Noted: Stephen Young is a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor who studies basic income programs in the United States and worldwide. Young said universal basic income is not a “magic bullet solution” but an idea that has gained traction in the past decade to “address structural unemployment and poverty.”
Quoted: “I think that there was some concern that inflation would continue to accelerate,” said Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Producers haven’t been able to respond with supply as enthusiastically as consumers have responded with demand as the economy has sort of opened back up.”
Conroy said the new numbers indicate the current accelerated inflation is a temporary trend brought on by supply shortages.
“I think that’s hopeful for a lot of consumers in particular, that as some of the short-term problems resolve themselves, prices will stabilize,” said Conroy.
Quoted: According to Noah Williams, director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy, the state’s labor force participation has been declining for decades as the state’s demographics shift over time.
“The way I think about it is there’s long term trends and then on top of that there’s been the shorter term issues,” Williams said, “The population is aging; it’s aging more rapidly in Wisconsin than in the rest of the country.”
Quoted: The overall job numbers showed “a strong contribution from education hiring, as more schools than normal retained teachers through the summer and ramped up hiring for a planned return to instruction in the fall,” said Noah Williams, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
The upward trend, however, is threatened by the virus spread, Williams added.
A new study out of Madison, Wisconsin shows that building dense, amenity-rich market-rate housing in vulnerable neighborhoods leads to higher evictions.
While there are significant differences between Madison and San Francisco, the data has implications for new local attempts to encourage more dense housing into existing residential areas that may be threatened by gentrification and displacement.
The author, University of Wisconsin Professor Revel Sims, looked at areas where five-unit or larger buildings were constructed in areas with older buildings and lower-income residents.
“No one wants to work anymore.” This is a common refrain from business owners around the country as the economy opens back up. Conservative commentators claim that unemployment insurance is keeping people from going back to work and fueling widescale laziness—but is that really what’s going on?
Today on the show, labor economist Laura Dresser joins Thursday host Allen Ruff to challenge these myths of the “labor shortage” narrative. They talk about the working class in Wisconsin, the pandemic economy, the importance of worker power, and the real reason employers are struggling to hire.
Laura Dresser is associate director of the Center On Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) and assistant clinical professor in the School Of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is co-editor of The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market(Cornell University Press, 2008) and co-author of the annual State of Working Wisconsin report from COWS.
Much of southern and western Wisconsin has continued to experience abnormally dry conditions this year, with far southeastern Wisconsin seeing severe drought earlier this summer.
But agronomist Chris Kucharik from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said lower precipitation hasn’t had as much of an impact on the state’s crops as he was anticipating.
“I’m a bit surprised at how well the crops have been doing,” Kucharik said. “Honestly, once the crop is in the ground, (farmers) are kind of at the mercy of what happens during the growing season with the weather.”
Quoted: Even though the situation in the industry remains tough, Mark Stephenson, head of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “2020 was not as bad a year for dairy farmers.”
Milk prices had been low since 2015 — “for a longer period of time than we’ve seen in quite a while,” according to Stephenson. Farmers did their best to cut costs, and waited for demand to increase and boost prices with it.
Quoted: Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”
Noted: La Follette School Assistant Professor Lindsay Jacobs is one of the authors of the report
Americans may be richer than they think and less unequal than they’ve been led to believe. That’s the takeaway from a recent working paper by five economists from the University of Wisconsin and the Federal Reserve, which adds to standard wealth measures by including Social Security and pension guarantees.
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it, it’s going to be bad,” said Kurt Paulsen, University of Wisconsin-Madison urban planning professor. He explained that the eviction moratorium barred landlords from evicting tenants who were unable to pay their rent during the pandemic, but that renters are still ultimately on the hook for all the rent they missed when the moratorium expires.
“Thousands and thousands of renters have been unable to pay the rent because of unemployment or COVID-related financial hardships, and eventually the rent comes due,” Paulsen said.
