Neoliberal Capitalism- A ( very) short history

 Definition.  Neoliberal Capitalism 

 

In addition to an economic policy, neoliberalism is also a political project.

 

Important components of neoliberalism are the consideration of the market as a pre eminent process of decision making. Markets are privileged and regulations or rules on trade and commerce are opposed.  Advocates of neoliberalism promote cutting public expenditures such as schooling and health care and social services. The promote deregulation of markets such as eliminating the Glass- Steagall’s limits on banking and deregulation of any practice that produces profits for some. 

 

In many places they promote privatization of state owned enterprises through private investment, including energy companies, utilities, and similar companies.  

 

1.    The Rule of the Market which liberates “free” enterprise from any bonds (regulations) imposed by the government no matter how much social damage this causes. 

2.    Cutting Public Expenditures for social services such as education and health care.

3.    Deregulation of any policies, practices or laws that could diminish profits, including environmental protection and worker safety. 

4.    Privatization of state owned enterprises, goods, and services through sales to private investors

5.    Eliminating the Concept of “The Public Good” or “Community” and replacing it with “individual responsibility.” (Martinez & Garcia, 2000) 

6.    Assaults on labor unions. 

 

Based upon Gorlewski & Gorlewski, 2012

 

*The adoption of neo liberal policies by main stream Democrats helps to explain the anger of a portion of the White working class and their abandonment of the Democratic Party. 

 

Recent history of  neoliberal capitalism. 

 

How neoliberal capitalism worked.

 

·       Prior to the 1970’s 

A. Following the Great Depression, American workers enjoyed a social contract with a strong central government guided by Keynesian economic policy and an expanding industrial base with a global reach. By the 1950s, manufacturing was almost 30% of GDP. Industrial communities were stable and vibrant.

 

·       B. The private sector—with government support—oversaw the development of our industrial base, making the decisions on what sectors to develop and retain, the products to produce, the use of technologies, and the terms of engaging the labor market.

 

·       C. The labor movement and the government provided a more equitable distribution of wealth as well as good working conditions. The underlying assumption of that era was that the drive for profit and the private accumulation of wealth would be a tide that would lift enough boats to sustain political and economic stability as well as ensure global dominance.

1947- 1979

 

Neoliberal capitalism 2. 

  1980 – Present 

 

·       A. With the emergence of new information technologies, opportunities to generate high rates of profit in the short term dramatically expanded. Capital maximized profits by globalizing production. 

·        

·       B. Powerful sections of the financial community along with owners and managers of the manufacturing sector unilaterally violated the social contract. They abandoned their home communities and their stewardship of the productive sector that had been the bedrock of our society. This resulted in the closing of thousands of companies and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs.

 

C. The neoliberal strategy included blaming labor and demanding concessions in wages, benefits, and working conditions. Government complicity in the destruction of our industrial base was framed by President Reagan as “government [needs] to get out of the way of the private sector.”

 

D. Extreme growing inequality as shown in graphs and the videos.

 

 

 

Biden Vaccine Roll Out

 

David Dayen, American Prospect

Back when this newsletter was called Unsanitized, I spent the first edition of 2021 lamenting the vaccine rollout, which at the time was plagued by a lack of presidential leadership, delayed funds to states, an over-reliance on hospitals busy fighting a pandemic, confusion over prioritization, and even reduced staff during the Christmas holiday. As of January 3, three weeks into the rollout, only 4.33 million doses had been distributed.  But in the past month, I have been far less concerned with the rollout, which has been among the best in the world. In the 49 days since January 3, the U.S. has delivered 58.8 million shots, with the seven-day average really moving in a straight line upward until Valentine’s Day, when that average topped out at 1.7 million shots per day. Early on, about 30 percent of vaccines shipped had been delivered; now the number is 84 percent. Only five countries on Earth have delivered a first dose to a higher percentage of the population than the U.S. (Israel, the Seychelles, the UAE, Bahrain, and the UK), and only one of them has a significant population. Only the icy weather in much of the country stopped the momentum, due to a combination of people socked in their houses and unwilling to go get the vaccine, and a delay in shipping roughly 6 million doses. Those shipments should be made up this week, and we will get a test as to how much capacity has been built when states are more flush with vaccine supply, since they’ll have leftovers from last week and the current week’s shipment.

