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After the coronavirus pandemic the whole picture of life in retirement and aging is expected, says this report in WSJ.  Retirement homes are not viewed as a good place and about 30% of these homes in the U.S. are expected to close with financial difficulties. Most people will now work longer and continue to live at home. Telemedicine and other technology will help make this possible. Experts say most people will age and stay at home and financial incentives will be given for this to happen.  Aging will also be seen differently because of the resilience of older people during the coronavirus. People will be seen as productive and living a full life well into their seventies and eighties. Community services will expand. Government services including under Medicaid will consider that it is less costly to stay at home than in long term care facilities and provide financial coverage for caregiver or homecare aides help at home. Many new services and technology assisted services are being planned with a focus on older people and living productive lives, as America and Europe other countries shift their focus to this group. After coronavirus people are also looking to spend their years in a productive way, to do things that really matter and add meaning to their lives.. How to spend the next 10-20 years in the most meaningful way. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
What is the oldest man alive like. Bob Weighton was presented with his certificate by the Guinness World Records this week. He lives in a assisted living home and is self isolating. Here is someone who has been through the 1918-20 Spanish flu pandemic that took millions of lives all over the world. What is he like? He was a professor of Marine Engineering at the City University of London till he retired at age 65 in 1973. Weighton says he is very pleased he was able to live so long and make so many friends. He has had serious medical operations but nothing he has experienced is like the coronavirus and self-isolation. He calls it "bizarre." But his advice is that there is nothing you can do about this so you might as well do what you can and  never mind about what you can't. He has 3 children, 10 grandchildren and 25 great grand children. He and wife Agnes traveled and worked around the world then settled back in the UK. She and his wife Agnes who passed away in 1993 volunteered in retirement as marraige counselors and helped youth groups in Alton.  ...

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Poland has a huge shortage of doctors and nurses. The ratio of doctors to every 100,000 of population is the lowest in the European Union. It is twice that in Germany whose relative success in tackling covid pandemic comes from having foreign doctors and nurses treat patients. Consider that the average age of Polish doctors is 53, only a few years from retirement. The situation in terms of immigration reminds pone of East Germany and its depopulation of young people who left for West Germany. Something like this has happened in Poland in health care.  In similar ways other countries in the EU, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania stocked up on ventilators but now have few doctors and nurses left to operate them. It is stretching the limits of human endurance as this report shows in WSJ, with doctors working 36 hour shifts and working 73 hours a week.  Here we see Dr. Rotnicki, who works these long hours at a hospital in western Poland and says that it is like the Second World War, that it is hard times in Poland for health care workers. This report says Italian and British hospitals, not just German ones, are tackling coronavirus with Polish, Hungarian and Romanian doctors and nurses. This report shows that headhunters in Germany drive in to western Poland blanketing windshields with pamphlets promising 5 times more pay, 2 years of free language classes and housing. In Slovakia a third of all nursing graduates leave the coutnry immediately after graduation. In Poland not nursing pay has lagged behind with fewer going into nursing schools. Staff remaining in the region are older and educated under communism when less English was taught, or have returned back home from years overseas. Forcing doctors to give up private practice and work in public hospitals during coronavirus pandemic is not working in Hungary, where surveys find 6 out of ten medical school graduates intending to leave Hungary. These doctors say they are better off working at Aldi and Tesco if needed and making more pay, plus getting weekends off. Poland only recently increased pay for healthcare workers, some even survived on cash given to them by patients. Not a good situation for a country to be in and reflecting the wrong priorities not just in the U.S. and western Europe, but also in eastern Europe, during the last 3 decades. These priorities shifted money away from health care, education and infrastructure priorities. The people simply lost control of their spending allocation to "financial markets" that shifted money in a way that benefited only small group in society neglecting others and national interests. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The difficulties the new U.S. Treasury Secretary faces as she tries to navigate the politics in Congress and the tries to reach out to moderates and progressives within the Democratic party. All have different views on spending, and where stimulus money should go in a second stimulus. Her long experience with the Fed is seen as not preparing her for the political role of evaluating different opinions that are described by some experts as ten times more political than anything going on in Fed meetings. As a student of Prof. Tobin Yellen sees government intervention as needed in times of economic crises. Twice in ten years the U.S. and the rest of the world has been struck by economic crises- the bank leveraging behaviours and poor lending practices that induced the 2009 financial crisis and in 2020 the coronavirus pandemic. Lessons learned Yellen says about the 2009 recession are that not enough stimulus was provided after the initial stimulus to get a strong enough recovery. Democrats are eager to spend over $2 trillion in a second stimulus. Republicans much less so particularly with a new president. Even under Mr. Trump spending was set at under $700 billion by Republicans for a second stimulus. Another economic crises is one of the U.S. strategic economic position in the world. On this issue of trade Yellen's husband George Akerloff, also a economist is more skeptical of the value of free trade. The failure of the World Trade Organization to ensure a level playing field as China subsidized key industries, and the loss of America's manufacturing advantage over three decades is now the defining issue in American politics. It takes the shape of manufacturing communities that were once a part of Democratic party support shifting away after devastated local economies from the loss of manufacturing plants to China. It takes the shape of a Republican party that is committed to bring back American manufacturing, and a Democratic party that under Biden is seeking the same result. How much each party will invest in terms of making things happen to get this done is one of the issues facing all parties, Congress, the administration, Ms. Yellen, and the new president. Economics does not have the answers. As economists could not have predicted the increase in women participation in the workforce, the drop in Black and Hispanic unemployment rates under the Trump administration. The lack of moral will to get trade to work for the American worker was more of an issue under Democratic and Republican administrations for the last 2 decades, so that issues of growing inequality were never better addressed by any party. It depended more on focus of the president elected to help American workers, and to avoid the cost and distraction of foreign wars when American interests could be protected in other ways. Yellen was not able to make a difference at the Fed because of these reasons and low interest rates have both helped and hurt the middle class, as low interest rates meant Americans were less able to accumulate savings for retirement since 2000. Determination and action counts for more than ideology or policy is the lesson learned in building strong economies and manufacturing.   ...