While the debate over enhanced federal unemployment aid in Wisconsin has been settled for now, the broader, national discussion on the issue continues.
At least 26 states have cut their ties with the program. Business owners and interest groups argue that ending the additional aid is the best way to address difficulties in hiring new workers.
For more on the debate, WORT producer Jonah Chester spoke with Laura Dresser, a labor economist at UW-Madison.
Industry experts Mark Stephenson and Bob Cropp say they see optimism in price and supply for the coming months, according to the latest episode of the Dairy Markets and Policy podcast.
Cropp, professor emeritus of UW-Madison’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, said cold storage reports bring both bad and good news to dairy farmers: American cheese stocks are slowly decreasing at 2% this month, but butter stocks have gone up 14% in the same timeframe. Stephenson, director of the Center for Dairy Profitability, said cheese stocks will continue to see rising price support.
Quoted: “People respond to price changes by shifting their consumption,” according to Noah Williams, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Quoted: Landlords have a lot more options available to them than eviction, Madison-based rental housing lawyer and University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor Mitch said. Mitch said property owners can negotiate rather than file evictions that will go permanently on the tenant’s record.
“I know that eviction isn’t the only tool in your toolbox when renters don’t pay, and I wish that property owners would realize that they have other tools such as working out agreements on early move-outs, working on payment plans or working together to get government assistance,” Mitch said.
Quoted: “You used to have to use McKinsey or another specialized consultant, but with the Internet and data science you can do this at a fraction of the cost and make it very easy for the farmers themselves,” said Tom Erickson, Founding Director of the University of Wisconsin’s School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences.
Noted: Green county has seen one of the state’s fastest growths in Latino population, increasing by an estimated 228% from 2000 to 2019, according to the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Monroe is the largest city in Green county and has seen a steady increase of Latino immigrants over 20 years. With a population of only about 10,800, new people stand out, which has made the adjustment, like the farm work, incredibly difficult for some dairy workers.
Quoted: “These early plants are relatively easy and that’s a good place to start,” said Greg Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in the development of climate-friendly energy technology. “As that gets shown and proven, you get some transportation networks, then it gets easier to do the harder stuff later.”
Quoted: Mark Stephenson, the director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the industry definitely has a lot of challenges but is nowhere near extinction.
“We’ve produced record amounts of milk in the last year or two. It’s being consumed. Most of it domestically, but increasingly with exports,” said Stephenson.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison plan to meld computer modeling and social science in hopes of providing better responses to future pandemics. The goal is to be ready with quicker and more equitable strategies to distribute vaccines.
Interview with Jirs Meuris, assistant professor of management and human resources at the Wisconsin School of Business.
Quoted: Menzie Chinn, an economics professor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email that while there is much demand for workers, supply remains constrained.
“Rising wages are not a ‘bad’, since that’s how the market adjusts to market conditions,” said Chinn. “There’s not a ‘shortage’ as the business community keeps on complaining about.”
Steve Deller, an applied economics professor at UW-Madison, said increased wages and benefits are one way companies are trying to be creative in the current labor market.
“Five years ago or so, people would think that a $15-an-hour job is a good paying job,” said Deller. “People are coming to the realization that’s not a good paying job. It’s got to be more than that. And businesses are coming around and saying, ‘If I want quality workers, I’ve got to up my pay.'”
Noted: Steven Deller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economist and part of a group that studied the impact of Verso’s closure in Wisconsin Rapids, said he thinks the paper industry in Wisconsin is declining for reasons similar to what happened in Maine, where he worked at a university before coming to Wisconsin.
The problem in both states, he said, is that many of the plants are old and companies are finding it doesn’t make sense to invest in aging facilities. Instead, they are building new, often in the south to reduce transportation costs by being closer to timber producers in warmer places where trees grow faster.