Even with the logistical hazards, the U.S. got 1.3 million shots out per day over the past week, about at the level of early February, and well above the original 1 million shots per day target of the Biden administration. The delays are unfortunate, and given the increasing variants could leave the country vulnerable to higher transmission and more mutations. But if it’s just a one-week blip caused by a nightmare in Texas and difficulties with shipping, and we get back on track this week, that danger could be muted. Moreover, the bumper crop of supply this week (because of the make-up shipments from last week) could be a preview of the near future. Right now the U.S. is shipping about 10-15 million doses per week. That should increase to 20 million per week in March, 25 million in April, and 30 million by June. If distribution ramps up similarly, you could see 4.5 million shots delivered daily by summer. The one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine will get a vote this Friday from the FDA’s advisory committee, and although that could be a complex analysis given the variants, I’d expect approval and immediate shipping by the weekend. While initial shipments will be small, they add to the Moderna and Pfizer rollouts, and of course as a one-shot vaccine, each one is worth two of the others.  There’s some evidence for the idea that the Pfizer vaccine generates a strong response with just one dose, perhaps as good as J&J. The evidence is overwhelming that people who have contracted the virus only need one dose. I’d expect Pfizer to ask for changes on both, which would again stretch supply to a greater population. (Pfizer is already seeking permission to store the vaccine in normal refrigerators, after testing showed it can survive under those conditions for up to two weeks. This would allow the Pfizer vaccine to be shipped to areas without the capacity for ultra-cold storage.)

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If you add this up, the U.S. is very well positioned to get the virus under control by early summer. The public even expects this now. The winter of our discontent could be made glorious summer. But there are a couple barriers still to cross. First, we’re approaching a time where the binding constraint will be public willingness to take the vaccine. Without any public education campaign, a little more than half of the population will take it. But that’s just it, there’s been no public education campaign, explaining that the vaccines are safe and incredibly effective. They all stop hospitalization and they all stop death.  It’s incredible that the Biden administration is leaving this to a media given to hype negative stories to explain this to the public. A handful of public service announcements have rolled out, including an effective one from Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell. But private trade groups or particular executive branch agencies (like the military) have led the way. There’s been no real broadcast message from the White House, on a daily basis, hammering home that these vaccines are vital and should be taken. There’s no need for a public education vacuum. The second barrier is getting a global rollout on par with the U.S. This is in our public health interest, because more virus circulating increases the potential for more mutations, including some that cannot be defeated through vaccination. To get the world inoculated, we have to produce more vaccine and we had to have done it months ago. The Biden administration pledged $4 billion to COVAX, the global campaign to vaccinate the world, but that’s not likely to go far.

 

Inequallry explained in under a minute

Note; 2014. 

Week 3. Related readings

Week 3.

Related readings

 

Max Sawicky

https://cepr.net/report/how-joe-bidens-budget-can-build-back-better-part-i-send-money-now/

 

 

Conspiracies. 

Can Biden Save People Like My Pal Mike?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/opinion/sunday/working-class-dignity.html

 

 

Supplemental reading ( if you want to know more about conspiracy theories)

 Gates:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcwPzbX9wLw

 

Alex Jones . United States of Conspiracy.  Intro. Then, go on to 37 min.

 

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-conspiracy/

 

On Netflicks.

  See: Social Dilemma

Great video. Long.

