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How Republican Politicians and Conservative Judges Work Together to Preserve Capital Punishment
Public opposition to capital punishment is growing. But more people are being executed.
IRS Updates Business Interest Deduction Guidance Following Tax Law Changes
Revised FAQs for the business interest deduction explain changes to adjusted taxable income, floor plan financing, capitalization rules, and CFC inclusions.
Makers Fund raises $250m in fourth round to support interactive entertainment startups
Latest fund from venture capital firm brings its total assets under management to $1.5 billion
The global health aid architecture is collapsing. The faith economy isn't
“Washington has rediscovered faith as a delivery mechanism. The bigger opportunity is faith as a source of capital,” writes Dr. Alaa Murabit.
Radiology Partners investing over $5M to build new headquarters in downtown Nashville
The practice and its technology services division have inked a lease to become a key piece of Nashville Yards, a massive mixed-use development in the “heart of the nation’s healthcare capital."
Eritrea’s Buffer Zone Politics from Eastern Sudan to Ethiopia's Tigray
The most consequential development in the Horn of Africa may not be taking place in any of its capitals. It is unfolding instead across a chain of borderlands stretching from the Red Sea through Kassala and further eastern Sudan to South and south-eastern to Ethiopia’s…
Coe College to launch reduced-credit business administration degree program
Coe College will offer a new online, reduced-credit bachelor's degree program in business administration starting this fall.
$600 Million-Plus in Capital Improvements Better Position UT Health Sciences to Train Tennessee's Healthcare Workforce
$600 Million in Capital Improvements Help UT Health Sciences to Train Tennessee's Healthcare Workforce
Black Legislative Caucus warns of potential lawsuit from governor's executive order
Members of the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus say Gov. Mike Braun overstepped his authority and risked a lawsuit when he issued an executive order last month targeting a state diversity program.
FGI TRUST Adds Duke as Director of Business Development, FGI Tech
FGI Worldwide, a provider of working capital financing and trade credit insurance solutions, hired Jason Duke as director of business development, FGI Tech.
Oregon congresswoman proposes program to support first responder mental health
Salinas’ bipartisan proposal is similar to a 2017 law that provided funding for mental health programs for law enforcement.
Chelsea co-owners Todd Boehly and Mark Walter open to selling stakes to majority owners Clearlake Capital
Latest transfer news and headlines as Galatasaray are prepared to double Bruno Fernandes Manchester United wages; Man City are hoping to sign Lille midfielder Ayyoub Bouaddi in the next few days; Man City face having to pay Chelsea more than £120m to land midfielder Enzo Fernandez
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Schools 'discourage' students' physical activity, healthy eating
State and federal officials spoke with Newton YMCA leadership, staff and participating kids about the reinstated presidential fitness test.
Standlee to pay $16.9 million for Anderson Hay's business
Company seeks permission for sale from bankruptcy court Anderson Hay has struck a deal to sell most of its operational assets, except its real estate, to the Standee forage company […]
Trump blames vandals for damaged grass in the spot where he held his July 4 celebration
Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals for damage to his renovation projects in the nation's capital, often without evidence and sometimes despite opposing accounts from his officials.
New Oregon survey for businesses facing wildfire losses could inform disaster assistance
Oregon officials are urging business owners to help inform future federal financial assistance efforts through a new survey.
4 Capital Region businesses advance in ‘Coolest Thing Made in NY’ contest
Four Capital Region businesses have advanced to the round of 16 in the third annual “Coolest Thing Made in New York” contest.
Everyday Injustice Podcast Episode 337: Marc Bookman Examines the Death Penalty’s Politics, Failures and Enduring Appeal
Marc Bookman, legal director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, recently discussed capital punishment on Episode 337 of 'Everyday Injustice.' Bookman challenged the perception of a national death penalty resurgence, asserting its continued application is increasingly confined to a limited number of states. He also critiqued public opinion polling on capital punishment, specifically a Pew poll, for failing to present alternatives such as life without parole. Additionally, Bookman previewed his forthcoming novel, 'Albert's Time,' which explores the ethical dimensions of capital punishment by confronting the execution of an undeniably guilty individual.
Chicago’s largest private equity and venture capital firms
The 20 biggest private equity firms on Crain's list reported making only 601 deals in 2025, down from 1,978 in 2024.
In Idaho, an insurer says health care costs may rise after hospital taps Congress’s billing tool
Blue Cross argues that Post Falls ER & Hospital is out-of-network for insurers and relies on an arbitration process created by Congress.
Indiana working to preserve local businesses across ownership changes
The "Keep IN" initiative is meant to get small business owners thinking about how to hand off their companies when they leave, instead of closing them down — and prompt potential successors to consider entrepreneurship through acquisition.
Bernhard Capital bucking private equity trend with more acquisitions, exits
The Baton Rouge-based private equity firm, with nearly $6.5 billion in assets under management, is defying trends with new acquisitions, exits and plans to start raising more money from investors with a $1.5 billion goal.