States around the country are gearing up for projects that could pair engineering schools and industry, but the dean of UW-Madison’s College of Engineering warned this week the state will be at a disadvantage unless there’s more investment in infrastructure needed to compete. “If we don’t act soon, we’re going to lose out,” said Ian Robertson, dean of Madison’s 4,500-student engineering college. “Others are going to get ahead of us. They’re all gearing up to go after the Endless Frontier money. It’s that simple.”
According to Tracy, Adventa has partnered with the University of Wisconsin to research the effects of breast milk in adults.
Interview with Howard Schweber, a professor of constitutional law and free speech at UW-Madison.
During the 2020-21 academic year, 14 Wisconsin third through fifth grade teachers took part in the Shipwrecks! Game Design Fellowship with PBS Wisconsin Education and Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout the winter, these educators met with teachers, game designers, researchers and maritime archaeologists to co-design a video game that investigates shipwrecks in the Great Lakes using the practices of maritime archaeologists.
Quoted: “Management of forage fish populations should be based on data that are specific to that forage fish, and to their predators,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Associate Professor Olaf Jensen, a co-author of the study, said. “When there aren’t sufficient data to conduct a population-specific analysis, it’s reasonable to manage forage fish populations for maximum sustainable yield, as we would other fish populations under the Magnuson-Stevens Act.”
Quoted: “The classic thing is that attackers go in and lurk, sometimes for very long periods of time, and maybe exfiltrate data,” said Molly Jahn, a plant geneticist at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was undersecretary of research, education and economics at USDA in 2009 and 2010 and has done extensive research on cybersecurity. Jahn is currently on loan to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) but spoke to Agri-Pulse in her personal capacity as an expert.
This summer, UW-Madison researchers further looked at the links between certain types of crops, the growth in those types of crops and the correlation to a decline in native bees across the state and the midwest as a whole.
“Rarer [bees] that have become increasingly rare, they might not be able to thrive because we’ve eliminated those flowers that they need from the landscape,” said Jeremy Hemberger, a research entomologist at UW-Madison “by converting prairies and wetlands to agriculture and developments.”
The decline of native bees is a decades-long problem that keeps the list of endangered bees growing.
“Native bees are silently playing these really important roles, so just people becoming more aware that there’s all these other groups out there that through our actions we could be supporting, I think is a really valuable thing,” UW-Madison professor Claudio Gratton said.
Quoted: Jeff Sindelar is a meat specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. He said small and mid-size processors saw demand for their services and products expand rapidly in 2020, after coronavirus outbreaks forced large processing plants to reduce capacity or shut down.
“They were really stressed because (farmers) were needing places to go with their animals, (consumers) were interested in buying more protein, and there was also this small hoarding phenomenon that was going on for a short period of time,” Sindelar said.
Quoted: “I think it’s clear it’s a contributing factor. What we don’t know is how large,” said Noah Williams, director at the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at UW-Madison. “It is the one piece which is most amenable to policy change.”
In 2011, the computer science major at the University of Wisconsin – Madison had about 200 students. Today, it has more than 2,000. It’s now the largest major on campus, and it’s expected to keep growing.
Quoted: Christelle Guédot is an associate professor of entomology at UW-Madison. She says establishing more habitat for pollinators could help them out.
“So having more habitats for them, and more connectivity between those habitats, and not have, like, islands of habitat for pollinators, would really help in bringing those populations – not necessarily back to where they were, but improving in their abundance and diversity,” says Guédot.
Quoted: “The FCC target for these is 25mpbs, which is sufficient for most applications. However, we are far from that in most places,” UW-Madison computer science professor Paul Barford says. “And, it’s not just about up/down speeds, it’s also about where there is still zero connectivity and about the reliability of connectivity in deployed areas. Many things must be considered.”
Quoted: The state’s field crops are in fairly good condition, but are behind schedule considering the early planting accomplished by farmers this spring, said Shawn Conley, a soybean and small grains specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension.
“In southern Wisconsin and even northern Wisconsin, it was a record planting time frame this spring,” Conley said. “I had a lot of farmers in southern Wisconsin have all of their crops in by May 1. I talked to a farmer of 40 years and that’s never happened.”