 Includes surveillance capitalism.  Zugboff.  Harvard)

  

Opening Schools During a Pandemic

 Re: Opening schools

David Dayen, The American Prospect  Feb.15, 2021

Last Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally released a long-awaited set of guidelines for how to safely reopen schools. It really says what the data has said for a while: schools are generally safe when community transmission is low, less safe when transmission is high, and only really safe when following mitigation guidelines, which include masking, social distancing, frequent hand washing and things like not coughing out loud without covering your mouth, sanitation, ventilation, quarantine and isolation for the sick, and contact tracing. Many observers have put the lack of school reopening on teachers and particularly teachers unions, but the polling shows a different story, which plays directly into the above paragraph. If you ask parents whether they want to return their kids to in-person instruction, you see a significant disparity cut by race and class. In general terms, whiter, richer parents are more likely to want to return their kids to school; poorer parents and parents of color do not. And the difference is that, for the whiter and richer parents, their communities have not been as ravaged by COVID, and their schools can actually undertake the mitigation measures.

Black and Latino communities have seen a disproportionate level of death and suffering during the pandemic. Whether community transmission is high right now or not in their area, the accumulated impact makes it feel high. (In truth, community transmission has been high pretty much everywhere in the country since late fall, and only now is coming down to a manageable level.) But just as important, these parents have been battling their school districts for a basic level of quality in the places they send their kids for many years. These schools are simply not equipped for the kinds of adaptations necessary to minimize risk from COVID. That’s where the Biden relief package comes in. It should be considered, especially by those concerned about the size or unnecessary nature of the plan, as a make-good for decades of disinvestment. It’s as much an infrastructure package as anything. There are public schools in America without soap in the bathrooms. There are public schools in America, a shocking number of them, with no working air conditioning system. Lots of schools have no on-site nurses, and janitorial staffs are often inadequate. Countless students are jammed into too-small rooms with bursting class sizes. The Philadelphia Public Schools came up with the idea to put window fans on boards and have that serve as ventilation for one of the largest and poorest school districts in the country. Students and staff are headed back in the Philly schools next week.

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By contrast, this white person’s school district in Brookline, Massachusetts, where the median household income in 2019 was $121,949, is presumably not indicative of these realities. Some of the CDC guidelines will be difficult no matter what school people find themselves in. It’s hard to get kids to physically distance or keep masks on or cough into their elbow. And the latest anger from the open-the-schools set, that six feet of distance is "impossible" in schools, is mostly a cri de coeur against regulation itself, as usual for the libertarians leading the charge. (See this dystopic potential solution to the distancing problem, rather than, you know, distancing.)  But it’s clear that some schools cannot come close to providing a safe environment, really even under normal conditions let along during COVID. They don’t have the possibility for distancing, the ventilation, the medical personnel, or the sanitation measures needed. That’s why there’s $130 billion in the American Rescue Plan, which can be put toward making these necessary adjustments. It includes an "Equity Challenge Grant" intended to reverse historical inequities in schools and the impacts on students of color.

That could easily be put toward investment. How about getting an air filtration system with the highest-quality filters (a pretty low-cost option!) in every school in America? How about money for staffing nurses at every school, and ensuring a clean environment in every school? This could be an opportunity, not just to reopen, but to level the playing field in the built environment of our public school system. There’s a concern that states and cities will take the new money and drop out their share of funding for these schools, leaving them in worse position once the one-time funds are exhausted. Congress could work to try to prevent that, and should. Jared Bernstein, now on Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, championed an infrastructure program during the last recession called FAST, or Fix America’s Schools Today. He reasoned that upgrading the nation’s schools would create lots of construction jobs while improving learning long-term. A $50 billion program would produce about half a million dollars per school building in the U.S., with a focus on weatherization, better air quality, mold and asbestos abatement, plumbing updates, boiler and window replacement, and outdoor learning improvements. The American Rescue Plan can be a version of FAST, with effects not only for the pandemic but the future. And this is an area where we ought to be investing anyway. The concerns from the Larry Summerses of the world that we’re just "throwing away" temporary emergency spending (we’re not) are unfounded, because school upgrades are among the most necessary infrastructure spending options we can take. It’s long overdue.

 

 

Seminar Day 2 Biden is the Big Spender American Wants

Biden is the Big Spender America Wants.

The state of U.S. politics is horrifying.

Paul Krugman, Feb.12, 2021. New York Times.