Castro-style capitalism: Havana promises economic changes without relinquishing political control
Economists and business leaders argue that Cuba cannot build a new economy without institutional reform, something the island’s government appears unwilling to negotiate
Dave Bushaw calls for building political independent 'movement' in Iowa
Independent Dave Bushaw told Iowa State Fairgoers that he wanted to build an infrastructure for more independent candidates to run in Iowa.
‘I’ll settle for not crazy’: Denver business leaders brace for socialist shift after big win for DSA
Denver business owners react to the rise of socialist candidates and how their policies could shape the economic landscape in the Colorado capital.
Growing Into the Middle Market: How Small Businesses Size Up
National Business Capital's Joe Camberato is back on the podcast to discuss scaling small businesses with a calibrated capital stack
Young, Loeffler pitch expanded small business lending during Indiana visit
Todd Young and SBA chief Kelly Loeffler pitched higher federal loan limits and other policies to help Indiana farmers and small businesses.
Idaho judge ruling allows abortion if it protects mother’s health, prevents self-harm
The Idaho federal judge's decision, released Thursday, marks a major change to Idaho abortion ban’s exemptions.
Raleigh staple Adventure Landing abruptly shuts its doors after 38 years
Known for laser tag and go-kart racing, this business will permanently close its doors after decades on Capital Boulevard.
How to Keep Business Ethics from Being an Oxymoron
As faith in capitalism wavers, business leaders need to reevaluate their responsibilities.
Political parties can survive internal struggles over identity
"Both political parties will always struggle with their identity and that is a healthy democratic function."
Scott Colangelo: There's going to be a reckoning for NY, California amid fleeing businesses
Prime Capital Financial Chair and managing partner Scott Colangelo weighs in on Bob Iger and Josh Kushner looking to buy the Los Angeles Lakers and the impact of the business exodus on New York and California.
Attorneys ‘On the Move’: Latham Adds Partner to Capital Markets Practice; Entertainment Lawyer Joins Dorf Nelson & Zauderer
And other announcements of recent hirings and promotions of New York attorneys.
Head Start changes could eliminate important child health and safety standards in Ohio, nationally
Child advocates in Ohio and nationally have said proposed changes to the federal early childhood education program Head Start would be “devastating” and eliminate important health and safety standards for children.
New Lakers buyer Joshua Kushner is a Democrat with sports roots
Venture capitalist Joshua Kushner, brother of President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, has tried to forge his own legacy that includes sports investments.
Jeff Lightner
Jeff Lightner has been appointed Chief Growth Officer for Marsh McLennan Agency’s Midwest Region, to help shape the region’s growth strategy across talent and growth capital, carrier economics and sales operations.
BREAKING: Oregon State Hospital superintendent ousted after resignation of health authority leader
This is a developing story and may be updated The superintendent of the Oregon State Hospital who was appointed less than a month ago by a since-departed director of the Oregon Health Authority is out as head of the troubled state-run mental hospital, the health authority said Wednesday. Oregon Health Authority Interim Director Fariborz Pakseresht […]
Opinion | When Politics Becomes a Substitute for Faith
The enemy of socialism isn’t capitalism, it is God.
Village Capital launches NWA investment facility
Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm Village Capital recently launched a first-of-its-kind flexible investment facility supporting Northwest Arkansas-based startups. The Walton Family Foundation provided $700,000 to support the VilCap Innovative Capital...
Village Capital launches NWA investment facility
Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm Village Capital recently launched a first-of-its-kind flexible investment facility supporting Northwest Arkansas-based startups. The Walton Family Foundation provided $700,000 to support the VilCap Innovative Capital...
Bob Iger and Josh Kushner to buy the Lakers
In a statement, former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner said they "were deeply honored" by the opportunity.
Wednesday Morning Links
Morning, all! Monday marked the first game in a stretch against a couple of cellar dwellers, and the Rangers capitalized by winning 4-1 in extras against the Angels. Unfortunately, the offense was flacid last night despite ample opportunities, so the signs aren’t pointing to a momentum building road trip. Cody Bradford was a bright spot, […]
Small Business Spotlight: Specialty dental practice takes root on Market St.
WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO OPEN BLUE HERON ROOT CANAL SPECIALISTS? OWNER SARAH ERMOSHKIN: “I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. When I was 23 years old, I owned a cafe in Seattle, where I even fought to oppose oppressive sales taxes on espresso drinks. After selling that business, I got married and started a family. Once my children were in school, I attended dental school through the Navy Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP), which covered my tuition and provided a stipend. From the beginning, my goal was to eventually own my own practice after completing my military service. The work I do is incredibly rewarding and being able to create an environment that puts patients first while helping employees grow professionally makes every day as a business owner meaningful.” WHAT DOES YOUR BUSINESS PROVIDE? ERMOSHKIN: “Endodontists are often called ‘pain doctors’ because our primary mission is to relieve pain and save natural teeth. We specialize in root canal therapy, retreatment of nonhealing root canals, treatment of root resorption, apicoectomies – microsurgical root-end procedures – and vital pulp therapy for children. Our goal is to preserve teeth that might otherwise need to be extracted and replaced with implants. Saving a patient’s natural tooth is almost always the best long-term solution for their oral health.” HOW DOES YOUR MILITARY TRAINING HELP YOUR BUSINESS? ERMOSHKIN: “My military service taught me how to lead, collaborate and make decisions under pressure. I worked closely with senior leadership while treating a large patient population and collaborating with specialists across multiple disciplines. During the COVID-19 pandemic, (I) served a dual role as Navy dentist and as the public affairs officer for Naval Health Clinic Annapolis, where I helped develop medical and dental communications for the midshipmen and support staff, while coordinating with the broader Navy Capital Region. We worked closely with other military treatment facilities to share best practices and deliver consistent public health messaging. Those leadership experiences continue to shape how I lead my team and serve our patients today.” WHAT CHALLENGES ARE YOU FACING RIGHT NOW IN YOUR BUSINESS? ERMOSHKIN: “One of our biggest challenges is overcoming the misinformation surrounding root canal treatment. Root canals are safe, effective and often the best way to relieve pain while preserving a natural tooth. Unfortunately, many people choose extraction because they believe it’s less expensive or because they’ve seen misleading information online. What they may not realize is that losing a tooth can lead to shifting teeth, changes in the way they bite and chew and significantly higher costs to restore their smile later.”
Atlantic Trivia, August 12, 2026: Faith and Science
Spain marketed itself as the lone populated place where today’s solar eclipse “can be fully enjoyed”—a snub to what cloudy Nordic capital also in the path of totality?
Eloxx Pharmaceuticals Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results and Provides Business Update
Completed underwritten public offering with gross proceeds of $66.0 million and uplisting to the Nasdaq Capital Market, significantly strengthening the...
Pritt Investment Partners Introduces a Long-Term Investment Philosophy Centered on Viable Businesses Rather Than Unicorns
RESTON, Va., Aug. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For decades, much of the venture capital industry has focused on finding the next billion-dollar ...
America's sunk so low, dishonor and disgrace don't end political careers. Ohio politicians prove it.
Dishonor should be disqualifying in politics. It is not. Scandalous behavior or public corruption should end political careers. They do not. Ohio politicians proved the point last week.
Rep. John Larson, a Longtime Lawmaker, Loses a Primary in Connecticut
In an upset, Luke Bronin, the former mayor of Hartford, won the Democratic nomination, capitalizing on calls for generational change.
Willits business owner to host Thursday event highlighting no-cost advising • The Mendocino Voice
Small businesses can get advising at no-cost from state program which also helps secure capital.
Trump talks about the Reflecting Pool and White House ballroom a lot. Here’s exactly how much
PolitiFact analyzed all of Trump’s public events and speeches over the first seven months of 2026 in which he mentioned his construction projects — including the White House ballroom and Reflecting Pool — and beautifying the nation’s capital.
“Monumental Sports & Entertainment Unveils Bold Vision for Brand-New Capital One Arena”
courtesy Monumental Sports & Entertainment From Monumental Sports & Entertainment: "Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE) and Capital One today unveiled the next chapter of Capital One Arena: a world-class, next-generation sports and entertainment destination built to bring fans, athletes, businesses, and the broader Washington community together in the nation's capital. The transformation represents a significant
Monumental, Capital One renew arena naming-rights deal for two more decades
Monumental Sports and Entertainment and Capital One Arena have extended their arena naming rights deal for two more decades.
America Already Built the World's Largest Science-Vetting Machine | The Foundation for American Innovation
Every year, federal agencies assess over a hundred thousand proposals that they never fund. Treating those peer review as public infrastructure could help unlock much more philanthropic capital for American research.
Monumental Sports & Entertainment Unveils Bold Vision for Brand-New Capital One Arena
/PRNewswire/ -- Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE) and Capital One today unveiled the next chapter of Capital One Arena: a world-class, next-generation...
MSE Unveils Bold Vision for Brand-New Capital One Arena
20-year naming rights extension launches the next chapter of Capital One Arena as part of Capital One’s continued commitment to its hometown Monumental unveils fresh videos and renderings of a brand-new arena in downtown D.C. CLICK HERE FOR NEW ARENA RENDERINGS AND VIDEO Credit: Monumental Sports & Entertainment WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 11, 2026) – Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE) and Capital
AI-Native, Not AI-Sprinkle: Why AI Is A Business Change, Not A Technology Change
Companies unlock AI’s biggest productivity gains not by adding AI tools to existing workflows, but by redesigning teams, roles and daily work around AI. The broader lesson, argues Bob Morse, co-founder and managing partner of Strattam Capital, is that achieving transformational gains like 3x productivity requires CEO- and board-backed organizational change — not merely technology adoption.
The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized
Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA
Insight: US fuel sales to Cuban business bring a glimpse of capitalism to Havana
Gasoline at $38 a gallon sold from cramped apartments. Diesel hawked on Instagram by a celebrity model to a reggaeton soundtrack. Six decades after Fidel Castro’s revolution, all of a sudden, capitalist cracks are appearing in Cuba’s communist energy sector.
