S. Korea's nominal GDP grows at fastest pace in 47 years in Q2; $40,000 per capita GNI on track

SEOUL, Sept. 8 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's nominal gross domestic product (GDP) grew at the fastest pace in 47 years in the second quarter, driven by strong artificial intelligence (AI)-related exports, with the country on track to reach US$40,000 in per capita gross national income (GNI), central bank data showed Tuesday.

The country's real GDP -- a key measure of economic growth -- rose 0.6 percent in the April-June period from three months earlier, according to preliminary data from the Bank of Korea (BOK).

The on-quarter figure matched the BOK's earlier estimate released last month, but it revised up growth in construction investment and intellectual property investment by 0.1 percentage point each, while cutting government consumption growth by 0.1 percentage point.

Asia's fourth-largest economy contracted 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year but rebounded 1.8 percent in the first quarter.

On a yearly basis, the economy expanded 3.7 percent in the second quarter, extending its growth momentum after expanding 3.8 percent on-year in the first quarter.

Exports advanced 1.3 percent from the previous quarter, supported by strong global demand for semiconductors, machinery and equipment. The figure slowed from a 5.9 percent increase in the first quarter.

Facility investment grew 0.2 percent and intellectual property investment gained 3.4 percent, while construction investment fell 0.1 percent.

Private consumption increased 0.4 percent, while government spending climbed 0.1 percent.

On a nominal basis, the country's GDP grew 9.2 percent in the three-month period that ended in June from three months earlier and expanded 26.4 percent from a year earlier, marking the sharpest growth since the third quarter of 1979, when the economy surged 27.7 percent on-year.

In particular, gross operating surplus, referring to companies' profits from production, jumped 18.5 percent from a quarter earlier on an increase in manufacturing and finance, while compensation of employees, or earned income, rose 1.9 percent on-quarter due to wage increases in manufacturing.

"The increase in gross operating surplus will likely lead to a rise in household income through bonuses and dividend payouts and in government income through corporate and income taxes, spilling over into the broader economy," said Kim Hwa-yong from the BOK's economic statistics department.

The central bank data also showed that the country's GNI rose 8.8 percent on a nominal basis from a quarter earlier and 26.4 percent from a year earlier.

Real GNI rose 3.1 percent from a quarter earlier and 15.6 percent from a year earlier, marking the steepest growth since the fourth quarter of 1988, when real GNI jumped 15.7 percent on-year.

The central bank expects South Korea to post per capita GNI of US$40,000 in 2026 unless there are unexpected external shocks.

Based on the continuing growth momentum, the central bank earlier revised up its 2026 growth estimate to 3.3 percent, citing solid exports driven by the ongoing semiconductor super cycle.

The BOK said the South Korean economy needs to grow at least 0.2 to 0.3 percent in the second half of the year to achieve its 3.3 percent growth target for 2026.

Summary: South Korea sees annualized GDP growth rates of 3.7% (PPP), 26.4% (nominal) in Q2.

Relevance to the subreddit: conflicts between gender equality, labor laws and religious pressures, political row in France over an emblematic monument and the separation of church and state

Tourists found the Eiffel Tower closed this Monday, September 7, after workers of the monument launched a strike to protest the treatment of their women staffers, who were forcibly sidelined to accomodate demands from a conservative Hindu group who wished to celebrate the consecration of a temple in the Greater Paris by a "private" visit to the Parisian landmark.

The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a Hindu movement that maintains a close relationship with the Indian PM Narendra Modi and his nationalist party BJP in Gujarat, sent a delegation for a private visit of the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, as part of wider celebrations over the opening of their first temple in Bussy-Saint-Georges, an outer suburb of Paris. As part of their visit, the delegation requested the removal of female staff so as not to interact with women, a demand granted by SETE, the managing society of the monument, owned by the city of Paris.

"Some women were invited to leave their post and to withdraw into separate rooms. In some cases, they were replaced by men. And all salaried women were ordered to avoid the floor and not to walk by some areas during the visit of the delegation", reported staffers whose unions launched a call to strike in protest of the decision.

The conservative president of the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse, who had congratulated the BAPS on the opening of their mandir, said she was "shocked" and denounced the request as "contrary to Republican values". Emmanuel Grégoire (Socialist Party), the mayor of Paris, whose municipal authority oversees and manages SETE, called for an urgent investigation on the incident and called the striking personnel's grievances "legitimate".

A volunteer for the BAPS, quoted by the AFP, justified the separation of men and women: "We have saints and they must follow rules, so it's true that men are on one side and women on the other [...] but it has nothing to do with gender discrimination". The local MP, Michel Barnier, the Equalities Minister Aurore Bergé and candidates on the right and far-right all condemned the demand, asserting that "no dogma, no belief is above the Republic".

TL;DR

• NIMBYs keep blocking reform that would allow for affordable rent, which is the primary cause of homelessness. How do we get around the blockers while still respecting everybody involved?
• A block-level opt-out. This removes most of the incentive for the NIMBYs to block all reform. When Houston introduced upzoning, they allowed individual blocks to opt out if they got the majority of their block to vote on it. 16% opted out, the rest didn't, and Houston is affordable.
• Legislate outcomes, not process. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with the cities constantly inventing ways to get around the reforms, legislate outcomes. This is how Voting Rights Act finally beat Jim Crow's workarounds after 70 years of banning individual tricks.

If you already agree on the diagnosis (e.g. housing supply, CEQA, etc), skip to the possible solutions. Just control-f "Key idea"

Here’s a mystery for you: why the hell isn’t homelessness solved yet?