A sustained campaign of lies on right-wing media — echoed by nearly half of the Republican senators — has convinced almost two-thirds of Republicans that the presidential election was somehow stolen. These lies set the stage for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol; but a great majority of Republican senators appear set to acquit Donald Trump for his undeniable role in promoting that attack.

Yet President Biden’s plans to rescue the economy command overwhelming, bipartisan support.

My sense is that the remarkably strong public consensus in favor of Bidenomics has largely flown under the radar. To be sure, I’m not saying that the surprising unity among voters (but not politicians) on economic policy compensates for the terrifying fact that one of our two major parties no longer accepts the legitimacy of elections it loses. But it’s still important for America’s future.

You might have thought that Democratic plans for a big rescue package, probably close to the $1.9 trillion the Biden administration has proposed, would lead to a Tea Party-style backlash. But a recent CBS News poll found that 79 percent of those surveyed either believe that the package is the right size or think that it’s too small. There are, of course, partisan differences, but even among Republicans, 61 percent support a plan as big as or bigger than the one in the works.

This broad public support for Biden’s signature economic policy is stunning given the depth of our political divisions. It’s also very different from what we saw in the early months of the Obama administration, during the Great Recession.

Biden has somewhat lower overall approval and much higher disapproval ratings than Barack Obama did at this point in his presidency. But Obama’s personal popularity didn’t translate into strong support for his stimulus plan, which only a narrow majoritysupported. Why is this time different? I’d suggest three reasons.

First, the Obama plan was sold as stimulus: deficit spending to boost overall demand. This was the right thing to do, but the Keynesian economic theory that supports deficit spending during recessions has always been hard for many people to grasp. When John Boehner, the House Republican leader, complained that “American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt,” he was peddling junk economics, but it resonated with many voters.

And at some level I think voters get that, and they support aid to those hurt by the pandemic.

Second, the Obama stimulus was conflated in many people’s minds with other policies, such as Wall Street bailouts, that were deeply unpopular. In particular, the Tea Party movement was not, despite many claims from commentators, mainly a protest against budget deficits. It began with outrage over the idea that “losers” might receive debt relief.

There isn’t anything comparable this time. Most Americans seem to realize that people who lost their jobs because of Covid-19 aren’t suffering for their own fecklessness.

Finally, Republican politicians have lost all credibility on fiscal matters. In 2009 many people believed them when they pretended to care about budget deficits. Since then, both the failure of the often-predicted fiscal crisis to materialize and the way the G.O.P. rammed through a huge, unfunded tax cut under Trump have made it hard to take such posturing seriously.

In fact, the only coherent objections to the Biden plan seem to be coming from some center-left economists who worry that it will lead to economic overheating. Many, perhaps most other economists, myself included, disagree, and the plan is likely to pass more or less as proposed. But it’s striking that G.O.P. politicians are barely even trying to challenge Democratic plans on the merits.

This intellectual vacuum won’t stop Republicans in Congress from voting against the Biden plan, quite possibly unanimously. But in so doing they’ll be at odds not just with the general public but also with many of their own voters. And that may matter.

In a better world, the Republican Party’s continuing fealty to a former president who tried to overturn an election with lies and violence would produce massive voter backlash; in America 2021, not so much.

But bread-and-butter issues still move voters. Low unemployment helped Republicans do better in the 2020 elections than most analysts expected; the promise of relief checks helped Democrats win the Georgia runoffs, and with them control of the Senate. Which is, by the way, one reason it would be foolish to scale back relief spending because some economists think it’s excessive.

This means that the refusal of Republicans in Congress to back highly popular economic policies may do the party more damage than their complicity in a violent attempt to reverse election results. It isn’t fair or right; but the G.O.P.’s ideological rigidity in a time of economic crisis may matter more, politically, than its rejection of democracy and rule of law.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/biden-economic-plan.html

Have questions? 

Keynesianism Explained. 

on this blog.  by Paul Krugman,  2015. 

