Kruse Kronicle

Mixed-Race America

New York Times: Mixed-Race America

That map is from a new Census Bureau report about the population of mixed-race Americans, which grew 32 percent from 2000 to 2010. The population of single-race Americans, by contrast, grew 9.2 percent.

As a share of the total population, mixed-race Americans are still a tiny minority, just 2.9 percent, or about nine million people. ...

 

Additive Manufacturing: The U.S. Government's Hopes for 3D Printing

Markeplace Tech: Additive Manufacturing: The U.S. Government's Hopes for 3D Printing

Not long ago I saw what looked like a big computer printer squirting not ink onto paper but plastic, to make actual harmonicas. It's called "Additive Manufacturing." There's a snappier name for it: 3D Printing.

Til now we've tended to make objects by cutting, grinding, chiseling away at metal or wood. Now we are entering the age of  making things by adding, not subtracting. The Obama administration thinks this sort of thing creates jobs, and wants to get 3D printing to a place near you. Marketplace's tech reporter Queena Kim spent a day at University of California-Irvine. Why?

"It's sort of like a big brainstorming session," said Kim. "And there's an official from the Obama Administration here--they want to come up with a billion dollars to fund 15 centers at universities where academics and business people can get together to figure out what the future of manufacturing will look like."

To many, that future looks like 3D printing. ...

Kids’ stuff – The tricky art of the children’s sermon

United Methodist Reporter: Kids’ stuff – The tricky art of the children’s sermon

... Now, some United Methodists are asking whether children’s sermons need to go.

“A noble effort but an unfortunate strategy” is how Bishop Will Willimon (now retired) characterized the practice on his blog a few years ago, adding that he had two objections to children’s sermons: “They are not for children and are usually not sermons.”

Melanie C. Gordon, director of ministry with children for the General Board of Discipleship, isn’t high on the idea of children’s sermons either.

“Personally, I’m not a fan of them, and I’ve gotten a lot of flak for that,” she said. “I’ve seen some wonderful children’s moments, and I’ve seen some that are painful.” ...

... But children’s sermons in Sunday worship seem to have really taken off in the 1970s, as mainline churches, taking cues from Vatican II, experimented with creative models of worship. In a quick survey of materials in GBOD’s archives, Ms. Gordon couldn’t find evidence of children’s sermons in worship until the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Now, churches are rethinking children’s sermons as part of a broader consideration of what creates vital worship and vital congregations. Dr. Phillips says that many of his students want to discontinue children’s sermons at the churches they serve, because children’s sermons interrupt the flow of traditional worship or seem too old school for contemporary worship.

Ms. Gordon, too, sees churches debating over whether to continue them.

“Children’s moments fall under that umbrella of a bigger conversation, about what it means for children to be present in worship,” Ms. Gordon said. ...

... Do it right

Bottom line: For churches that do choose to offer children’s sermons, it’s important to put time, effort, preparation and prayer into getting them right.

“Never underestimate the importance of the children’s sermon,” Ms. Foster said. “What you say makes a spiritual impact on the lives of those gathered.”

And to Ms. Gordon, the test of excellence definitely applies.

“If you can’t do them well, don’t do them,” she said.

Did You Know?

As Tod Bolsinger notes, this is about the umpteenth updated version of this video but I still think it is pretty cool.

Makers unite - the revolution will be home-made

BBC: Makers unite - the revolution will be home-made

When Karl Marx predicted a revolution putting the means of production in the hands of the workers, he probably didn't imagine it to be fought by an army of DIYers.

But increasingly tinkerers and hobbyists are proving they are more than equal to the corporate world, and their efforts are challenging the traditional methods of manufacturing.

From the 15-year-old high school student who created a pancreatic cancer test using Google as a research tool, to people making money from home-made electronic devices, citizens are most definitely doing it for themselves.

The availability of cheap components, from microcontrollers such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, coupled with the plethora of crowdsourcing models to allow the sharing of everything from ideas to funding, means that production can move out of the factory and into the home.

Garage band

"Things that 10 years ago you needed to be in a big company to make are now possible from individuals," said Dale Dougherty, founding editor of Make Magazine and the Maker Faire.

Make Magazine has become the Das Kapital of the maker movement showcasing what people are making while the fair offers a real-life meeting point for what is often a very diverse community - "from embroidery to robotics" as Mr Dougherty puts it.

