April 26, 2019

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Business April 26, 2019

U.S. Economy Grows 3.2% During First Quarter Of 2019

The U.S. economy started 2019 with a bang, growing at a better-than-expected rate of 3.2% in the first three months of the year.



ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The U.S. economy started 2019 with a bang. A report from the Commerce Department shows the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2% percent in the first three months of the year; that’s a full point faster than it was growing at the end of last year. And as NPR’s Scott Horsley reports, it’s an encouraging sign that while other economies around the world may be tapping the brakes, the U.S. is still humming along.

SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: The first quarter growth rate of 3.2% was better than anyone expected – well, almost anyone.

KEVIN HASSETT: Do you remember what our forecast for this year is? Three point two. And what was the first quarter?

HORSLEY: White House economist Kevin Hassett hit the bull’s-eye with his growth forecast. And while there’s no guarantee the rest of the year will see similar growth, President Trump couldn’t help gloating, as he prepared to board his helicopter outside the White House.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’re knocking it out of the park, as they say, and we’re very happy about that.

HORSLEY: Many forecasters outside the administration say first quarter growth was boosted by temporary factors, and they don’t believe the economy will continue to grow at this pace. Economist Ben Herzon of IHS Markit notes, with demand weak early in the year, many of the goods produced during the first quarter piled up in warehouses and on store shelves.

BEN HERZON: I think what’s going to happen is, after a first quarter burst in inventory building, that inventory building’s going to slow down and contribute to a slowing in overall GDP growth.

HORSLEY: White House economist Hassett agrees – sometimes a buildup in inventory is followed by a slump in production. But he’s counting on a jump in demand the rest of this year to keep factories and other producers busy.

HASSETT: So I’m not as concerned about the inventories as I normally would be.

HORSLEY: Consumer spending did start to heat up towards the end of the quarter, as shoppers set aside their winter concerns over the government shutdown and stock market gyrations. Jack Kleinhenz of the National Retail Federation says consumers do have the money to spend more, thanks to a healthy job market.

JACK KLEINHENZ: Every new job, we get new income into the economy, and that creates more spending.

HORSLEY: Wage gains have been solid, if not spectacular, and some of the biggest raises have gone to those at the bottom of the income ladder, who are especially likely to spend the extra cash. Fears of an all-out trade war also eased during the first quarter. Chief economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics says most observers are now counting on the president to strike a deal with China and avoid a costly escalation of tariffs.

MARK ZANDI: If he fails to follow through on that, I think there’s going to be a lot disappointment around the globe, stock markets will fall, and the year is going to turn out to be much less positive than anyone would expect at this point.

HORSLEY: Trade talks with China resume in Beijing next week. White House economist Hassett says the two sides are making progress towards an agreement.

HASSETT: Last time I used a wedding analogy – I said we’re at the point where we don’t want the groom to see the bride. But now I think we’re past that point. I think now we’re at the point where we don’t want Dustin Hoffman to show up at the wedding (laughter).

HORSLEY: Just like that scene from the classic movie, “The Graduate,” the course of the economy can offer unexpected twists. But for the first three months at least, 2019 got off to a good start. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF SIMON AND GARFUNKEL’S “MRS ROBINSON”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Sports April 26, 2019

Tyreek Hill Barred From Kansas City Chiefs After Audio Alleging Child Abuse Surfaces

The Kansas City Chiefs have barred Tyreek Hill from the team. This follows a recording of the wide receiver’s fiancée accusing him of abusing their young child.



ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

A star NFL player has been barred from his team over suspicion that he abused his 3-year-old son. The Kansas City Chiefs say wide receiver Tyreek Hill cannot take part in any team activities, including offseason workouts. On a newly released audiotape, two people said to be Hill and his fiancee discuss a police investigation into the child’s broken arm. On the tape, Hill’s fiancee accuses Hill of causing the injury.

Joining us now is NPR’s Tom Goldman. Hi, Tom.

TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.

SHAPIRO: Catch us up on the background to this story. I understand prosecutors initially said they would not file any charges in this potential case of child abuse.