Capitals’ biggest mistake so far in 2026 NHL free agency
Capitals have made several moves in the offseason after failing to make the playoffs and those moves may have been made out of panic
Nevada County and Sierra Business Council’s SBDC to Host Free Capital Summit
On Thursday, Aug. 27 at 1 p.m., the Sierra SBDC at Sierra Business Council and Nevada County are hosting a free Capital Summit at the LOVE Building (660 Minnie St., Grass Valley) in partnership with b
Nevada County & Sierra Business Council’s SBDC to Host Free Capital Summit
On Thursday, Aug. 27 at 1 p.m., the Sierra SBDC at Sierra Business Council and Nevada County are hosting a free Capital Summit at the LOVE Building (660 Minnie St., Grass Valley) in partnership with b
ERAM Holdings Appoints Alok Kumar as CEO to Lead Human Capital Management Business in India
ERAM Holdings, a leading diversified conglomerate headquartered in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is pleased to announce the appointment of Alok Kumar as Chief Executive Officer – ERAM HCM India.
Cardinal Health Board of Directors Approves Quarterly Dividend
Cardinal Health (NYSE: CAH) announced today that its Board of Directors approved its quarterly dividend of $0.5158 per share, out of the Company's capital surplus. The dividend will be payable on...
ICYMI: Bernhard Capital Partners to acquire Virginia engineering firm
Baton Rouge-based private equity firm Bernhard Capital Partners has agreed to acquire Reston, Virginia, engineering and infrastructure services firm Bowman Consulting Group Ltd. in an all-cash transac… Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in
Bernhard Capital Partners strikes $1B deal to acquire Virginia engineering firm
Baton Rouge-based private equity firm Bernhard Capital Partners has agreed to acquire Reston, Virginia, engineering and infrastructure services firm Bowman Consulting Group Ltd. in an all-cash transac… Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in
AbCellera women’s health data top ‘most aggressive upside scenario,’ putting Astellas and Bayer on notice
AbCellera has reported phase 2 results “beyond even the most aggressive upside scenario” that its CEO dared to consider, boosting the biotech’s chances of challenging Astellas and Bayer for a women’s health market. The phase 2 clinical trial compared ABCL635, an antibody targeting NK3R, to placebo in patients with hot flashes caused by menopause. Investigators enrolled 92 postmenopausal women experiencing a mean of about 10 moderate or severe hot flashes per day. By Week 4, the number of moderate or severe hot flashes had fallen by a mean of 8.8 on ABCL635 and by 3.5 on placebo. That statistically significant, placebo-adjusted reduction of 5.3 hit the trial’s primary endpoint. The level of efficacy also cleared the bar set by existing drugs. While cross-trial comparisons can be misleading, AbCellera CEO Carl Hansen, Ph.D., had seen enough to start hyping the program. “We now view ABCL635 as a potential best-in-class non-hormonal therapy with strong differentiation against approved NK3R competitors across all important dimensions, including efficacy, safety, dosing and convenience,” Hansen said on a Monday morning conference call with investors to discuss the data. “We believe ABCL635 is now a highly de-risked program.” Last week, Hansen used AbCellera’s earnings call to set expectations for readout, with the CEO defining success as a clean safety profile and efficacy comparable to the two approved small molecules. The data vaulted over that bar. Astellas linked (PDF) one of the small molecules, Veozah, to placebo-adjusted reductions in hot flash frequency of 2.1 and 2.6 at Week 4 of its two phase 3 trials. Bayer reported (PDF) placebo-adjusted reductions of 3.04 and 3.29 at Week 4 of pivotal studies for its small molecule, Lynkuet. At 5.3, the placebo-adjusted reduction in AbCellera’s trial comfortably cleared the standard set by the incumbents. Veozah and Lynkuet came to market based on evidence of their ability to reduce the frequency and severity of hot flashes. AbCellera’s phase 2 study covered both endpoints, with the Canadian biotech reporting a mean reduction in severity of 1.4 points at Week 4 on ABCL635, compared to 0.3 points for placebo. Again, the placebo-adjusted result compares favorably to data on Veozah and Lynkuet. Analysts shared Hansen’s enthusiasm for the data. The phase 2 results “firmly validate ABCL635 as a potentially best-in-class treatment,” BMO Capital Markets analysts said in a note to investors Monday. ABCL635’s apparent efficacy edge “is likely attributable to the higher dosing/target engagement the asset is able to reach vs. the oral agents due to its wider therapeutic index,” the analysts added. The analysts, who model $2.3 billion in unadjusted peak sales for ABCL635, flagged the safety profile as another positive of the phase 2 readout. While Veozah carries a boxed warning for liver damage, nobody on ABCL635 in the phase 2 trial had elevated liver enzymes or bilirubin values. If replicated in phase 3, the lack of a liver signal could allow approval without the monitoring requirements imposed on Veozah. Investors appeared equally enthused, sending AbCellera's stock up 32% to $9.21 in premarket trading Monday from a Friday closing price of $6.93. Next, AbCellera will collect the Week 12 data and talk to its advisors about further development. The results open up “a wide variety of possibilities of how we might take this forward into phase 3 studies to truly maximize the value of the asset and make sure that ABCL635 is able to demonstrate its differentiation potential,” Sarah Noonberg, M.D., Ph.D., AbCellera’s chief medical officer, told investors.