I grew up on the West Coast and I thought everybody had this problem, but the more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve seen something puzzling - it’s just us.

Other places have homeless people, but it’s just not the same quality or quantity. You can travel to any other first world city in the world, and hardly ever see somebody visibly homeless, then come back and be kicked in the heart with such overt suffering and awfulness.

Why are we failing at something that everybody else seems to be doing better at?

Or, more optimistically - if everybody else is doing better, that means it is solvable, and what are they doing that we can copy?

In this post I’ll:

1. Diagnose the problem.
2. Propose a concrete solution, including how to get it past the people who’ve been blocking the necessary reforms.

How to not de-rail the homelessness conversation

The two most common ways the conversation gets de-railed are:

1. Some people are trying to help the homeless. Some people are trying to fix the problem of finding visible homelessness unsightly and scary. I am only trying to help the homeless themselves in this post.
2. Some people are just trying to solve homelessness specifically. Some people are trying to help the homeless get back to a relatively normal level of welfare, which means not just fixing their homelessness, but also their mental illness, addiction, employment, abusive family, etc. I am going to focus only on solving homelessness. Solving everything else is for another post or 20,000.

This isn’t to say I don’t care about those other problems. However, I am but a humble writer. I think I can simply solve homelessness in a blog post.

Also, this post will focus on SF and California, but much of it cross-applies to the whole West Coast of North America, including British Columbia.

Housing costs determine how many people become homeless. Drugs and mental health determine who becomes homeless

Want to help one specific person? Treat what went wrong for them.

Want fewer homeless people overall? Build more housing.

Both matter.

They're just answers to different questions.

Think of it like a game of musical chairs with 10 people and 9 chairs, where housing are the chairs.

You can give the slow kid sprinting lessons.

There are still nine chairs.

Somebody has to lose the game. It will probably be the slower kid (the person with disabilities or drug addictions).

If you ask the kid why they’re chairless, they’ll say it’s because they’re slower than the other kids. Which is true.

But it’s the proximate cause.

The structural, distal cause is that there are not enough chairs.

“But surely, Kat, some homeless people are just too messed up to afford housing, no matter how cheap we make it?”

Yes, you’re right. Some of the homeless people are not part of the market, they are unemployable, so the market cannot fix their problems.

This leads to an important distinction between the types of homeless people. ~80% of the homeless in SF are temporarily homeless. They will likely only be homeless once in their life, for a relatively brief period of time, then they’ll pull themselves back onto the rungs of society.

It’s easier for them to pull themselves out when there’s low rent and high vacancy rates, so lowering housing costs helps this group.

Cheap housing also does something sneakier: it shrinks the future chronic population. Nobody starts out chronically homeless. You become chronic by staying homeless: you lose your ID, the couches run out, the untreated illnesses compound, and you're sleeping next to fentanyl every night (exposure is a massive cause of addiction). The faster people bounce back onto the ladder, the fewer of them ever harden into the group that needs the expensive solution.

For the chronically homeless, who are in it for the long term and potentially for life, we need a different solution. The solution is permanent supportive housing (PSH). It’s a room of their own, provided by the government, either via vouchers or directly, where the building itself concentrates a bunch of services to treat the common problems, such as drug addiction and schizophrenia.

This works. As Scott Alexander puts it, the evidence that giving people housing makes them housed is overwhelming. (The evidence that it fixes the addiction or mental illness underneath is much weaker. Which is fine. Because in this article we’re only solving the homelessness problem.)

Why hasn’t SF already done this?

Trick question: they have!

Just not nearly enough.

Because you know how hard it is to build buildings in SF? You know how hard it is to even turn an abandoned building into a innocent and beloved ice cream shop? Now imagine trying to build a house for the worst off homeless people, the ones with the most disruptive and probably permanent problems?

SF already runs one of the biggest supportive housing systems in America: roughly 16,000 units, more per capita than almost any city. And it's still losing. Because building a new unit of PSH in SF costs $600,000 to $1 million.

Compare that to Finland, which just converted its shelters into apartments (2,121 shelter beds in 1985, 52 by 2016) and cut homelessness roughly 80% since the 1980s.

Or Houston, which houses people for about $18,000 a year each, and cut homelessness 63%. Not because Houston is generous. It spends less on the homeless than almost any major city. Houston can afford to house people because Houston has cheap apartments to put them in.

Which then leads us to the question:

Why is SF housing so damn expensive? Vetoes, zoning, and entrenched interests, oh my!

Housing costs are a simple matter of supply and demand. If demand is high, that will push costs up. Which usually leads to supply providing more, which will drive the costs down again.

Unless supply is blocked.

Which is what happens in SF and a lot of expensive cities.

“But Kat, SF isn't expensive because of supply. It's expensive because it's full of rich people bidding up prices." Half true! Demand here is enormous. But demand is enormous in Tokyo and Dallas too, and they're cheap, because when demand rises there, they build, and the demand shows up as new apartments. When demand rises in SF, the demand shows up as price, because the number of homes barely moves. Same demand, opposite outcomes.

And notice which half of the equation you'd actually want to change: the only way to lower demand is to make SF a worse place to live.

Supply is the only lever that doesn't involve sabotaging your own city.

In SF it’s not uncommon for it to take 3 years just to get the permission to build. Let alone actually building the thing.

Compare this to Houston at about two weeks. Or Calgary at four to five months.

So what’s going on? Isn’t SF full of builders? Why is a city full of builders so bad at building actual buildings?