GOLDMAN: That’s right. The DA said he thinks a crime was committed against the child, just couldn’t prove who did it. So on Wednesday of this week, there were no charges filed against Hill or his fiancee, who I should add is also now pregnant with twins.

SHAPIRO: And now there is this audiotape. Describe where it came from and what’s in it.

GOLDMAN: Yeah. It emerged the day after the prosecutor made his announcement about no charges. It was first played on a local TV station in Kansas City Casey, KCTV. And it was described as a tape made in March while Hill and his fiancee, Crystal Espinal, were walking through the Dubai International Airport. Now, we haven’t independently verified that it’s actually Hill and Espinal, but the tape is out there; nobody has denied its authenticity. In fact, the Chiefs, Hill’s team, say they are deeply disturbed by what’s on it.

The whole tape is about 11 minutes long. We have a couple of short excerpts. On this first one, Espinal appears to accuse Hill of breaking their son’s arm. Hill speaks first, and the child’s name, I should say, is bleeped out on the tape.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TYREEK HILL: I didn’t do nothing.

CRYSTAL ESPINAL: Then why does (beep) say, Daddy did it? Why? Why does (beep) say, Daddy did it?

HILL: I don’t know. He says Daddy does a lot of things.

ESPINAL: Like what?

HILL: A lot of things.

ESPINAL: A 3-year-old’s not going to lie about what happened to his arm.

GOLDMAN: Now, Ari, in this next clip, Hill appears to threaten Espinal. Here it is.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ESPINAL: He is terrified of you. And you say that he respects you, but it’s not respect.

HILL: He respects me.

ESPINAL: It’s terrify – he is terrified.

HILL: No, you [expletive]. You need to be terrified of me, too.

SHAPIRO: Wow. So Tom, what have prosecutors said about this tape?

GOLDMAN: We haven’t heard anything publicly from the prosecutors, but there are a number of reports out today, Ari, that the DA has reopened the case in light of this new audiotape.

SHAPIRO: And what about Tyreek Hill? Has he issued a statement?

GOLDMAN: He has. He released a statement saying in part, quote, “I love and support my family above anything. My son’s health and happiness is my No. 1 priority.” I contacted his lawyers today. They declined to comment because of what they called confidentiality laws. They have said, though, that Hill maintains his innocence and that he has cooperated with law enforcement.

SHAPIRO: Tom, this painful and upsetting story is unfolding in the middle of one of the NFL’s biggest offseason events, the NFL draft. So what’s the impact?

GOLDMAN: Yeah, that’s right. Well, the draft goes on of course. But this is the kind of publicity the league obviously hates, especially, as you point out, in the middle of this crown jewel moment that the NFL always loves as a way to, you know, keep sports fans consumed by the NFL even when there’s no football being played – so bad PR again for a league, you know, that seems to often deal with controversy.

SHAPIRO: And also for the Chiefs, which has dealt with this problem in the past.

GOLDMAN: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Chiefs are one of the best teams in the NFL. They almost got to the Super Bowl last season. But controversy has been following them even before this week. Kansas City star running back Kareem Hunt – he led the league in rushing yards his rookie season in 2017. Last year, he was videotaped shoving and kicking a woman, and he was released by the team just a few months ago. Also, the Chiefs just traded for a top defensive lineman, Frank Clark. He was arrested on a domestic violence charge in 2014, kicked off The University of Michigan football team. And let’s not forget, Ari, that Kansas City drafted Tyreek Hill in 2016 knowing that he had pleaded guilty to a charge of domestic violence against his then-girlfriend, who is now his fiancee.

SHAPIRO: That’s NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman. Thanks, Tom.

GOLDMAN: You’re welcome, Ari.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Health April 26, 2019

Does Taking Time For Compassion Make Doctors Better At Their Jobs?

Studies show that when doctors practice compassion, patients fare better, and doctors experience less burnout.

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For most of his career, Dr. Stephen Trzeciak was not a big believer in the “touchy-feely” side of medicine. As a specialist in intensive care and chief of medicine at Cooper University Health Care in Camden, N.J., Trzeciak felt most at home in the hard sciences.