Quoted: “Mind you, it’s a difficult thing to do, and to do well,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at UW-Madison.
Stephenson said farmers often make about $20 per hundredweight (cwt) for milk. By selling the cheese instead of the milk, they can get somewhere closer to $100 cwt for their milk.
“Sure, there are additional costs along the way, but potentially the income stream is bigger,” Stephenson said. “But there are a lot of ways it can go wrong.”
Quoted: Amaya Atucha is a fruit crop specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. She said the hot and dry conditions over the last few weeks have put stress on everything from strawberry plants to apple orchards.
“Plants in general use water mostly to be able to control temperature. So the warmer it gets, the more water they need to be able to cool down,” Atucha explained.
Cole Lubinski manages the UW-Extension’s Langlade Research Station, which supports the state’s potato industry. He said his area has gotten enough moisture so far this year, but farms in the Central Sands have had irrigation systems running around the clock.
“Vegetable crops, they’re considered a high-moisture crop, so it’s very crucial to keep proper soil moisture levels,” Lubinski said. “When you have weeks like last week where there was a lot of heat and you get put on electrical (peak) control, where you can’t run your system if it’s run by electric, then you’re going hours without water for your crop.”
Quoted: Kurt Paulsen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison expert on housing affordability, said little headway has been made in increasing Black homeownership, which stands at 44 percent nationally compared to 74 percent for whites.
“Nationwide, the Black homeownership rate is still not where it needs to be, and in some ways, has not significantly improved since the 1968 Fair Housing Act,” Paulsen said.
Kacie Lucchini Butcher is a public history project director at UW-Madison who researches housing inequity. Butcher emphasized the alarming implications of low Black homeownership rates, including the ability of such families to build intergenerational wealth.
“If homeownership continues in the way that it does, and if access to housing continues in the way it does, we are just going to see a continued exacerbation of wealth inequality and of poverty. One of the best ways to fix this is to get everybody housing.”
UW-Madison professor Kris Olds, an expert on urban planning and gentrification, said housing affordability remains a huge problem across Wisconsin, especially in Madison.
“One of the problems in Madison is so much of it (housing) is allocated to single family zoning districts, and it’s quite expensive to access that,” he said.
Paige Glotzer, assistant professor of history at UW-Madison and author of a book on the history of housing discrimination, said bias still permeates the housing market in sometimes inconspicuous ways.
Quoted: Joe Lauer, an agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, acknowledged that farmers are anxious about the dry weather, but said that he’s not concerned … yet.
“One of the characteristics of a record-breaking year (for corn) is a mini-drought during the months of May and June,” he said. Lauer explained that a dry spring allows farmers to plant without fighting wet fields.
If you are worried about your garden or lawn, horticulture educator Vijai Pandian from the UW-Madison Extension has some tips to mitigate drought stress on landscape and garden plants.
Quoted: “These jobs aren’t the same jobs they were a year ago, and our lives aren’t the same lives that they were a year ago,” says Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The research and policy center examines economic issues as they affect workers and employment.
Workers in the hospitality industry, already at the lower end of the wage scale, were especially hard hit.
“Those jobs make for very hard lives,” Dresser says. As the coronavirus spread, “either your venue shuts down and your work goes away, or if your work doesn’t go away, you’re exposed through your work.”
Quoted: “For our future up here, broadband is the single most important thing,” said Christopher Starks, retired from the aerospace industry and now working with University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension in the Northwoods.
Quoted: “The denominator part, or the biggest piece of that, was really that imports declined,” said Mark Stephenson Director of Dairy Policy Analysis at UW Madison.
While it’s too soon to tell now, experts believe that increase could widen because of the pandemic.
“We had restaurants and other institutional portions of sales just decline precipitously during much of 2020,” Stephenson said.
Across the state, local public health agencies are dropping their public health orders and mask mandates. The moves come as vaccination rates across the state climb, and as hospitalizations steadily decline.