Started in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, the Maker Faire has now grown to 60 events around the world each year in locations as diverse as India, Tokyo and Newcastle.

There is also an independent African Maker Faire, and this is a continent where the maker movement can have real impact thinks Mr Dougherty.

"They are realising that they don't need things that a large Western company has. In the past they have got hand-me-downs from the West which are difficult for them to maintain or repair," he said.

Instead they can make their own devices, custom-made for medical, communication, farming or other needs.

Laser cutters

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, is so convinced that the maker movement will bring about the next industrial revolution, that he has written a book about it.

The parallels between the current phenomenon and the beginnings of the digital revolution are remarkable, he told the BBC ahead of the launch of his book: Makers, The New Industrial Revolution. ...

Productivity and Grace: Management and Labor at a Denver Manufacturer

Christianity Today: Productivity and Grace: Management and Labor at a Denver Manufacturer

Steve Hill and Jim Howey's leadership style is unusual in an industry known for top-down hierarchies.

There's a simple reason why manual laborers are called "blue-collar": The color blue, it turns out, hides dirt better than the white seen in office buildings. But "blue collar" defines more than work apparel, of course. It defines industry, even a way of life. And its stereotypes are often unflattering.

But a metal products manufacturer in Colorado is working to undermine those stereotypes, right on the shop floor.

Sandwiched between rail lines and a tire depot, the Blender Products factory hides in a quiet neighborhood in Denver. The nondescript warehouse looks from the outside as nondescript as most warehouses do. But the way Steve Hill and Jim Howey lead inside the building is unusual in an industry known for top-down hierarchies of management.

"The metal fabrication business is extremely cutthroat," says Hill. "Workers are given a singular task, and maximum output is demanded. They're simply a factor of production. As a general rule, they have no access to management. There is very little crossover between guys on the floor and guys in the offices."

Hill and Howey aim to subvert the us-versus-them mentality. Many days they walk the shop floor, engaging their workers as peers. Employees on the floor are treated as importantly as the managers, undermining the adversarial culture simmering in many manufacturing businesses.

"The company has tried to abide by a simple philosophy concerning our employees," Steve said. "Pay them well, provide great benefits, and invest in lives. . . . The guys in our shop . . . know that I'm a human too. I have many of the same struggles they do. Showing humanness to people is key to disarming those stereotypes."

Extraordinary moments of God's grace abound. ...

Reading this article took me back to grad school and reading about Wayne Alderson.

Can progressive economists join forces with the church? - Felix Salmon

Reuters: Can progressive economists join forces with the church? - Felix Salmon

Last week I was invited to hear Joe Stiglitz talk on “God, hope, happiness, death, suffering, values, grace, and evil” at Union Theological Seminary. With a menu like that, how could I resist?

The event was billed as an “innovative lecture series” combining, essentially, God and mammon: it was organized in large part by INET, an organization devoted to “new economic thinking” and backed — to the tune of $75 million — by George Soros and Bill Janeway. But, frankly, it was an inauspicious beginning, and although in principle I’m a big fan of making economics much more interdisciplinary, I think the idea of connecting it with theology, in particular, is not going to be easy or even particularly helpful.

One of the problems was that this was not a lecture: Stiglitz just sat and answered open-ended questions, and most of the time, when he did so, he talked about his latest book. The book is about inequality, and religious types tend to care a lot about inequality, but they tend to look at economics in very different ways. ...

... These are important questions, no doubt, and religious types do worry about them. But rather than looking for high levels of GDP or productivity growth, or worrying about the effects of international capital flows on domestic interest and exchange rates, the kind of people who hang out at places like Union Theological Seminary tend to have their eyes on a greater and much more eternal prize. Economists, especially on the left, love to quote Keynes’s dry statement that “in the long run, we’re all dead”; you can imagine how far that kind of rhetoric will get you in a church or mosque or shul. Religious leaders  don’t tend to rely very heavily, if at all, on empirical data; few of them feel the need to prove that they are right. And as a result, when Stiglitz took his passionately-argued economics a few hundred feet from the east side of Broadway to the west side, he entered a world which was much more alien to him than the conferences he attends in Shanghai or Dubai or Davos.