Norris Consultant Group Launches New Credit-to-Capital Curriculum on The Wealth Blueprint Platform
ANDERSON, S.C., Aug. 10, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Norris Consultant Group, the parent company and operating entity behind The Wealth Blueprint, today announced the launch of a new curriculum module on its educational platform, expanding the program's business credit and funding-readiness training for aspiring entrepreneurs. The new module went live in early August 2026 and is now available to members of The Wealth Blueprint community. Norris Consultant Group operates The Wealth Blueprint as its
AB Science announces today the successful completion of capital increases of a total gross amount of EUR 14.2 million
PRESS RELEASE AB SCIENCE ANNOUNCES THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF A EUR 14.2 MILLION PRIVATE PLACEMENT, PRIMARILY SUSBCRIBED BY LONG TERM INVESTOR AB...
He left his job to help farmers keep rural Japan alive through tourism
After seeing how venture capital transformed US cities, Japanese entrepreneur Daisuke Fujii found a new way to help farmers boost their income: agritourism.
Is Accel Entertainment (ACEL) A Bargain As Earnings Growth Lifts Valuation Hopes?
Accel Entertainment (ACEL) is attracting fresh attention after its 4 August 2026 earnings update, which showed higher sales, revenue and net income for both the quarter and first half compared with the prior year. See our latest analysis for Accel Entertainment. At a share price of $12.16, Accel Entertainment has posted a 6.95% year to date share price return and a 10.34% 1 year total shareholder return, which suggests moderate positive momentum heading into the latest earnings and capital...
Hacky sack is having a moment. Can it continue to capitalize?
Hacky sack has always had nostalgic appeal and a grassroots playing base. But this spring, things really surged. Why? And what's the next step for the throwback game?
Fact-Checking 3 Competitive Senate Races in Maine, Michigan and Ohio
Republican attacks have focused on terrorism and illegal immigration, while Democrats have sought to capitalize on the unpopularity of President Trump’s cuts to Medicaid.
National Grid's BioBus brings science lab to Albany's Lincoln Park
WRGB CBS 6 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Albany, New York and nearby towns and communities in the Capital City area, including Cohoes, Watervliet, Colonie, Bethlehem, Guilderland, New Scotland, Coeymans, Green Island, Knox, Berne, Westerlo, Rensselaerville, Colonie, Menands, Green Island, Ravena, Altamont, Voorheesville.
Washington Capitals Offseason Recap
In this series, Heavy Sports is looking at what every NHL team has done over the offseason. Next up is the Washington Capitals. Washington had a disappointing season this past year as they dropped out of the postseason, posting a 43-30-9 record. The team has been busy loading up over the offseason in the hopes […] The post Washington Capitals Offseason Recap appeared first on HEAVY.
In ancient Rome, tax fraud was punishable by death
Stone tablets recount a corruption case so widespread that it became a capital offense in 480 CE.
Gerald Winegrad: The Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on science
Opinion: Donald Trump’s second term has been the worst period in our nation’s history for the advancement of science and its use in governance, writes Gerald Winegrad.
5 Questions with Archer Graduate Fellow Christina Lildharrie
A Ph.D. student in neuroscience, she is exploring science, service and public policy in the nation’s capital.
Bond 2025 Project Update: Career & Technical Education (CTE) Center and Environmental Science Center (ESC)
The district is advancing planning and scheduling for the upcoming major capital projects.
The Sports Report: A look at USC’s new football training center
A look at one of college football’s finest facilities, a $225-million capital project at USC that includes a new baseball stadium and a women’s soccer and lacrosse field.
Budget Battle Erupts in Nation’s Capital Over Opioid Settlement Money
Washington, D.C.’s 2027 fiscal-year blueprint reflects a debate playing out around the U.S.: whether opioid settlement money should be used to free up taxpayer dollars by paying for existing responsibilities instead of new programs.
🥐 Transfer market erupts, 5️⃣ stories shaping Friday
The transfer market explodes this August 7 with historic moves in the capital and Barcelona. Amid record-breaking figures in Chamartín, unexpected twists in negotiations involving the biggest stars, ...
Oregon universal health care board punts single-payer report over funding uncertainty
A state board in charge of developing a universal health plan for all Oregonians will delay the release of its final report to lawmakers, citing uncertainty over how to pay for it. The Universal Health Plan Governance Board voted unanimously Thursday morning to extend its deadline to Dec. 1 for its report that will describe […]
Free Savannah workshop to help business owners improve cash flow and profits
The UGA Small Business Development Center will offer a free Savannah workshop to help business owners improve cash flow, increase profits and access capital.
Developer's big flex project could be 'largest taxpayer' small town south of Austin
Capital Construction LLC plans a 208,400-square-foot business park in Uhland, south of Austin, after city council approval on Aug. 5.
