Today, Explained - Good news

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

2021 was better than 2020. Here's proof. Today’s show was produced by Matt Collette, edited by Jillian Weinberger, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. The year is coming to an end. We're looking back, taking stock. And one thing's clear. 2021, not as bad as 2020.

Good things happened. We covered lots of positive developments on the show, from alien-feeling bipartisanship in the United States to people reclaiming political power in Chile to a vaccine for malaria that could save tens of thousands of lives a year. But there are things we missed too, and some things we wanted to review. So today on the show, it's just wall to wall good news from 2021. Deal with it. Hey, Sean, this is Dylan. Dylan Matthews, write about poverty at Vox.com.

Hi, my name is Lizo. I cover Congress and social programs for Vox. I think probably the best thing that's happened on my beat over the past year, besides, you know, the COVID vaccinations and people being protected, has been the huge drop in poverty, especially for kids. As the name suggests, the child tax credit is something that families who have kids are able to receive, which reduces their tax liability and enables them to keep more of that money. In plain English, it means instead of families

who need help the most getting the least, the hardworking families, hardworking families will get this on a full monthly basis. Congress this year made a couple big changes to the tax credit. First, they made it a lot bigger. Secondly, they made it so that people could receive it in monthly installments instead of just as a lump sum. And third, they increased the accessibility of the credit for lower-income households who previously may not have qualified. Already, we're seeing the effects of this change. In the first month after payments went out, child poverty went down 25%, which means 3 million children were lifted out of poverty. And experts estimate that if this policy is able to go on for longer, the impact could be even more significant, cutting child poverty by 40%.

We have official numbers for 2020, actually. And you would expect in a year when unemployment shot up to 14% and there was this giant recession and a massive public health crisis, that poverty would go up and human deprivation would go up. And literally the opposite has happened. If you look at a chart of poverty measured accurately, including government programs, it was the biggest year-to-year drop in poverty ever. According to the census's supplemental poverty measure, it went down by about 20% the poverty rate. That's just a huge, huge drop year over year, and it's nothing we've ever seen before. So we've just done a remarkable job of taking care of Americans and especially

children and preventing them from falling into poverty. I don't know if that'll keep going, but it's one of the big pieces of good news over the past year for me. I am Jen Kirby, a foreign and national security reporter with Vox. 2021 was a pretty bad year for the world. We're obviously still in the middle of a pandemic with a very unequal global vaccination campaign. We've seen coup d'etats in places like Sudan and Myanmar, and I could go on with bad news, but if I had to find a positive development, I would suggest the efforts of more than 130 countries to agree to a global minimum tax rate of 15% on certain very large multinational corporations. Today, after years of discussion, G7 finance ministers have reached a historic agreement

to reform the global tax system, to make it fit for the global digital age, but crucially to make sure that it's fair. The goal of this minimum tax rate is to really prevent these major companies from moving operations or finding tax havens where they can pay a lot less and to help countries, you know, recoup some of those profits. And whether it's people operating in tax havens or it's digital companies, we're going to level the playing field and inject that principle of fairness into our global tax system. That's the prize. A lot of critics say that there are going to be loopholes and it may not work out very well because there will be difficulties to

implementation worldwide. But I think that in this time when we've seen, you know, countries kind of turn inward in the pandemic and struggled to work together on global efforts on vaccination, for example, the idea that the G20 countries signed off on and a bunch of other countries agreed to these plans shows that there are still possibilities for diplomacy and multinational, multilateral efforts. And of course, again, there is going to be challenges to really making this work in real time, but it is an effort to, at least on paper, make the global economy a little bit more just. And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has estimated it could raise about $150 billion annually, which, you know,

many countries may need as they recover from the pandemic. So, you know, the best case scenarios, we'll start to see these changes in being implemented next year in 2022 to go into effect into 2023. That may be overly optimistic, but why not have a little faith for once? And the governor of Puerto Rico, Pedro P. Luisi, joins us now. Governor, thank you so much for being here. You've praised your island's efforts. You all have a high vaccination rate. I'm Nicole Nerea, and I'm a reporter for Vox. Puerto Rico has become a real pandemic success story. As of December 5th, the island had fully vaccinated almost 75% of its population. That's more than any other U.S. state or territory. And Puerto Ricans have been less

than half as likely to die of the virus than the U.S. population overall. Well, we're acting with a sense of urgency. We have the Department of Health fully engaged. We have the National Guard as well supporting our health department. And we're doing what we have to do. That might come as a surprise given the kind of public health challenges that Puerto Rico is facing. The island is still recovering from Hurricane Maria, which hit in 2017. 72 of the island's 78 municipalities are considered medically underserved. And nearly half of Puerto Ricans are on Medicaid. So why has Puerto Rico been so successful? It's a combination of politics and earning community trust, and it could provide a blueprint for responding to future public

health crises on the mainland. NGOs and community groups were some of the first responders during Hurricane Maria and two major earthquakes that hit the island in late 2019. In the government's absence, they set up emergency centers and provided basic supplies and services, establishing the community relationships and infrastructure necessary to mobilize when the pandemic hit. They developed an expertise in responding to public health crises, and Puerto Ricans learned to trust them with their health. When it came time for vaccination, 85% of Puerto Ricans wanted the jab. And the collective efforts of the local public health department, the National Guard, and NGOs made it really easy to get,