Stiglitz is constitutionally incapable of talking about economics without bashing right-wingers, and hilariously, even in a chapel, he decided to keep to his standard criticism that the economics spouted by Republicans was essentially “theology” rather than anything scientific or empirical. I have numerical proof that I’m right, he said; my opponents only have faith! ...

... [Cornell] West’s point is simple and powerful. Stiglitz, and most of the people at Union, look at the state of America, and especially at the degree of inequality, and want to change that. And if you look at the history of successful campaigns to effect change in America, they tend to be based overwhelmingly on the power of storytelling, often of the moral variety, rather than on the power (which is always pretty limited) of logical argument. Narratives — stories — move people in a way that Stiglitz’s econometrics never could. And the most powerful narratives are religious ones. ...

... Indeed, the left has its work cut out for it when it comes to shaping the kind of narratives that West was calling for: it hasn’t been able to frame inequality as a moral issue, while the right has been spectacularly successful in framing its pet causes as moral issues which should be taken very seriously by all citizens of faith.

Stiglitz responded to West by basically saying “yes, you’re right, we need people able to weave powerful moral narratives around these themes. But don’t look at me, I’m just going to keep on telling Republicans they’re wrong, using all the dry econometric tools at my disposal”.

And this is where I think Stiglitz has failed to learn from Occupy. He credits himself as being one of the driving forces behind the idea of the 1%, and of course he went down to Zucotti Park to address the crowd down there. But if they were listening to him, I don’t think that he was listening to them. He wasn’t hearing their deeply moral anger, not only at the 1%, but even at the whole structure of capitalism — maybe he’s too steeped in economics to be able to do that.

There was just one question from the audience at the event, from a woman who said that she loves the Bible. “It says there’s something deeply unhealthy about the pursuit of wealth,” she said, and she’s absolutely right about that. But you’re not going to find many economists who agree with that, and certainly Stiglitz didn’t. He’s happy to say that the very rich suffer from moral turpitude — but he doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion, which is that the things which make us rich also make us bad.

I’m not religious, and I spend my life in the world of intellectual argument — I’m naturally on the economists’ side of things when it comes to constructing narratives. I also don’t kid myself that there’s any nobility, be it moral or otherwise, in being poor. But I do see the power of religion when it comes to sending messages to the world. And I do see the left straggling far behind the right when it comes to harnessing that power. And, after attending this INET event, I see very little chance that they’re going to catch up.

Very interesting piece. I think he has identified well the gulf in the discussion between economics and religion. Economists are forever interacting with empirical data but think little about narrative. Many continue to operate under the illusion that economics can be completely value free and that homo economicus, human beings as rational utility calculators, is a sufficient anthropology.

Theologians are all about narrative but rely heavily on heuristics for economic thinking. Because theologians tend to be grounded in holy writings of advanced agrarian societies from 2000+ years ago, and grounded in moral reflection by people who have lived in the intervening time in similar societies until the past two centuries, their theology is deeply intertwined with heuristics of people from that era. Because they have a mission of looking after the poor and marginalized there is a strong tendency to frame things in Marxian categories of haves, have-nots, and power struggle, rather than being able to offer perspective on comparative models for organizing economy and the society. Because their livelihood is typically earned outside the context of market exchange, and precious few have ever received any economic education, economic modes of thinking are particularly foreign to most.

Finally, factor in the Western Church’s longstanding ambivalence, if not animus, toward business and finance, and factor in that for the past two hundred years economics has been an extension of the Enlightenment/Modernist project to develop an empirical value-free science of human behavior … particularly free from religious moralism … and you begin to see how daunting the conversation is.

Global Grain Production at Record High Despite Extreme Climatic Events

World Watch: Global Grain Production at Record High Despite Extreme Climatic Events

Global grain production is expected to reach a record high of 2.4 billion tons in 2012, an increase of 1 percent from 2011 levels, according to new research conducted by the Nourishing the Planet project for our Vital Signs Online service. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the production of grain for animal feed is growing the fastest—a 2.1 percent increase from 2011. Grain for direct human consumption grew 1.1 percent from 2011. ...