The Arsenal and the Statehouse: New Defense Firms, Venture Capital and State Industrial Policy
When Anduril announced a $910 million drone production facility in Ohio, it was not politics as usual. The main message came from Ohio’s governor, Mike
Viewpoint: Europe needs a new scientific contract
The White House's new science strategy should be required reading in the Berlaymont and every European capital.Not because Europe should copy it. Parts of it should concern Europeans deeply. But because it asks the question Europe has so far avoided while steadily losing ground in the global race for technological leadership.Europe already possesses many of the world's finest universities, scientists and research-intensive companies. It produces world-leading research in fields ranging from quantum technologies and biotechnology to climate science. Yet time and again Europe generates the scientific breakthroughs while others build the companies, industries and strategic advantages around them, particularly in digital technologies. Increasingly, we find ourselves regulating technologies whose underlying capabilities were developed elsewhere.This is not primarily a scientific failure. It is an institutional one.The settlement that shaped modern science policy emerged after the Second World War. In Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush argued that governments should invest in fundamental research while protecting scientists from political direction. Public investment was justified precisely because no government, university or company could predict where the next transformative discovery would emerge.That scientific contract served liberal democracies extraordinarily well. It underpinned decades of advances in medicine, computing, energy and communications, but the world for which it was designed no longer exists.Artificial intelligence is transforming not only technology but the production of knowledge itself. Advanced chips, computing power, data and scientific instruments have become strategic assets. Scientific knowledge now diffuses globally almost instantly. Competitive advantage increasingly lies not in making discoveries first, but in possessing the infrastructure, capital, engineering capability and institutions required to translate those ideas into products, industries and strategic advantage.The old boundaries between science, industrial policy, national security and geopolitics have largely disappeared. Dual-use technologies now underpin both economic power and military deterrence.The US has recognised this shift. In July, the White House published Science: A New Golden Age, a comprehensive attempt to rethink the relationship between science and national power. The report builds on Bush's legacy, but departs from his framework in important ways. Science is no longer treated simply as the source of future discoveries. It is presented as the foundation of economic resilience, technological leadership and national security. AI, advanced infrastructure and the capacity to build become as important as discovery itself.Yet the report also reveals a striking paradox. The same administration calling for “a new golden age” of US science has simultaneously proposed deep cuts to the federal research enterprise while expanding political influence over the allocation of public research funding. Europe should therefore distinguish between the report's diagnosis and its prescription. The diagnosis, that science has become a strategic asset, is compelling. But the prescription is self-defeating. Long-term technological leadership depends on strong universities, academic freedom and the institutional autonomy that makes scientific discovery possible. This distinction matters. Bush's achievement was never simply to make science serve national strength. It was to establish a division of labour in which governments invested in research without attempting to direct discovery itself. Scientific breakthroughs emerge precisely because researchers retain the freedom to pursue questions whose value cannot yet be demonstrated and whose conclusions cannot be anticipated.Neither China, nor the USAs science becomes more strategically important, the temptation to politicise it inevitably grows. But scientific freedom is not an obstacle to technological leadership, it is an essential precondition.China represents the opposite model. For decades it has integrated science, manufacturing, infrastructure and industrial policy into a single national strategy. Its ability to mobilise resources around critical technologies is formidable. But it does so within an authoritarian system where scientific priorities are increasingly inseparable from political power.Europe should imitate neither model. It should learn from the strategic ambition of the US without importing its growing politicisation of science. And it should learn from China's capacity to build without adopting its concentration of power.Instead, Europe needs a scientific contract of its own. Bush's scientific contract protected the freedom to discover because the defining challenge of the 20th century was producing new knowledge. Europe's next scientific contract must preserve that freedom while ensuring that scientific discoveries can be converted into technological, industrial and strategic capability. Because in a transactional world, Europe's freedom to shape its own future depends on its capacity to build it.Related articlesThe US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to knowEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationNIH turmoil risks reciprocal EU-US access to health research fundingThis does not mean subordinating free science to competitiveness or industrial policy. On the contrary. Scientific autonomy remains the first principle of Europe's next scientific contract. Governments should not direct scientific discovery. Their responsibility is to ensure that Europe's scientific, industrial, financial and regulatory institutions work together rather than in isolation.Meeting that responsibility requires far more than research funding. European researchers need access to world-class computing infrastructure, advanced laboratories, shared datasets and scientific facilities. Innovative companies need patient capital, testing environments and a genuine single market in which they can scale without facing 27 different regulatory regimes. Public procurement must evolve from purchasing existing technologies to creating markets for new ones. Regulators must become partners in experimentation rather than guardians of yesterday's rules.A connecting architectureEurope does not need to invent the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) model from scratch. Britain's Aria, Germany's Sprind and Wellcome Leap already show that Europe can build institutions capable of taking high-risk, mission-oriented bets while preserving democratic accountability. The challenge now is not to create more isolated initiatives, but to connect them to Europe's broader scientific, industrial and financial system so that breakthrough discoveries can scale.Above all, Europe must stop treating research, innovation, industrial policy, finance and security as separate policy domains. The challenge is no longer to create excellent institutions in each of these fields, but to make them work as one European innovation system. Europe's strength will increasingly depend not on excellence within institutions, but on excellence across them.Europe's ambition should be neither to imitate the US nor to emulate China. It should demonstrate that scientific freedom, democratic legitimacy and technological capability are not competing objectives, but mutually reinforcing strengths. In an age of geopolitical rivalry, Europe's greatest advantage may ultimately be its ability to attract the world's best talent by combining scientific freedom, democratic openness and technological ambition.Bush's scientific contract helped define the 20th century because it protected the freedom to discover. Europe's challenge is not to abandon that achievement but to extend it. The defining task of Europe's next scientific contract is to preserve the freedom to discover while building Europe's capacity to translate scientific discovery into technological power.Kaare Nielsen is founder of Pomus, a Danish think tank on science and innovation.