even for people in medically underserved areas. And while Republicans on the mainland have flirted with anti-vaxxers, politicians across the spectrum in Puerto Rico did not tolerate vaccine disinformation and let scientists lead the response. It also helps that the four major parties that were in power in 2020 and into 2021 all support vaccines. So there isn't the same partisan divide on, you know, don't get the vaccine, be wary and do definitely get it. It's, you know, there's more of a middle ground there. Puerto Rico's governor has implemented some of the widest vaccine mandates in the country for students, for public sector employees, and for many private businesses

without the kind of pushback that we're seeing on the mainland. It's a testament to the island's efforts to unify around the vaccine as a means of protecting everyone. While it may be too late to turn the clock back on the kind of political polarization we've seen in the U.S. on vaccines, it should be a lesson to the 50 states that building community trust is the first step in responding to a public health crisis, and it's not something that can be established overnight. This pandemic is hitting us all in the states and in Puerto Rico, and we're an island. So

we have to be very careful in dealing with it, and that's what we're doing. Even more good news in a minute on Today Explained. of their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself.

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Hey, I'm Anna North. I'm a senior correspondent at Vox. This was a year when workers started to take back at least some power from their employers. It's a sign of the times. Employees at this Nebraska Burger King telling customers, we all quit. After a frightening and dangerous year in 2020, when frontline workers faced unprecedented risks and many others were laid off or furloughed. A record of nearly 4 million people quit their jobs in April 2021.

And quit rates kept smashing records all year long. Job openings are at a record high and wages increased again last month as companies tried to attract new employees. More than 25 million people quit their jobs in the first seven months of this year. And it is now being called the Great Resignation. The so-called Great Resignation has led to a lot of jobs going unfilled. The demand for workers has led to the best market for job seekers in recent memory, with employers offering signing bonuses and higher wages to try to coax people back to work.

I think we kind of live in a time now where companies have to really think about, how do I rehire this employee every day and make them excited about their work because there's really more choice than ever and it's easier to change roles than ever. There's no guarantee that this moment will last, and some economists are worried that it's just a temporary response to the pandemic. They fear that without reforms like a higher minimum wage and protections for unions will eventually go back to the bad old days when bosses had all the power. But at least for right now, it feels like working people finally have some choices. is high take a look it's in a book a reading rainbow my name is benji jones and i'm an

environmental reporter at vox where i spend most of my time writing about biodiversity along those lines one good thing that happened in 2021 was that monarch butterflies in the western made a modest recovery. These are, of course, the iconic black and orange insects, and I'm talking specifically about the ones that live west of the Rocky Mountains. They migrate each year to coastal California for the winter, where they clump together in trees, and it's a pretty amazing sight. Last year, the annual count there turned up only about 1,900 butterflies, whereas this year there are over 100,000 already, and it could go up from there. This is especially neat because butterflies are this kind of barometer for what's going on elsewhere in the country. They migrate across

long distances and are sensitive to things like habitat loss and climate change and so forth, which means basically that lots of monarchs tend to be a good sign for the health of the planet. Plus, they're just super beautiful and fun to see. But you don't have to take my word for it. Something else good that happened in 2021 is that a bunch of very powerful people saw the value in biodiversity. What do I mean by that? Well, for one, President Joe Biden has put a lot of attention on protecting nature in his agenda, more than other presidents in the past. For example, in the spring, he launched an initiative called America the Beautiful to conserve at least 30% of all land and water by 2030. It's a goal

also known as 30 by 30, and dozens of other countries have made similar commitments. For reference, at the start of 2021, about 12% of American land was within national parks, wildlife refuges, and other formal protected areas. So 30% is a pretty big step up. The truth is national monuments and parks are part of the identity of our BDNA as a people. There are more than natural wonders. They're the birthright we pass from generation to generation, the birthright of every American. Preserving them is the fulfillment of a promise to our children. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, also known as the billionaire behind Amazon, pledged $2 billion allocated directly to restoring nature and transforming food systems.

And more than 100 world leaders agreed to halt or reverse deforestation by the end of the decade. Those promises are backed by $19 billion in public and private funds. This is a big deal because in the past, biodiversity has been sort of in the shadow of climate change when it came to ranking priorities. And now it seems like they're sort of side by side. So essentially, biodiversity has really entered these high levels of decision making. This all matters, of course, because nature is what sustains us. It provides us with water and food and so on. And saving biodiversity comes with benefits for slowing climate change.

One example is that forests rich in trees store lots of carbon. So yeah, I would call that pretty good news. It's Britney, bitch. My name's Constance Grady and I cover culture and celebrities for Vox. So I have been following a lot of news about

the Free Britney movement. And I was very excited when Britney actually got freed. Britney's freedom was announced on Friday, November 12th. So just moments ago, the fans out here, the supporters of the Free Britney movement reacted to the news that both conservatorships, the personal were in the courtroom because they were not broadcasting anything, any of the court proceedings out to the public. And eventually this lawyer, who is a big Britney fan and has followed the case pretty religiously, just tweeted in all caps, BRITNEY FREE!

And I immediately sent it to my editor with a million exclamation points. And that is when I found out she was out. So one good thing that happened this year is Britney Spears' freedom. on my own I don't need nobody better off alone Here I go on my own now I don't need nobody not anybody

Constance Grady Benji Jones Anna North Nicole Nerea Jen Kirby Lee Zoe Dylan Matthews You can read all their good work

at Vox.com Our episode today was produced by Matthew Collette edited by Jillian Weinberger engineered by Afimim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Will Reed. This is Today Explained. It's nothing but my way My loneliness ain't killing me no more I ain't, I ain't Your girl