Attacks on Keynesians in general, and on me in particular, rely heavily on an army of straw men — on knocking down claims about what people like me have predicted or asserted that have nothing to do with what we’ve actually said. But maybe we (or at least I) have been remiss, failing to offer a simple explanation of what it’s all about. I don’t mean the models; I mean the policy implications.

So here’s an attempt at a quick summary, followed by a sampling of typical bogus claims.

I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:

1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.

2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.

3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.

4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.

Is this a complicated, convoluted doctrine? It doesn’t sound that way to me, and the implications for the world we’ve been living in since 2008 seem very clear: aggressive monetary expansion, plus fiscal stimulus as long as the zero lower bound constrains monetary policy.

But strange things happen in the minds of critics. Again and again we see the following bogus claims about what Keynesians believe:

B1: Any economic recovery, no matter how slow and how delayed, proves Keynesian economics wrong. See [2] above for why that’s illiterate.

B2: Keynesians believe that printing money solves all problems. See [3]: printing money can solve one specific problem, an economy operating far below capacity. Nobody said that it can conjure up higher productivity, or cure the common cold.

B3: Keynesians always favor deficit spending, under all conditions. See [4]: The case for fiscal stimulus is quite restrictive, requiring both a depressed economy and severe limits to monetary policy. That just happens to be the world we’ve been living in lately.

I have no illusions that saying this obvious stuff will stop the usual suspects from engaging in the usual bogosity. But maybe this will help others respond when they do.

Economics of Growth

 Here is one view of how economies recover

The Chief. David  Dayen, American Prospect

Since 2012, Japan has engaged in an economic experiment known as Abenomics. Attempting to pull the country out of a deflationary and low-growth cycle, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (he retired last fall) laid out a three-pronged attack, which included significant monetary actions (a higher inflation target, quantitative easing, negative interest rates), fiscal actions (large economic stimulus and public investment), and structural reforms (some international trade agreements, tax changes, labor law reforms).  Not all of this was truly implemented, particularly on the structural reforms side. And a doubling of the consumption tax defied the purpose of the fiscal stimulus. In the short run, however, employment surged, particularly among women. The weaker yen was good for exports. And the persistently high initial deficit had little impact on economic growth. GDP grew at a faster rate than Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s, though below Abe’s target. Equity markets and large firm profits rose while wages failed to break out of a long-running stagnation. The inflation goal never got reached, as wages stayed flat. Different analysts have different thoughts about the legacy of Abenomics. I have contradictory thoughts about it. But there’s no doubt that he tried something new and a bit radical for an industrialized country, running up significant debt and making a whole-of-government effort to bring the economy back to life.

Japan, with an aging population, has different challenges than the United States. But there is such a thing as Bidenomics, judging from his team’s early actions. And the debate over whether the American Rescue Plan is “too big” or too untargeted should look to the context of where the United States stands economically, pandemic or not.  At this moment, there are 18 million more people on continuing unemployment claims as there were a year ago. Over 11 million of themrisk losing benefits in a month. This pain has been almost entirely concentrated in the low-wage sector, and by “low-wage” I mean making under $30,000 a year. Even now, as Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said yesterday, we have an unemployment rate at around the highs of the Great Recession, masked by misclassification and statistical error. And prior Fed pronouncements indicate that the bottom quartile has unemployment rates at the Depression level of 20 percent or more. That comes on top of a situation in America where we have the highest poverty rates in the developed world, and among the most threadbare safety nets. When the pandemic hit we had to spend a lot of money because we were practically building a safety net from scratch, with few automatic stabilizers that kicked in. The Biden rescue plan attempts to continue that approach, not as “stimulus” but as basic survival for a large cohortsuffering from unemployment, housing debt, and food insecurity. We have no good data on who precisely is in this predicament, and in America the precarity is pretty deep and nobody is really safe, so you have to set the aperture wide. Then you have pandemic control, which is not only necessary in a disaster but couldn’t possibly have a higher fiscal multiplier. The economic consequences of getting back to something resembling normalcy is almost incalculable.