Science|Business summer reads of 2026
As most people in the European research and innovation policy bubble are going on a well-deserved summer break, we have come up with a list of our favourite books, podcasts and essays from the past year that ask deeper questions about science, technology and politics.BooksPasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation, by Donald StokesIf you haven’t read Pasteur’s Quadrant yet, now is the time. In the EU and elsewhere, we’re living through a period of dwindling faith that curiosity-driven research automatically leads to economic growth and technological progress. Pasteur’s Quadrant, published in 1997 by the Princeton academic Donald Stokes, is the most influential critique of the standard “linear model” of R&D: the idea that new discoveries made in ivory-tower labs get neatly passed on for commercialisation by start-ups. In reality, Stokes argues, practical applications often inspire more theorical lines of inquiry. Of course, we have long known that things are more complex than the linear model, but even today, it’s still often assumed in Brussels discourse. The book is a useful corrective, and is being used now to argue for new types of scientific institutions. David MatthewsThe Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism, by Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis PattersonAre society’s problems solvable by technical expertise alone? “If only the benighted would listen,” say Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis Patterson, two professors at Rutgers Law School who got frustrated with how scientists and politicians handled public health communication during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the book, they argue that clichéd mantras about scientific evidence and expertise perpetrated by academics, journalists and politicians have harmed public trust in the very institutions they were trying to defend. Paradoxically, slogans such as “we believe in science,” “follow the science” and “defer to the experts” can fuel mistrust in science, experts and democratic institutions. The authors criticise “condescension” and “technocratic paternalism” in the public discourse and make the case for a more nuanced approach to scientific and expert policy advice that rests on humility, doubt, scepticism and open dialogue. “Most complex social questions in fact revolve around values, not the recitation of unambiguous facts,” they say. Florin ZubascuBreakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan WangIn this book, Dan Wang compares the structural differences between the US and Chinese industrial policies, but raises a very timely question for innovation policy wonks: how can advanced manufacturing know-how contribute to technology-intensive economic growth? Wang says technology has three components: the tools, the blueprints and patents, and the process knowledge. The third component represents the “proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated and requires years of implementation.” According to Wang, rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, policymakers should see them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Over the past decades, China has amassed “process knowledge” because capital flowed to complex fabrication facilities, while investors in the West have parked their money in capital-light businesses such as digital platforms or chip companies that focus on design. As it turns out, thanks to its oversized focus on manufacturing, China has gained remarkable advantages in the global technology race. Florin ZubascuBaltic: The Future of Europe, by Oliver MoodyWhat can Europe learn from the nine countries surrounding the Baltic Sea? Alongside the familiar stories about Estonia's digital transformation, the book examines how the region has used technology, resilience, education, governance and long-term thinking to respond to geopolitical, economic and security challenges. Innovation policy wonks might find fresh perspectives on how innovation can strengthen defence, societal resilience and Europe's capacity to adapt in an uncertain world. Whether or not you agree with all of Oliver Moody's conclusions, the book is a useful guide to a region that is increasingly shaping European debates on security, competitiveness and technology. Goda NaujokaityteThe Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf This book chronicles the wild and adventurous life of natural science pioneer Alexander von Humboldt who at some point in the 19th century seems to have been just about the most famous person in the world. Through scientific expeditions to the Andes Mountains and to the depths of Siberia, von Humboldt contributed a host of discoveries and concepts. During his life he met and formed relationships with historical figures as different as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles Darwin. He is also claimed to be the person in the world with most things named after him, a list that includes an ocean current, a penguin and a region of the Moon. Still venerated in Germany, with numerous scientific institutions named after him, von Humboldt has slipped out of public consciousness in most of the rest of the world. For anyone not familiar with him, this book does a good job of describing his fascinating life. Ole EllekrogCareless People, by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsYou may have heard this referred to as the book Meta doesn’t want you to read. The 2025 memoir from Sarah Wynn-Williams, former director of global public policy at Meta, then just called Facebook, includes explosive claims about everything from a toxic workplace culture to how the company worked with advertisers to target vulnerable teens, and the lengths it was prepared to go to in order to break into China. It’s a fascinating insight into how and why the tech company gradually shifted its approach to policy, whether in the US, Europe or Asia. Meta has denied the allegations in the book, and last