Positive Points of Bernie\u27s Green New Deal

The Green New Deal will help will create jobs in the energy market. Many people fear that the workers in the coal mines or oil plants will be out of job but this is actually false. The Green New Deal will create jobs in the energy market, all while switching our infrastructure to 100% renewable energy. The Green New Deal is the best way for our country to become more sustainable, modernize our energy infrastructure, and do it without costing americans jobs. First off the Green New Deal will create 20 million new job openings according to Bernie Sanders campaign website. The Green New Deal plans to create enough jobs to not only cover all the fossil fuels workers but also have enough for new workers. Jobs in the renewable energy field also require more people than fossil fuels. According to the Energy Research Center, it takes twice as many humans to run renewable energy than it does for fossil fuels. On top of that, renewables offer a much safer environment than working in the fossil fuel industries. Coal miners that put their health on the line could be working in hydro power plants that require twice as many human positions and less health risks than the mines. The 2017 Energy and Employment report found that there was a sharp decrease in coal energy jobs since 2009, 57% decrease, while wind energy jobs increased by 37% in just two years from 2015 to 2017. This means is that in just a few years renewable energies are already on their way to being huge job creators. According to the 2017 US Energy and Jobs Report, there are approximately 86,000 coal extraction jobs, 12,000 oil extraction jobs, and 393,000 natural gas extraction jobs in the United States. Moving these workers to a safer renewable energy job will in total help almost half a million people live healthier lives. Historically, mass projects like this have been extremely successful. One obvious example would be the New Deal. The new deal introduced dozens of new social programs as well as work programs and reforms in our financial system. This was a massive project that to combat the effects of the Great Depression and it tested the resolve of every American. What the New Deal and Green New Deal have in common is the fact that it will take massive spending and investment. However, the costs tend to pay for themselves over time, usually at least a couple decades. But the New Deal is not the only point in history that took mass mobilization and cooperation. What many people tend to forget is that it created tons of new jobs. The Green New Deal creating 20 million jobs is no different, it creates plenty of new spots. On top of that, fossil fuel workers are guaranteed 5 years of their previous salary, assistance with housing, job training, health care, and retirement support according to Burnie Sanders campaign website. Moving to completely renewable energy is bold but it would finally modernize our system. For instance, France gets 76% of its energy from nuclear power according to the EIA. This is especially impressive because France is the second largest energy consumer per capita. Germany is already utilizing 31% of its total energy production from renewables and 15% from nuclear power in 2015. These two modern countries dwarf the United States. In 2018 the United States only 17% of our total energy came from renewable energy. It is blatantly obvious that it will take drastic measures of the Green New Deal to modernize our energy systems. While the Green New Deal is extremely drastic, it is necessary. History has shown that movements where incredible spending is necessary can work. On top of that, far more jobs will be created along with multiple benefits to fossil fuel workers. The Green New Deal will allow us to catch up to modern renewable energy producers like France and Germany. Most importantly, it will allow us to combat climate change

2017 Menino Survey of Mayors Final Report

Report on research findings.The 2017 Menino Survey of Mayors represents the fourth scientifically rigorous and nationally representative survey of American mayors released by the Boston University Initiatives on Cities. The Menino Survey, based on interviews with 115 sitting mayors conducted in 2017, provides insight into mayoral priorities, policy views and relationships with their key partners, including other levels of government. Researchers spoke with mayors about a range of topics including affordable housing, climate change, city-to-city networks, and data-driven decision-making

Institution building and political accountability

The paper examines the role of policy intervention in engendering institutional change. We show that first order changes in the political structure (e.g. introduction of democracy) may be undermined by local political interests and result in persistence in institutions and the (poor) quality of governance. The paper identifies two effects of development policy as a tool for institutional change. One, by increasing political accountability, it may encourage nascent democratic governments to invest in good institutions – the incentive effect. However, we show that it also increases the incentive of the rentier elite to tighten their grip on political institutions – the political control effect. Which of these dominate determine the overall impact on institutional quality. Under some conditions, by getting the elite to align their economic interests with that of the majority, development policy can lead to democratic consolidation and economic improvement. However if elite entrenchment is pervasive, then comprehensive change may require more coercive means

A report to the Federal Insurance Office

Perhaps the most important report that the FIO will ever make is the report on the system of state-based insurance regulation. By the end of January 2012, the FIO Director is to submit a report to Congress recommending changes to modernize and improve insurance regulation in the United States. This essentially means the FIO is being asked to propose its own mission and scope of operations and to lay out a road map to guide public policy decision-making moving forward in a major part of the financial services sector. Our focus here is on that report, but the discussion will also be useful in preparing other reports to the Congress mandated by DFA. This paper provides analysis and recommendations of NFI on the issues that the Congress has mandated for discussion in the FIO report to Congress early next year.Dodd-Frank Act; Federal Insurance Office; insurance regulation

Would Wage Concessions Help the Steel Industry?

[Excerpt]The American steel industry is dying. 150,000 steelworkers are laid off, and thousands of them will never work in steel again. The steel companies will report losses of some $2 billion for 1982, and Wall Street analysts predict— advocate—that as much as 20 per cent of the industry\u27s primary capacity will be eliminated. The loss of steel jobs threatens more than a dozen local and regional economies with decades of Depression-like conditions. And the worst is not likely to be over soon. Even though most people recognize that the primary cause of this situation is the misguided and mean-spirited policies of the Reagan administration, public opinion seems to have accepted a simple logic: If the industry is in such trouble, steelworkers should help it by granting concessions on wages and work rules

Understanding the Persistent Low Performance of African Agriculture

We explain the persistence of low performances in African agriculture by analyzing the determinants of farmers' decisions to modernize their farming practices. Owing to sociocultural factors specific to Sub-Saharan Africa, farmers' decisions on farming practices are strategic complements. We demonstrate that the modernization game these farmers play admits two pure-strategy, Pareto-ranked, symmetric Nash-equilibria. The equilibrium where all farmers choose to modernize their farming methods is preferred to the one where all of them choose to stick to a traditional method. We argue that scarcity and economic opportunities put forward by neo-Boserupian theories of induced-innovation as determinants of the onset agricultural innovations are, in the context of African countries, only necessary, but not sufficient to generate modernization of farming methods. Deliberate action to enhance aadoption of agricultural innovations must therefore take the African's sociocultural context into consideration, or risk failure.Sub-Saharan Africa, Agricultural modernization, Fertilizer adoption, Supermodular games

An Overview of Approaches to Modernize Quantum Annealing Using Local Searches

I describe how real quantum annealers may be used to perform local (in state space) searches around specified states, rather than the global searches traditionally implemented in the quantum annealing algorithm. The quantum annealing algorithm is an analogue of simulated annealing, a classical numerical technique which is now obsolete. Hence, I explore strategies to use an annealer in a way which takes advantage of modern classical optimization algorithms, and additionally should be less sensitive to problem mis-specification then the traditional quantum annealing algorithm.Comment: In Proceedings PC 2016, arXiv:1606.06513. An extended version of this contribution will appear on arXiv soon which will describe more detailed algorithms, comment more on robustness to problem mis-specification, comment on thermal sampling applications, and discuss applications on real device