But, just because public health orders have been dropped doesn’t mean we’re entirely in the clear.
For more, our producer Jonah Chester spoke with Ajay Sethi, an Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Gregory Nemet, a UW-Madison professor studying innovation in climate change, said “staying home and not moving around” are not the ways to see a continued decline in emissions. The key, he said, is in applying clean technologies and digitalizing activities.
“I don’t expect that we would get the type of reduction that we saw this past year,” Nemet said, looking into next year. “But the flexibility that’s been shown and the ability to work remotely is likely to give us some improvement in the right direction.”
Wisconsin employers couldn’t require employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, and so-called vaccine passports would be prohibited under GOP-backed bills that received a public hearing at the state Capitol Wednesday.
Another proposal would prevent the University of Wisconsin System from requiring COVID-19 vaccines or testing.
Madison’s economy used to be driven by state government and UW-Madison. But the region’s technology sector has fueled much of the growth over the last decade. Young technology workers for Epic Systems, Exact Sciences and countless start-ups like to live, eat, shop and be entertained Downtown.
In a new study, researchers from the University of Wisconsin Madison asked over 800 local residents in the Madison metropolitan area to assess their attitudes towards using autonomous vehicles in the future and found that study respondents would be interested in using a driverless car about 31 percent of the time, a significant chunk more than taking the bus. Wissam Kontar, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin Madison and lead study author, says that with growing popularity and industry investment in autonomous vehicles, that this “excitement” may be “overshadowing potential environmental impacts.”
Quoted: “Cows in cities were milked every day, and people would bring milk in carts back to their neighbourhoods to sell it,” says John Lucey, food science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“As cities got bigger, milk got further away and took longer to get to the consumer, which meant pathogens could multiply.”
Noted: A 2018 study lead by University of Wisconsin, Madison professor of pediatrics Dr. Megan Moreno found that some companies were flouting regulations on marketing, with social media posts that appeal to teens and promote therapeutic benefits.
The study noted around 1% of social media posts appeared to directly target teens, with one post explicitly showing a young person in the promotion, with several others using well-known cartoon characters, Reuters reported.
ACalifornia startup developing electric vans and trucks is partnering with UW-Madison in hopes of making electric vehicles more available while reducing the use of limited natural resources.
After a year fraught with unemployment payment delays, high rates of unemployment denials, call center headaches and other issues, a new University of Wisconsin report suggests the state should outsource at least a portion of its unemployment system.
The report by conservative UW economics professor Noah Williams detailed areas the state lagged behind most other states as the wave of unemployment claims swamped the state’s Department of Workforce Development last year.
Pioneered by researchers at UW-Madison, microgrids — which can include a combination of generators and batteries — are designed to function as self-contained systems that can seamlessly disconnect from the larger system, functioning as islands during power outages.
Last year, the Army awarded the University of Wisconsin to investigate hybrid drivetrains for tactical and combat.
The keynote speaker at next month’s Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference owes his $1 billion company, Fetch Rewards, to an idea that came to him when he was a University of Wisconsin-Madison soon-to-be sophomore learning to do his own grocery shopping.
UWM’s Sandra McLellan and MIT’s Eric Alm are among the world’s foremost experts at detecting very small organisms in very large quantities of sewage — a useful tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. But despite their similar research capabilities, Alm’s work is having a wider impact and creating more economic value and high-paying jobs.
The FFI was founded in 2013 and is part of the University of Wisconsin System’s Institute for Business & Entrepreneurship. The organization focuses on building and funding profitable businesses in the food, beverage and value-added agriculture sector through training, coaching, resources, tools and mentoring programs.
Noted: Foxconn has worked to try to create goodwill with other parts of the state by signing agreements with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and local governments in Racine, Eau Claire and Green Bay to establish “innovation centers.”
The company has signed a $100 million agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create Foxconn Institute for Research in Science and Technology within the College of Engineering.