year won an emergency ruling to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting it. In response, the author is now suing her former employer. If that doesn’t make you want to read it. Martin GreenacrePodcastsThe Europeans: Europe’s anti-ElonThis podcast is a great choice for a light-hearted dose of European policy and culture news. Most of it has little to do with research, innovation and technology, but this particular podcast features an interview with Mastadon’s founder Eugen Rochko. He talks about his experience running an open-source, federated, European-made social media platform, and leaving it all behind. The conversation, which starts 14 minutes in, gently encourages us to reflect on what kind of technology we, as Europeans, want to make. Goda NaujokaityteSolarpunk and how we escape dystopiaNew technologies are very often taken from science fiction. Alberto Santos-Dumont, inventor the airship, was inspired as a child by the adventure stories of Jules Verne. OpenAI’s attempt to build a personal assistant with the voice of Scarlett Johansson was lifted from the 2013 film Her, completely ignoring the movie’s cautionary message. So if we want better tech, we need to imagine it first. Unfortunately, the state of current sci-fi is relentlessly dystopian, giving inventors precious few ideas or hope. However, a new genre, Solarpunk, which envisages a technologically advanced but ecologically harmonious future, is now taking off. The actual tech the genre imagines, such as permaculture, renewable energy or community repair workshops, while nice, isn’t all that inspiring or ambitious. But it’s a first step towards rescuing sci-fi from its pessimistic Blade Runner rut. David MatthewsEveryday AbundanceLaunched in June, Everyday Abundance is a podcast that tells the stories of the inventions we now take so for granted that we barely given them a second thought. For example, the washing machine, which liberated women from a lifetime “bent over washtubs and washboards.” Or modern dentistry, which ended the reality that “tooth pain was simply part of human life.” Historians of technology, Virginia Postrel and Charles C Mann are very much on the optimistic end of the spectrum when it comes to the capacity of invention to improve human life. Here, they set out their case: if it wasn’t for progress, you might be hunched over a washtub with toothache rather than reading these words. David Matthews‘We will not know what we lost’: Conservation fallout a year after USAID shutdownSince his return to the White House, Donald Trump has been on a mission to undermine science. He slashed jobs at federal agencies, terminated grants in some research areas, took unprecedented control over university affairs and, within hours of his inauguration, suspended the US Agency for International Development. While its initial focus was to administer health and food aid around the world, it had since expanded to conservation projects. The result? Some of these projects were stopped abruptly. In this Mongabay podcast, environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis tells the story of the EcoGuard conservation programme in Liberia, whose local patrols had helped protect rainforests, monitor endangered wildlife and track illegal threats. From one day to the next, these were left without salaries. Luckily, she notes, the initiative was able to get emergency funding from international NGOs, but its future remains “incredibly uncertain.” Juliette PortalaEssaysThe Mars Delusion, by Henry WismayerWhy is humankind so fixated on establishing a colony on Mars? asks London-based writer Henry Wismayer. From space evangelists promoting Martian settlement as an insurance policy, to billionaire Jeff Bezos, who said humans should settle on Mars “because it’s cool,” the mission is not running short of advocates. However, in this essay, Wismayer reminds us that some critics expect any future Mars pioneer to end up “irradiated, sick, mad and dead.” Scientists have already looked into the possible effects of prolonged exposure to Martian gravity, and it’s not pretty: muscle shrinking, bones weakening, changes to the central nervous system and other biological modifications to make us all reconsider the journey. “Some researchers have forecast that the future settler, after generations of evolutionary conditioning, will look less like an Übermensch and more like ET,” Wismayer writes. Juliette Portala
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Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. 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🗞️ Julián Álvarez, Madrid academy, Rodri... Wednesday's covers are packed
The sports press this August 5 is reaching fever pitch, with the transfer market at the center of attention. From the Blaugrana board’s lightning-fast negotiations in the capital to transfer records...
Capital One dismissal bid puts Trump's JPMorgan Chase "political debanking" lawsuit in sharper focus
New filing in Trump's Capital One case spotlights the challenge of proving political bias when banks can broadly close accounts at their discretion.
Rep. Zach Nunn, U.S. labor secretary say 2025 tax cuts help Iowa businesses expand
Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling toured an Iowa manufacturer with U.S. Rep. Zach Nunn as part of his Tuesday visit.
Pickleball, anyone? It’s for a good cause
ROCKY MOUNTAIN CHILDREN’S HEALTH FOUNDATION Arvada News: Pickleball is still quite the rage, and to capitalize on its popularity, the Rocky Mountain Children’s Health Foundation will host its first fundraising tournament on Aug. 23. It will be from 2-5 p.m. at Chicken & Pickle, 14225 Lincoln St., Thornton. Teams of two will compete in a full bracket-style tournament to determine the victor. Tickets […]
Woroniuk Named Capital District Grand Collegiate Sports Woman of the Year
The University at Albany women's volleyball's Shynelle Woroniuk received Grand honors at the Capital District Sports Women of the Year awards event, Monday evening.