Then his new boss, Dr. Anthony Mazzarelli, came to him with a problem: Recent studies had shown an epidemic of burnout among health care providers. As co-president of Cooper, Mazzarelli was in charge of a major medical system and needed to find ways to improve patient care.

He had a mission for Trzeciak — he wanted him to find answers to this question: Can treating patients with medicine and compassion make a measurable difference on the wellbeing of both patients and doctors?

Trzeciak wasn’t convinced. Sure, compassion is good, Trzeciak thought, but he expected to review the existing science and report back the bad news that caring has no quantitative rationale. But Mazzarelli was his colleague and chief, so he dove in.

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After considering more than 1,000 scientific abstracts and 250 research papers, Trzeciak and Mazzarelli were surprised to find that the answer was, resoundingly, yes. When health care providers take the time to make human connections that help end suffering, patient outcomes improve and medical costs decrease. Among other benefits, compassion reduces pain, improves healing, lowers blood pressure and helps alleviate depression and anxiety.

In their new book, Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, Trzeciak and Mazzarelli lay out research showing the benefits of compassion, and how it can be learned. One study they cite shows that when patients received a message of empathy, kindness and support that lasted just 40 seconds their anxiety was measurably reduced.

But compassion doesn’t just benefit its recipients, Trzeciak and Mazzarelli learned. Researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that when people spent time doing good for others (by writing an encouraging note to a gravely ill child), it actually changed their perception of time to make them feel they had more of it.

For doctors, this point is crucial. Fifty-six percent say they don’t have time to be empathetic.

“The evidence shows that when you invest time in other people, you actually feel that you have more time, or that you’re not so much in a hurry,” Trzeciak says. “So when 56 percent say they don’t have time in that survey, it’s probably all in their heads.”

The good news is, the same study that found doctors didn’t have time for empathy, also showed that a short training in the neuroscience of empathy made doctors interact with patients in ways patients rated as more empathetic.

Compassion also seems to prevent doctor burnout — a condition that affects almost half of U.S. physicians. Medical schools often warn students not to get too close to patients, because too much exposure to human suffering is likely to lead to exhaustion, Trzeciak says. But the opposite appears to be true: Evidence shows that connecting with patients makes physicians happier and more fulfilled.

“We’ve always heard that burnout crushes compassion. It’s probably more likely that those people with low compassion, those are the ones that are predisposed to burnout,” Trzeciak said. “That human connection — and specifically a compassionate connection — can actually build resilience and resistance to burnout.”

Trzeciak and Mazzarelli hope their evidenced-based arguments will spur medical schools to make compassion part of the curriculum.

For those outside the health care system, acting with compassion can be a kind of therapy as well, the authors say. They cite the phenomenon of the “helper’s high,” the good feeling that comes from helping others, and explain how giving to others benefits the givers’ brains and nervous systems.

“I can say this with confidence,” Trzeciak says. “Other-focused behavior is beneficial to your own mental health.”

For Trzeciak, the research had a personal effect. When he started into the project, he’d been

going through his own existential crisis, triggered by his son’s middle school homework assignment that asked, “What is the most pressing problem of our time?” While he believed his work to that point was meaningful, it was definitely not the most pressing problem of our time.

Along the way, he says, he realized he was feeling burned out after 20 years of practicing medicine. So, armed with data from his book research, he decided to test his own hypothesis.

“The recommended prescription is what I call ‘escapism’ — get away, detach, pull back, go on some nature hikes or whatever but I was not believing it,” Trzeciak explains in a TEDxPenn talk.

Instead, he says, he applied the techniques he’d been studying, including spending at least 40 seconds expressing compassion to patients. “I connected more, not less; cared more, not less; leaned in rather than pulled back. And that was when the fog of burnout began to lift.”

He prescribes the same for anyone, not just health care providers, suffering from mental or emotional exhaustion.

“Look around you and see those in need of compassion and give your 40 seconds of compassion,” he says. “See how it transforms your experience.”

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