The proximate cause of SF sucking at building buildings is vetoes

Imagine you are a developer trying to build a building in SF. You check to make sure that your building meets the stated laws. It does. You submit some extensive forms and wait 3 months for review. A neighbor says that they’re worried about a shadow. It’s scheduled for them to discuss this 14 months from now.

Honestly, I could keep going, but writing it was giving me flashbacks to the worst bureaucracy I’ve ever experienced (registering a charity in India) and I don’t want to inflict that on myself or anybody else. Kafka bureaucracy stories are horrific and boring to experience and read about. If you want some concrete micro-stories Claude wrote to get a sense, check out here.

Suffice to say it’s a series of vetoes, where even if everybody on the block is fine with the building, a single no can stop or slow down the whole thing. The biggest ones are:

• Discretionary review, as compared to ministerial review. Ministerial review is how most of the world does it, where if you follow the law, you by default get approved by an administrator. Discretionary review means it’s up to the discretion of the administrators and even your neighbors. Instead of clear rules, you get vibes.
• CEQA approval. It’s meant to be an environmental law, but people were given a veto lever, and they started using for everything under the sun. Don’t give people a stop-everything button. Some people will press it.
• There’s a 5 department relay that takes ~600 days to go through. If nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. Each department gets an opportunity to slow you down.

It’s important to say that this is not democratic. It’s not that if the majority of people on a block don’t want something, it doesn’t happen. It’s if anybody says no.

Most insanely - you could be following all of the rules and this will still happen. It’s up to the discretion of a bajillion people.

It would be like a group dinner where the restaurant choice needs unanimous approval. One person's vegan, one’s a carnivore, one hates Italian, one's gluten-free. You probably just . . . won’t eat. And in SF you probably just . . . won’t build.

This is different than how most of the world works. Most of the world does zoning where by default you’re allowed to build as long as you are following the local rules. You check the rules, fill out a form, an administrator checks you are indeed following the rules, gives it a stamp, and you’re ready to go.

Most places take a few weeks to a few months to get permission to build. SF takes an average of 523 days just for planning approval, then another 605 days to issue the building permit for the already-approved project - about three years.

It’s the difference between a vending machine and an interview. If you have enough money, a vending machine will simply give you what you pay for. The vending machine doesn’t question whether you’re worthy of a snack. An interview is up to the discretion of the interviewer and is opaque and even if you look great on paper, you can be rejected for any reason.

But it’s not all bad news! The state has actually spent the last few years dismantling most of this machine. Since 2024, under a law called SB 423, any SF apartment project that follows the zoning rules gets approved ministerially in three to six months. No discretionary hearings, no Board of Supervisors. In 2025 the state gutted CEQA for infill housing too, and put shot clocks on the five-department relay. For the kind of building that follows the rules, the vending machine is finally installed.

So SF is booming now, right?

. . . Right?

More than 8,000 units sit fully approved, permits in hand. . . but nothing’s being built.

Because two other blockers are still standing.

Which brings us to the fees.

SF made it unprofitable to build buildings

Builders aren’t building because according to the city’s own calculations, exactions have simply made it unprofitable to build.

What are exactions? They’re basically “you can build here, but you must include X% of your units below market rates / pay some of SF's twenty-plus separate impact fees (transit, schools, parks, childcare) / pay union-level wages / upgrade the sidewalk while you're at it / etc."

Exactions are not bad in and of themselves. They’re like taxes. Taxes broadly help provide public goods that the market wouldn’t provide on its own. But just like taxes, exactions can get too high, and then people stop working, just leave, or lead a revolution. Developers aren’t usually your revolutionary types, so they usually just don’t build or switch jobs. That's why today SF technically could have more than 8,000 units built - they're fully approved, entitlements in hand - but nobody has signed up to build them. They'd lose money.

To be fair, the city has noticed. In 2023 it cut its inclusionary percentage by roughly a third, cut impact fees by a third, and let developers defer 80% of fees until opening. Still not enough. The city's own most recent study found that even at zero inclusionary, buildings don't pencil.

This needs to be fixed on top of removing the vetoes before we can expect housing supply to increase, thus leading to a lowering of costs.

SF made it illegal to build dense housing

SF decided it wasn’t enough to make it unprofitable and painfully slow to build. They also outlawed the type of housing most people need.

Do you want to work in SF? Well, you have to commute every day. But all of the areas with a reasonable commute have already become single family homes. The only way to fit more people within a reasonable commute from work, you need to build up. You need apartments.

So of course, SF zoned about two-thirds of its residential land for single-family houses only, and capped most of the rest of the city at 40 feet.

This means that even if you take 3 years to get permission to build, you still cannot build enough on the lot to make a dent in the supply.

Why would they do something so silly?

Enter stage left:

There’s an organized group who doesn’t want things to change. They like things this way

Remember the loveable old man in Up (Carl)? Who refuses to move while the evil developers destroy his neighborhood?

This is the person who is blocking building in SF.

I like using Carl as an example because it’s great for empathy.

Carl is not a bad person. And he’s not wrong in some ways. His house is more beautiful than those large soulless skyscrapers.

Not to mention he loved his home and the neighborhood. It’s not simply replaceable with another home and neighborhood. He is losing something important and real if his neighborhood changes.

It also shows what can happen if you go too far in the other direction, where you give developers all the power. It’s what happens in China when they simply kick out people who’ve lived there for generations to build something shiny and new.

If Carl lived in SF, he wouldn’t have to face this. He would simply have vetoed the building next to his house, and it would have stayed the same.

