Thursday morning news drop
The Great Resignation is also the Great Retirement of the Baby Boomers. That’s a Problem. Employers are dependent on the outsize baby boomer cohort, whose exit is contributing to growing shortages of workers everywhere, from nursing to school bus drivers to the service industry. It’s not just 22-year-old baristas who have had it with working conditions. Those understaffed stores? Retailers became increasingly reliant on older workers in the wake of the Great Recession. Many are now making an exit. (Washington Post)
4 Bed, 3 Bath, No Garage Door: The Unlikely Woes Holding Up Home Building Supply-chain complications are giving the industry and buyers fits. (New York Times)
Is There a Way Out of America’s Impossible Housing Mess? The first step, according to economist Jenny Schuetz, is recognizing there is more than one housing crisis. (Slate)
Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Everything, has big plans for Canada’s economic future In an alternate universe, you would know Chrystia Freeland only as a writer and journalist, as an eminent authority on Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs who feed off him, perhaps eventually as the editor-in-chief of this newspaper or the Financial Times. You would see her on talk shows, on the lecture circuit, publishing another award-winning book examining the ways of wealth and power. That was the train she was on in 2013, when she decided to jump the track and enter national politics. Since being elected in 2015, she’s become known as Justin Trudeau’s Everything Minister (Globe and Mail)
As food prices soar, communities find innovative ways to feed more people Experts stress charity not a long-term solution to food insecurity in Canadian households (CBC)
COVID-19 Isn’t Going Anywhere — And Americans Know It Most Americans believe COVID-19 will persist into the near (or distant) future, but what that means to people’s daily lives is the subject of much more dissent. That’s because understanding COVID-19 as an ongoing reality means something different to everyone. (FiveThirtyEight)
COVID Won’t End Up Like the Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, from either tobacco or the pandemic, could be prevented with a single behavioral change. (The Atlantic)
Francis Ford Coppola’s $100 Million Bet Fifty years after he gave us The Godfather, the iconic director is chasing his grandest project yet—and putting up over $100 million of his own money to prove his best work is still ahead of him. (GQ)