Biden adds to that an actual safety net, with child support policies, increased health insurance subsidies, and more. These are far from perfect but certainly in a better direction than the “settle-for-less” posture of the past. Plus, there’s a second reconciliation package we’re going to see later this year, focused mostly on infrastructure spending, and probably rebalancing the tax code to add revenue from high-income earners and corporations. This has an interesting parallel to Abe’s consumption tax, although it’s much better targeted. This is designed to add a set of good-paying jobs to the labor force to pull up wages and maximize employment. And it builds public investment, something that has been savagely cut back over the past four decades. Obama’s team boasted about producing the lowest level of discretionary spending since Eisenhower, when that was a tragedy of persistent underinvestment. There’s no question that “running hot” is not how we have dealt with recessions over the past 40 years. It’s also true that those recoveries have been ghastly. A few years ago everyone was repeating this chart from Pavlina Tchernava, showing that the gains from economic growth after recessions used to go to the bottom 90 percent of the income scale, but that has completely reversed, to the extent that in the last economic cycle, morethan 100 percent of the gains accrued to the top 10 percent. Part of what the Biden team is thinking through is how to learn from the failed recoveries of the past.

And therefore we have large deficits planned, with no concern about inflation. We have fiscal support flowing in beyond what the experts who engineered those bad recoveries say is needed to fill the “output gap.” Instead of just topping up enough to hit a statistical target, Biden’s team is buying recovery insurance in the hopes that enough of the money will leak out to support those who actually need it. This is how you get the familiar refrain of “the cost of doing too little is greater than the cost of doing too much.” It’s a popular approach as well. The Fed, in concert with the White House, plans to accommodate this with loose money policies. You have a central bank unafraid and eager to accept inflation above target for a little while. You have a policymaking apparatusfocused on full employment, unconstrained by persistently wrong arguments about how much the economy can bear. By filling bank accounts and going above the timidity of past recessions on both the fiscal and monetary side, we could actually see a recovery that’s broadly shared. So put it all together: accommodative monetary policy, expansive fiscal policy, and structural reforms, not around “competitiveness” but around restoring public investment and building a half-reasonable welfare state. It’s not Abenomics but it definitely rhymes, and it attacks similar policy targets, full employment being the biggest. This is not a new posture, it’s just a reversal of 40 years of neoliberal/conservative ideology. Biden is a throwback “run it hot” Democrat, who believes in pouring in money and public investment to shape outcomes. He might think that’s a return to the days of FDR, though it’s much more LBJ. And that’s actually the one glaring problem.

As I noted yesterday, there’s more in heaven and earth than the macro-economy. There are big supply chain issues that demand reshoring. Over-financialization of the economy ruins the chance for inclusive prosperity. Lack of access to capital could prevent small business formation and subsequent job growth. Bad housing policies threaten to eat up recovery funds. The changing post-pandemic workplace will strand a lot of economic activity.

 

The most important chart of 2014, explained in under a minute

The Larger Lesson of the Bungled Vaccine Rollout : The roll out mess.

The Larger Lesson of the Bungled Vaccine Rollout: Government needs to restore the competence of public systems and not wait for crises.

Why is the vaccine rollout such a god-awful mess? In most states, there is no single portal where you can register and wait your turn, and then be offered appointments as your category comes up and vaccine supply becomes available.

Instead, most state websites direct you to locations that may or may not have vaccines, and then you have to monitor each one for a possible appointment.

You can go to the site to read the piece.  Click on the link above.

The Larger Lesson of the Bungled Vaccine Rollout:  Or, you can go to the site and listen to the piece.

Duane Campbell 

Vaccine Rollout in California

 

	By Jill Cowan

Good morning.

As virus cases and hospitalizations drop and increasing attention turns to the state’s vaccine rollout, California officials are attempting a fine balancing act between speeding up the process and ensuring that vulnerable populations aren’t shut out.

On Tuesday, Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s secretary of health and human services, said in a news conference that the two goals were not mutually exclusive.

“This notion that we have to make a choice between speed and equity — it’s a false choice,” he said. “We can do both.”

But in a state where officials have repeatedly said that equity was a top priority, and that transparency would be built into the effort, information about who’s getting vaccinated and in what order has been difficult to come by.