Except, of course, then it would lead to massive rents, leading to mass homelessness, and programmers having to live in bunkbeds in a bedroom of 8 people. It shows the single identifiable victim instead of the diffuse victims.

And here’s the kicker - the victims can’t vote on this. Zoning is done at the city level in SF, and largely at the neighborhood level in practice, since supervisors answer to tiny districts, so the people who'd most benefit from cheaper housing don't live there yet and can't vote on it.

This is unlike in most other parts of the world where zoning is done by a body a level up, so people can vote on it who don’t already live in the affected neighborhoods.

This is why it’s best to do the proposed laws at the state level. Then the people who are affected can vote for this. A neighborhood of Carls will never vote for change.

But it’s important to sit with our empathy for Carl for a moment. We really don’t want to become the soulless developers who steamroll over him.

The key idea: give people the ability to opt-out. Respect autonomy while still changing the default option to yes.

Let people, at a block level, opt out of the specific thing they really care about.

If you can get the majority of people on your block to vote to opt out, you’re all good.

I love this because it does two things at once:

• It takes down the main motivation of the opposition group. The people who keep blocking this for everybody else will be fine if they can opt out. They don’t care about other neighborhoods changing. They just care about their own.
• It actually respects their values and avoids being authoritarian. I’m not a libertarian by any stretch, but I hate it when people force me to do something. I don’t want to do that to somebody else unless it’s a really extreme circumstance. High housing costs is not an extreme circumstance. This helps us avoid going to the other extreme, of just bulldozing the opposition.

I got this idea from Houston. Houston is the poster child of affordable housing in a high demand city. Part of the way they got to this situation is they allowed this block level opt out system.

About 16% of them opted out. Meaning 84% didn't.

It’s an open question how many people would opt-out in SF. It could be higher than Houston. That doesn’t matter unless it gets pretty crazy (which is quite unlikely). If even 50% of SF opted out, going from 0% of SF can build to 50% can would be insane for rental costs.

It might make sense to make an exception for housing next to public transit hubs, since that’s so particularly important for providing housing to the poorer people. But that’s for the legal folks to figure out.

The general thing is we’re not here to bully. If you really care and enough people on your block do too, you can opt out of all of this.

It just changes the default. Before the default was that nobody can build unless you get everybody on board. Now the default will be that people can build, unless the majority of your block is against it.

But hasn’t this already been tried and it didn’t work?

You've already seen this play out. Remember the vending machine nobody used? The state spent years removing the process vetoes (see appendix), and production didn't budge, because the exactions and zoning blockers were still standing. Every partial reform 'fails' this way, and every failure becomes ammunition for people who say reform doesn't work.

The problem with blockers is that if you get rid of one, you still have all of the other ones.

You need to get rid of all of them.

This is an example of the Law of the Minimum. This is a fancy way of saying “you can only go as fast as your limiting factor.” It’s like getting your family out of the house. If you’ve got everybody in the car, but there’s one lolligagger still in bed, you’re not going anywhere.

The problem with SF housing is that if you get everything right but you miss something along the chain, it all breaks. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means that it’s hard and you shouldn’t expect much in the way of changes until you get all the pieces.

How to stop the game of whack-a-mole: police outputs, not inputs

The problem with almost all legal reform here is that you are not playing against a static opposition. If you pass one law, they’ll find a workaround.

But there’s a solution to this: legislate outcomes, not process.

Pass a law at the state level saying:

1. Cities must permit at least X units per year.
2. If you do so, you get to keep your local zoning rules.
3. If you fail to do so, you automatically switch to the state mandated zoning system, which is by-right building (the vending machine model), being able to build up, anything not approved within X days gets approved by default, fees capped, etc.

Right now with most legislation, they’re rewarded for coming up with ways to delay building or come up with different ways to block it. But in this model, that would be self-defeating. If they come up with a way to delay building, then the law will detect this and switch them to a zoning that they hate even more.

It doesn’t matter the workaround they find - it’ll get noticed in the outcome metrics.

This has actually already been tried with great success in the civil rights fight.

For 70 years, Congress kept trying to legislate away the Jim Crow tricks.

They banned the grandfather clause, so they introduced literacy tests. Congress banned those, and then they introduced “understanding clauses”. Black voter registration stayed at 7%.

Then in 1965, Congress changed to measuring the outputs, not the inputs: any county that had less than 50% registration would lose control of their own election process.

Finally, registration went to 60%.

Cross-apply this to housing. Stop legislating individual zoning rules. Legislate the outputs.

What about the homeless who refuse shelter?

What if we build all of this housing, fast and cheaply, and then they refuse to live there?

You might have heard that a lot of the homeless could be in a shelter but refuse. This is true, but irrelevant.

Temporary shelters are but a stop gap for helping the homeless. And they kinda suck. You might refuse them too.

• They split it by gender, so if you have a partner, you can’t be with them.
• They’re crawling with diseases.
• You don’t even necessarily get that much better of a sleep because you’re in giant open rooms with tons of people snoring, coughing, and having psychotic episodes around you.
• Crime and assault are common.
• You have to wait in line for ages.
• You can’t store anything there and you have to leave in the morning, so you’re still on the streets most of the time

In a word, it’s not really housing.

The generally accepted solution to actually providing housing to the homeless is to give them what’s called Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). PSH is where you get a small room of one’s own, with your own key. In the fancier ones you get your own kitchen and bathroom. In the more frugal ones, you share the bathroom and kitchen with a few other people.

