The Financial Times has a piece on how the Chinese economy is poised to take over the mantle of “world’s biggest economy” this year, which is earlier than previous estimates.

But China has been the world’s biggest economy since 2010. You can read about it in a post of mine from a couple of years ago, here.

That doesn’t mean that the news is meaningless; the fact that the relative economic positions of China and America are changing faster than expected means that the (nearly inevitable) political rebalancing will also happen faster than expected. As I said in my previous post: we’ll have to make room for others at the top, if we’re smart we’ll do it willingly and with good grace, but either way we’ll do it.

There’s a video making the rounds where Neil DeGrasse Tyson talks about the gender and racial disparity in race and science. It’s a great talk and I thought I’d transcribe it for the video-impaired.

It’s worth pointing out that this was a response to a question that in turn was prompted by Larry Summers talking about something he doesn’t understand (in this case the gender disparity in science). Summers was somewhat misquoted, but honestly there’s no subject Summers doesn’t get wrong; the man just has to shut his big stupid yap already.

Anyway, here, by contrast, is Tyson:

I have never been female. But I have been black my whole life. And so, let me perhaps offer some insight from that perspective. Because there are many similar social issues related to access to equal opportunity that we find in the black community, as well as the community of women, in a male-dominated—a white-male-dominated—society. . . .

“When I look at, throughout my life—I’ve known that I wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, my first visit to the Hayden planetarium. . . . So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. And all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist and astrophysicist was, hands down, the path of most resistance through the forces of society.

“Any time I expressed this interest teachers would say, “Don’t you want to be an athlete?” I looked to become something that was outside the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. Fortunately, my depth of interest was so deep, and so fuel-enriched, that every one of these curveballs I was thrown, and fences built in front of me, and hills that I had to climb, I just reached for more fuel and I kept going.

“Now here I am, one—I think—one of the most visible scientists in the land, and I look behind me and say, “where are the others who might have been this?” And they’re not there. And I wonder how— who— what is the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive that others did not? Simply because of the forces of society that prevented, at every turn, at every turn, to the point that I have security guards following me as I go through department stores, presuming that I am a thief. I walked out of a store one time and the alarm went off, so they came running to me. I walked through the gate at the same time a white male walked through the gate. And that guy just walked off with the stolen goods, knowing that they would stop me and not him. That’s an interesting sort of exploitation of this; what a scam that was. I think people should do that more often. [Laughter]

So, my life experience tells me that when you don’t find blacks in the sciences, when you don’t find women in the sciences, I know that these forces are real, and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today.

So before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there’s equal opportunity. Then we can have that conversation.

I’ve already talked about my (overwhelmingly positive) experience with Obamacare in two blog posts here and here. But one Jen Sorensen, a freelance cartoonist in Texas, did the same thing in comics! It’s available here.

A sample:

So, a week or so ago one of my favorite living economists, Paul Krugman, posted a piece on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He wasn’t for it, exactly, but he thought it just wasn’t that important. I disagreed, to put it mildly.

But yesterday, one of my other favorite living economists, Joseph Stiglitz, came out swinging against the TPP in a New York Times opinion piece.

Some of his points:

• Based on the leaks we’ve seen, the TPP doesn’t look good; it’s a symptom of our political dysfunction that it’s even being considered.
• Tariffs are already low; agreements like the TPP focus on reducing non-tariff barriers to trade, which are hard-won labor, environmental, or consumer protections. In his words, “‘Trade agreements’ new boosters euphemistically claim that they are simply after regulatory harmonization, a clean-sounding phrase that implies an innocent plan to promote efficiency. One could, of course, get regulatory harmonization by strengthening regulations to the highest standards everywhere. But when corporations call for harmonization, what they really mean is a race to the bottom.”
• One of the worst aspects is that it allows corporations to sue governments in international tribunals.
• There’s not even good evidence that developing countries benefit.
• The economists who support it are working from wrong assumptions.

Which are much the same points I made in my comic on the subject. It’s kind of nice when someone of Stiglitz’s stature agrees with you.

The Washington Post has a nifty interactive infographic that shows who sits on the committees that advise the administration on trade negotiations. And although nobody can accuse me of being a pollyanna about the influence of business on trade agreements, even I was a bit stunned by just how corporate-heavy the committees are.

It’s worth going through the whole infographic, because at first things don’t look so bad. There are a lot of industry and trade organizations, but a fair sprinkling of academics, NGOs, and labor representatives too; given that all of our policy decisions are heavily weighted toward corporate interests, the overall distribution looks like a snapshot of economic power in our society. That’s not great, but it would be weird to expect business to have less voice in trade deals than they do elsewhere.

But that third page, where we see who goes on what committee? That’s more than a bit horrifying:

The labor advisors are almost entirely confined to one committee (“Trade negotiations and policy, labor”), which is entirely composed of labor advisors talking to themselves. No doubt this committee makes resolutions; no doubt these resolutions are ignored.

The academic advisors are almost as ghettoized, in the “trade and environment” committee. (That committee does have two representatives from trade associations, one from the solar industry.)

Meanwhile, every committee that deals with specifics is entirely or almost entirely made up of representatives of businesses and trade groups. Autos and capital goods? Aerospace equipment? Steel? No representatives from labor. Intellectual property rights? No representatives from academia.

In my piece about the TPP I said that trade agreements are tools for businesses to get what they want without going through the normal democratic process. This doesn’t exactly make me change my opinion.