So far, more than 3.5 million doses of vaccine have been administered in California, Dr. Ghaly said. The rate of vaccinations statewide, he said, has been building day by day, since a surge in hospitalizations over the holidays. According to a New York Times tracker, about 7.4 percent of the state’s population has gotten at least one shot. That number is 8 percent for the nation overall.

However, the state has not released demographic statistics about who received the vaccines, so it’s unclear whether Latinos or other Californians of color who have been at disproportionate risk have been vaccinated at commensurate rates.

Dr. Ghaly suggested state officials were weighing several methods of incentivizing vaccine providers to specifically target vulnerable communities, including with payments for performance.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last week announced that the state would revamp its vaccine distribution approach after widespread criticism that the rollout had been confusing and piecemeal.

Part of that restructuring involved enlisting two of the state’s biggest health insurers, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, to help with a statewide distribution system that would prioritize equity and streamline a patchwork system.

And the state created a website and data portal that officials have said will not only notify Californians when they are eligible for a vaccine and help them make appointments, but also would help collect and share data with federal agencies or others who may be working to allocate vaccines.

[Visit the site, myturn.ca.gov, to sign up for notifications.]

On Tuesday, Dr. Ghaly declined to share details of the partnerships, but said any transitions to new systems would not disrupt existing appointments.

Experts have said that enlisting bigger, more experienced health care providers could help accelerate a vaccine rollout that has been hampered by its being implemented by already overwhelmed local public health departments.

In at least one place, though, simply having a smaller, more nimble agency in charge has made a significant difference, officials there have said.

A Look at Long Beach

Mayor Robert Garcia of Long Beach told me that the fact that the city has its own health department, separate from Los Angeles County’s, had helped make its vaccine rollout a model within the state, hailed by Mr. Newsom.

“We can move fast and make decisions quickly,” Mr. Garcia said. “It’s been very beneficial.”

The city of about 467,000 people — Los Angeles County’s second largest — was the first jurisdiction to move from vaccinating health care workers and nursing home staff and residents to inoculating grocery store workers and critical public schoolteachers and staff. Anyone 65 and older has also been eligible, as directed by the state.

And it is also set to begin vaccinating crucial workers at California State University, Long Beach.

[See how the vaccine rollout is going in California and other states.]

As of Tuesday, some 48,000 doses had been administered, according to data provided by Jennifer Rice Epstein, a city spokeswoman. The city has also been inoculating nonresidents who work in Long Beach, but if the doses had all gone to residents, that would represent more than 10 percent of the population.

That includes shots for 16,000 health care workers, almost 7,000 long-term care facility residents and staff, and 2,500 grocery store workers.

Mr. Garcia said the city’s health department was able to build on significant work bringing testing to harder-hit neighborhoods, where many lower-wage, often undocumented workers live.

“We had one of the best testing operations of anywhere in the state,” he said. “A lot of our testing sites just became vaccine sites.”

Those efforts have been coupled with a robust notification system that frequently updates users, even if they are not yet eligible for a vaccine, he said.

The city data showed that about 49 percent of the people who have been vaccinated in Long Beach are white — a reflection of most of the vaccines having gone to residents 65 and older, a population that is mostly white, Ms. Epstein wrote in an email. Roughly 21 percent were Hispanic or Latino, about 20 percent Asian and 7.6 percent Black or African-American.

The city’s population is nearly 45 percent Hispanic or Latino, and roughly 28 percent white, 12 percent Asian and 11 percent Black, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Still, it’s tough to get a sense of how this compares with other jurisdictions or the state more broadly in the absence of more detailed data. But the numbers suggest that it will be challenging to fast-track vaccinations to specific at-risk groups.

In any case, Mr. Garcia said he believed that the statewide partnerships with insurers could help streamline vaccine distribution even more, in particular the allocation of doses to providers — whether they are public health departments or clinics.

“There needs to be a change,” he said. “I’m very hopeful this new system will fix some of the issues.” NYTimes, California Report