But you’ve got a door with a lock. You’ve got your own room where you can store your stuff in the day, including just staying inside if you want to. No need to spend your days on the streets or in libraries.

The “supportive” part of PSH is that then usually this is where a whole bunch of supportive services are concentrated, such as programs to help you quit an addiction or get your meds, etc.

The stats you’ve heard about how a decent chunk of the homeless refuse shelter is about them refusing shelters.

Not PSH.

PSH is different.

When researchers ran the hardest version of the experiment - a randomized trial offering permanent supportive housing to the most impaired chronically homeless people in Santa Clara County, people averaging five hospitalizations and three jail stays in the prior two years - the vast majority moved in and stayed housed. People don't refuse housing. They refuse shelters.

Also, while we’re on the subject of PSH - the bulk of the ability to build enough of these will be making the city by-right. However, there’s also a good ~50% increase in costs of building if the government funds it compared to only private funding. This is largely driven by union-wage mandates, gold-plated design requirements, and the multi-year scramble to assemble a dozen funding sources. This is another lever to pull on, though lower priority than simply making it easier in general to build in SF.

The Trump administration has removed language criticizing a memorial to the Confederacy formerly located in Arlington National Cemetery, part of its ongoing effort to reshape portrayals of the Civil War.

The Confederate Memorial, a 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914, was removed from the military cemetery in 2023. Its removal followed a congressional mandate to rid U.S. military property of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy and its leaders.

The decision by the bipartisan Naming Commission to remove the statue was based on criticism and backlash over the memorial’s depictions, which included an enslaved woman carrying an infant child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war.

A Defense Department website and a marker at the memorial’s former site included contextual language describing the sculpture as portraying a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The website also described the two Black figures as enslaved people, including an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” and it remarked on how the portrayal of the “faithful slave” helped to shape American pop culture.

Now, that language has been removed from the website, and the marker in the cemetery has been replaced by a new sign that omits wording critical of slavery and the Confederacy.

The website also formerly featured additional context about the sculpture’s symbolism, including a Latin phrase inscribed on it.

“An inscription … construes the South’s secession as a noble ‘Lost Cause,’” the website previously read. “This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans.”

That language and other text was removed in recent weeks, according to photographs of the sign and archived versions of the webpage.

Asked about the changes to the sign and the website, the Defense Department referred questions to Arlington National Cemetery, which did not respond Monday.

The statue was relocated to the Virginia Military Institute in 2023 amid some congressional GOP opposition. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last year that the statue would be reinstalled at Arlington National Cemetery. Last year, then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) had said that the statue would return next year.

“The Army expects to display the sculpture at this site in 2027 after it has undergone comprehensive conservation and refurbishment,” according to a new marker in Arlington National Cemetery at the statue’s former site.

Stephen West, a Catholic University historian, said he first noticed that the sign had been changed when he visited Arlington National Cemetery on Sunday.

“The language that used to be on the sign and website described the Memorial correctly. Ezekiel’s sculpture did sanitize slavery, and it did mythologize the Confederacy,” West wrote in a text message to The Washington Post. “And so as a historian, I’m deeply disturbed by the removal of that language and by plans to restore the statue — especially because they’re of a piece with the censoring and slanting of history at other federal sites.”

Trump has previously said he supports efforts to recognize the Confederacy and sees it as a freedom of speech issue.

“When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism,” Trump said in a 2020 interview with Fox News. “They love their flag, it represents the South; they like the South.”

The president has decried efforts to remove Confederate statues and worked to reinstall them in his second term.

A statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that was torn down and torched by protesters in 2020 was restored to its original location in downtown Washington in October. And last year the Pentagon ordered that a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee in his Confederate uniform be restored to the West Point library. The painting, which had been ordered removed by the Naming Commission, featured an enslaved man in the background tending to Lee’s horse.

Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who served as vice chair on the commission, said he was particularly disturbed by the Confederate Memorial’s pending return.

The Confederate Memorial “is the cruelest monument that I have ever seen,” Seidule said in an interview Monday. He said that he and a number of his colleagues called the statue “the most egregious example of racism that they had seen on any public land in America. It is a pro-slavery, anti-United States monument.”

Seidule said the rewording of the marker and the website is the first step the administration is taking before bringing the memorial back to the cemetery. Restoring the monument, he said, would be “against the will of the American people through their elected representatives in the law that they created.”

Of interest to the sub because it's about economics, and particularly touches on AI and labor income. Should be a gift article.

To discuss:

Is the labor share of income shrinking, and should it concern us?

The author lands on AI as the current cause and lists some suggestions, namely indexing the social safety net to labor share trends and reducing biases towards capital income in the tax code.

This is relevant because it is about the global wave of anti-migrant sentiment.

Kenya's president has said that foreign, small scale businesses like street hawkers should close their businesses so that such basic economic activity is protected for Kenyans.

The government is effecting this by going after those businesses which are unregistered or unlicensed, where the person may be committing visa fraud because they are working on a non-work visa.

Britain is set to announce wide-ranging economic restrictions targeting Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as soon as Tuesday, according to seven officials briefed on the measures, in what experts say would be a significant censure of Israeli policy toward Palestinians.

The measures are expected to include a trade ban on goods produced in the settlements, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Three of the officials said the measures could also include sanctions on companies helping to build settlements.

Israel has become increasingly isolated on the world stage in the aftermath of the devastating war in Gaza, and international attention has focused on Israel’s tightening grip over the West Bank. The sanctions come at a time when Israeli extremists have been repeatedly attacking Palestinians, on occasion assailing homes with little intervention by Israeli forces.

Some analysts say Britain’s move could foreshadow decisions by other European countries to impose harder-hitting and broader sanctions.

While the details are still unclear, a British product ban would likely have a limited impact on the $8 billion in annual trade between the countries, given that goods made in Israeli settlements are only a small fraction of that amount. But the measures go well beyond previous British sanctions related to the West Bank, which targeted some extremist Israeli settlers and two far-right ministers.

“The government is broadening the extent of the sanctions from individuals to looking at processes and the system,” said Lord Tariq Ahmad, who was a British minister for the Middle East until 2024 and has knowledge of the expected policy.

Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said last week that “Israel will act” against any new British sanctions, without elaborating. The Israeli foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. The British Foreign Office declined to comment.

British Jewish groups have lobbied against the move in meetings with government officials, arguing that the measures unfairly single out Israel for criticism and could stoke antisemitism.

Britain, a longtime ally of Israel, has long condemned Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are widely considered illegal under international law, saying they undermined the possibility of a future Palestinian state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shrugged off international criticism and promoted building more settlements at a record pace

In August, Britain condemned the Israeli government decision to move ahead with plans for new homes for settlers in E1, a part of the West Bank near Jerusalem, that critics say could preclude the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state in the territory.

Ed Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, denounced that decision as “an unacceptable and destructive act,” and vowed to respond with new policies, including sanctions targeting those involved in expanding settlements.

“We need to look at our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories, as we are doing, and at the different tools we have,” he said in Parliament last week. “We do not want British companies financing, constructing or advertising new settlements.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. About three million Palestinians live in the territory alongside some 500,000 Israelis, who live in a sprawling array of settlements. Their exports include kosher wine, produce, plastics and other products.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham entered office in July pledging a tougher stance on Israel over the war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Mr. Burnham called Gaza “a scar on our collective conscience,” and criticized the previous government’s response in a video.

Keir Starmer, Mr. Burnham’s predecessor as prime minister, moved to recognize a Palestinian state, suspended some arms licenses for Israel and imposed sanctions on the two far-right Israeli ministers but stopped short of broader economic measures. The Biden administration imposed sanctions on individual settlers deemed to be responsible for attacks against Palestinians, but President Trump canceled those measures when he was re-elected.

Spain and the Netherlands have already banned products from the settlements. Analysts say Britain’s move wields additional influence.

“Britain’s political and economic weight could play an almost unique role in catalyzing broader measures against Israel’s settlement project and in coalescing other Western partners around joint action to defend whatever is left of the two-state solution,” said Hugh Lovatt, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research group.

In commenting on possible British sanctions last week, Mr. Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, argued that Mr. Burnham’s government was “acting systematically against Israel” in part to shore up domestic support ahead of the Labour party’s conference later this month.

Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said on social media last week after meeting with Mr. Miliband, the British foreign secretary, that a ban on trade with Israeli settlements could easily slide into a “de facto boycott of trade with Israel more broadly.” He argued that “when rhetoric towards Israel escalates, hostility towards Jews is never far behind.”

Other Jewish leaders have asked Mr. Burnham to at least delay announcing the measures, noting that Israel is set next month to hold its first national elections since the 2023 attacks. Mr. Netanyahu is locked in a close contest with opponents who are generally seen as willing to pursue more moderate policies toward the Palestinians.

Some opposition lawmakers in Britain have also spoken out against the plans, saying that imposing sanctions could threaten the country’s national security because Israel shares intelligence information that has been used to prevent terror attacks on British soil.

The government is launching a major restructuring plan that will reduce the number of public institutions by 109. Five power generation subsidiaries under Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) will be consolidated into a single company, while Korea National Oil Corp. (KNOC) and Korea Gas Corp. (KOGAS) will also be merged into one state-run corporation. Korea Land and Housing Corp. (LH), whose debt exceeds 170 trillion won, will be split into two public corporations, with one responsible for land development and housing construction and the other handling housing welfare and asset reserves.
The government announced its “Plan for Functional Reform of Public Institutions” on the 3rd following a meeting of the Public Institutions Management Committee. The government concluded that structural reform had become necessary as the number of public institutions, their organizations and workforces, and their debt had all continued to expand.
The number of public institutions has risen from 298 in 2007, when the Act on the Management of Public Institutions took effect, to 342 this year. Their combined debt reached 769 trillion won at the end of last year. President Lee Jae-myung instructed the government last August to carry out extensive consolidation, saying, “There are so many public institutions that I cannot even keep count of them.”
The government will carry out the restructuring along three tracks: structural reform of 15 key public institutions, consolidation of overlapping or similar functions involving 11 institutions, and integration of 83 subsidiaries and small-scale institutions.
Prime Minister Han Sung-sook said, “We will reduce the number of public institutions by 109, the largest such reduction ever,” adding, “For institutions where legal amendments are not required, implementation will begin immediately.”
LH is the only institution that will be split under the restructuring plan. Land development and housing construction will be assigned to a tentatively named “Housing and Urban Development Corporation,” while housing welfare and asset reserves will be handled by a tentatively named “Housing and Urban Asset Corporation.”
A portion of the development corporation’s profits will be accumulated in a separate account within the Housing and Urban Fund and used to finance the asset corporation’s housing welfare programs. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport will separately announce detailed plans for the division of functions and organizational restructuring.
Korea National Oil Corp. and Korea Gas Corp. will be merged into a tentatively named “Energy Resources Corporation.” The government plans to combine their oil and gas exploration, development, and resource procurement functions in order to strengthen bargaining power against major global energy companies.
The plan is based in part on the fact that oil and natural gas are often discovered and produced together in the same fields, creating significant overlap between the two companies’ business areas. Japan likewise supports oil and gas development as well as the securing of metal and mineral resources through the Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security (JOGMEC).
Korea Coal Corp., whose mines have all ceased operations, will be liquidated. Its debt stood at 2.59 trillion won at the end of last year. Although it no longer conducts any significant commercial operations and is largely handling residual affairs, it still incurs more than 75 billion won in annual interest expenses.
The five power generation companies—Korea South-East Power, Korea Southern Power, Korea East-West Power, Korea Western Power, and Korea Midland Power—which were separated from KEPCO in 2001 to introduce competition into the electricity industry, will be merged again after 25 years into a tentatively named “Korea Power Generation.”
The government plans to achieve economies of scale by integrating fuel and maintenance-material procurement, research and development, and investment in renewable energy.
The consolidated company will establish, among other units, a Renewable Energy Division and a Just Transition Division responsible for workforce and business restructuring resulting from the phaseout of coal-fired power generation.
The Busan, Incheon, Ulsan, and Yeosu Gwangyang port authorities will also be merged into a tentatively named “Korea Port Authority.” Policy and planning functions will be centralized, while the four existing port authorities will be converted into regional branches.
The proposed merger of Incheon International Airport Corp. and Korea Airports Corp. has been postponed. The government will first establish an “Airport Strategy Council” to promote measures aimed at revitalizing regional airports before reconsidering whether the two airport operators should be consolidated.
In addition, institutions and small subsidiaries with overlapping functions in sectors including broadcasting and media, employment and labor education, advanced medical care, and small-business distribution will be reorganized by function. One example is the proposed consolidation of subsidiaries responsible for facility management at public financial institutions.
However, substantial obstacles remain before the mergers can actually be completed.
One immediate issue is the prospect of conflicts among regions over where the headquarters of the newly consolidated corporations will be located. The five power generation companies currently have their headquarters in Jinju, South Gyeongsang Province; Boryeong and Taean, South Chungcheong Province; Busan; and Ulsan.
If a headquarters is moved to another region, the existing host city could lose tax revenue and resident population, raising the likelihood of strong opposition from affected local governments.
North Jeolla Province and the proposed Jeonnam-Gwangju Integrated Special Metropolitan City have also begun efforts to attract the headquarters of the consolidated power company, emphasizing links with their renewable energy industries.
Second Vice Minister of Economy and Finance Heo Jang said of the headquarters issue, “Discussions are ongoing.”
Yoo Seung-hoon, a professor in the Department of Future Energy Convergence at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, said, “The five power generation companies have a significant impact on tax revenues in the regions where they are based. If the headquarters are relocated elsewhere during the consolidation process, the loss of tax revenue will inevitably provoke considerable opposition from the current host regions.”
The handling of debt is another major challenge.
LH’s debt stood at 173.7 trillion won at the end of last year, up 13.6 trillion won from a year earlier, while its debt-to-equity ratio reached 230.8 percent. However, the government’s announcement did not specify how LH’s existing assets and liabilities would be divided between the two newly created corporations.
The housing welfare division is particularly problematic, having recorded operating losses of 3.1949 trillion won from rental housing alone last year.
The proposed merger between Korea National Oil Corp. and Korea Gas Corp. is complicated by both financial and governance issues.
KNOC was in a state of complete capital impairment at the end of last year, with total equity standing at negative 2.529 trillion won. KOGAS has been improving its financial position, but its debt still exceeds 42 trillion won.
Another complication is that KOGAS is a publicly listed company. Because a substantial portion of its shares is held by private investors, the method used to carry out the merger could provoke opposition from minority shareholders.
The government is considering separating KNOC’s distressed assets and liabilities into a separate subsidiary.
Opposition from labor unions is also expected to be a significant variable in the consolidation process.
The Joint Countermeasures Committee of the Public Sector under Korea’s two major labor confederations said in a statement on the 3rd, “This functional reform plan contains numerous consolidation and restructuring measures that carry a serious risk of undermining public services,” adding that it expressed “grave concern and regret.”
The committee continued, “We strongly condemn the government’s undemocratic, closed-door administration, which excluded substantive consultation with the affected parties and broader public deliberation in the process of developing the functional reform plan.”
The committee includes the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, and five industry-level unions representing public-sector institutions.
The government plans to guarantee employment succession for employees of institutions subject to consolidation, with the exception of executives, and to introduce support measures to ensure that employees’ pay and other working conditions do not deteriorate following the mergers.
Park Jin, a professor at the Korea Development Institute (KDI), said, “After public institutions are consolidated, they should not simply continue every activity they previously carried out. A judgment must be made as to which businesses should continue and which should be discontinued.”
He added, “Projects that generate excessive debt or impose high costs without providing meaningful services to the public should be eliminated decisively.”

Submission Statement: Chinese scholarship on India has grown in breadth but not depth.

India has long been an important place for China to study. It is a neighbour, a potential rival and the only other member of the billion-plus club. It is also a fellow member of many international forums including the brics, whose summit Narendra Modi will host in Delhi on September 12th and 13th. Xi Jinping is expected to attend, on his first trip to India since 2019. As India’s economy, global heft and bilateral relations with China have grown, so have the ranks of researchers dedicated to studying it.

For all that, the quality of much of this research is poor. Rising interest “has also exposed clear shortcomings”, note Lin Minwang of Fudan University in Shanghai and Mao Keji, a doctoral candidate at Tsinghua University in Beijing, in a survey of the field published last year. “Many of the viewpoints lack sufficient depth, historical perspective and the necessary intellectual grounding,” they write. Indian analysts who look at China have reached much the same conclusion. Raj Verma, a political scientist who spent 11 years in China and has published papers exploring Chinese scholars’ attitudes towards India, says that while older researchers are “sensible and moderate”, younger ones can be “aggressive and hubristic”. Even as China produces more research about India, it seems to understand it less.

Many Chinese scholars point to a lack of access. India has always been cagey about granting visas to researchers and journalists of any nationality. But ever since a lethal high-altitude clash between the two countries’ troops in Ladakh in 2020, Chinese researchers have been barred from India. A thaw in relations in recent months has seen the issuance of tourist visas resume, and there is talk that the pair might even allow back each other’s journalists. Perhaps scholars will follow.

A lack of introspection also plays a part. Indian analysts publish extensively on their country’s policy missteps towards China. Writing in his newsletter earlier this year Ananth Krishnan of the Hindu, a newspaper, noted the lack of similar self-reflection in Chinese analysis of India: “A conversation can’t go very far if the basic premise is that every problem in the relationship is because of the other side’s insecurities, which is what I increasingly hear and read in Beijing.”

The U.S. is exploring whether Ukraine and Russia could take steps to de-escalate the war during the winter while restarting negotiations toward a broader peace agreement, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Axios in an interview Monday.

The Ukrainian president believes the weeks before winter offer a window for diplomacy. While Zelensky said he's convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin is counting on another brutal winter to weaken Ukraine, he added that Putin doesn't want to antagonize the U.S. president ahead of the midterm elections.

"My feeling [is] that Putin needs Trump," Zelensky said. "He doesn't want ... to upset him."

Zelensky said that even if Putin doesn't want to de-escalate, he could be pressured by the Trump administration to do so

.

When asked whether Putin might want to give Trump a diplomatic win before the U.S. elections, Zelensky replied: "Yeah."

Zelensky met in Kyiv on Sunday with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. It was their first visit to Ukraine since Trump started his second term.

Kushner and Witkoff traveled to Kyiv after holding a three-hour meeting with Putin at the Kremlin on Saturday.

Zelensky said the message he received from the U.S. envoys was that "the Russians are ready to negotiate."

He remains skeptical, however, because Russia's actions on the battlefield and its recent escalation of attacks don't demonstrate a willingness to compromise.

But Zelensky said his understanding after the U.S. envoys' trip is that Putin is "ready to discuss" ideas for moving negotiations forward.

Zelensky said the U.S. envoys came to Moscow and Kyiv primarily to "unblock" the diplomatic process, but also brought some new ideas.

He declined to disclose all the details but said some of the discussions involved potential de-escalation steps from Russia and Ukraine ahead of and during the winter.

"There are ideas around energy [facilities] and around grain [shipments], around electricity [facilities] and around oil and gas [exports]. We have different interests, Russia and we," Zelensky said.

Asked whether the emerging U.S. approach involves both restarting negotiations and trying to reach understandings that would allow Ukraine and Russia to get through the winter without a major escalation, Zelensky said that interpretation was "very close to the reality of these conversations."

He described the first objective as resuming negotiations and the second as trying to make the coming winter different from previous ones, when Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure heightened the war.

The goal, he said, would be to find steps before or during the winter "which can bring [the] sides closer to the peace."

U.S. officials say they don't know if it will be possible to address the interests of both Russia and Ukraine ahead of winter. Countless previous attempts to reach ceasefires or pause strikes on energy facilities have failed.

Zelensky said the U.S. team is expected to brief Trump and then continue consultations with Ukrainian and European officials.

Zelensky said the U.S. also supports a separate "winter package" for Ukraine that would include air defense and energy assistance.

"It's not only about missiles," Zelensky said. "It's also about LNG [liquefied natural gas] ... and it's also about steps of de-escalation."

Zelensky believes Putin is counting on the winter to inflict enough damage on Ukraine to force Kyiv into further concessions.

"Russia really thinks that this winter can help them to break us," Zelensky said.

He said Moscow hopes a major winter offensive and attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure will deliver a "strong kick" after which Ukraine will become "more compromising."

Zelensky stressed that Ukraine has already made all the compromises it can and that any diplomatic process would also need security guarantees and an economic support package.

Zelensky also pointed out that Russia faces its own risks heading into the winter months. Ukraine, he said, can also hit Russia economically. "When they attacked our electricity, we blocked their possibility to sell oil and gas," he said. He also warned that disruptions to agricultural exports could drive up global food prices and cause food insecurity.

Zelensky said Ukraine wants to use September and October to restart a diplomatic process and suggested the UN General Assembly in New York later this month as a possible venue for further U.S.-Ukraine talks.

He said there is also the possibility of another trilateral U.S.-Ukraine-Russia negotiation session, though no decision has been made.

"We have this September, October to find any way to speak," Zelensky said. "Without dialogue … we will not have [a] result."

"I think that President Trump can find a way to [a] real beginning of the process of negotiating before [the] cold winter," he added.

Zelensky said Ukraine would need to remain militarily strong throughout any diplomatic process and argued that Kyiv is currently in a better position on the battlefield than it was previously despite shortages in its air defense and continued Russian drone and missile attacks.

He also called for additional U.S. sanctions on Russia, describing them as a key source of leverage in any negotiations.

"Putin needs money," Zelensky said. "Putin wants money to continue the war."