... Further highlights from the report:

•  
  • The FAO expects global maize production to increase 4.1 percent from 2011, reaching an estimated 916 million tons in 2012.
  • Global rice production achieved an all-time high of 480 million tons in 2011, a 2.6 percent increase from 2010.
  • World wheat production is projected to drop to 675.1 million tons in 2012, down 3.6 percent from 2011, with the largest declines in feed and biofuel utilization.
  • Since 1961, grain production has increased 269 percent and grain yield has increased 157 percent, while the grain harvest area has increased only 25 percent. This is due largely to the Green Revolution and the introduction of high-yielding grain varieties.

To purchase your own copy of State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, please click HERE.

Minutes of Work Required to Purchase 500ml of Beer

Economist

Always good to know the U. S. is first at something.

Researchers Create Batteries that can be Painted onto Virtually Any Surface

Oilprice.com: Researchers Create Batteries that can be Painted onto Virtually Any Surface

... A team at Rice University has made a battery from paint. They created a lithium ion battery which they are able to paint onto virtually any surface.

In tests they combined the battery with a small solar cell and found that the system worked as a perfect energy generating unit. In one test the batteries were even able to power light-emitting diodes that spelled out "RICE" for six hours, with a steady 2.4 volts.

Neelam Singh, the team leader, said that she can already imagine integrating paintable battery technology with paintable solar cells.

They have already filed for a patent, and are now looking to use the technology to create batteries that can be connected together like LEGO and attached to anything.

Rise of Evangelicals Changes Brazilian Fashion

ABC: Rise of Evangelicals Changes Brazilian Fashion

Strolling down the main shopping drag in this working-class Rio de Janeiro suburb, it's not the second-skin dresses in shocking pink spandex that catch the eye or even the strapless tops with strategically placed peekaboo paneling.

The newest look can instead be found in stores like Silca Evangelical Fashion, where the hot items are the demure, long-sleeved frocks with how-low-can-you-go hemlines and the polyester putty-colored potato sack dresses.

In the birthplace of the "fio dental" or dental floss string bikini, so-called evangelical fashion has emerged as a growing segment of the country's $52 billion-a-year textile industry, catering to the conservative sartorial needs of Brazil's burgeoning numbers of born-again Pentecostals.

Once so difficult to procure that evangelical women tended to make much of their own clothes themselves, the modest garb is now popping up all over Brazil.

On the tiny high street of Rio suburb Itaborai, not one but two evangelical clothing stores compete to dress the faithful. M&A Fashion got its start two decades ago as a conventional clothing shop, selling the short, tight styles favored in this tropical country, but shifted to evangelical offerings five years ago. Silca Evangelical Clothing, two doors down, opened in March. ...

How Unequal Are We Compared to Other Nations?

Tim Worstall has in interesting piece about income inequality in Fortune, The Amazing Thing About American Inequality: How Equal The Country Is. Here are some of his observations. Remember that for the GINI index, 0 = perfect equatity, and 1 (sometimes 100) equals perfect inequality:

Census has just released the figures on income inequality in the United States. Fascinating reading it makes too. Well, OK, fascinating for the data geeks like myself perhaps. For there’s an interesting little misunderstanding about these figures. There’s an awful lot of people using them to tell us how amazingly unequal the United States is. When in fact the figures show that the country is nothing out of the ordinary for an advanced industrialised nation.

The problem is that people are looking at the US figures as released and comparing them to those of other countries. Something that you really cannot do given the way that the various sets of figures are collected. Here’s an example at the New York Times:

The Gini index value for the United States in 2011 was 0.475, higher than it was in 2010 at 0.469. The index rose in 20 states last year (including New York); there was no statistically significant change in the rest of the states and the District of Columbia (which, at 0.534, has a higher index value than any state).

The Gini index value for New York State was 0.503, which means the state’s household incomes are about as equally distributed as those in Costa Rica, at least according to the most recent international data available.

The figures they use for a comparison are here. Looking at those you might think, well, if the US is at 0.475, Sweden is at 0.23 (yes, the number of 23.0 for Sweden is the same as 0.23 in this sense) then given that a lower number indicates less inequality then Sweden is a less unequal place than the US. You would of course be correct in your assumption: but not because of these numbers.

For the US number is before taxes and before benefits. The Swedish number is after all taxes and all benefits. So, the US number is what we call “market income”, or before all the things we do to shift money around from rich to poor and the Swedish number (in, fact, the numbers for all other countries) are after all the things we do to reduce inequality.

You can see this here at Wikipedia. ...

Later ...

There are two more points we might make about all of this. From the NYT again:

Of all American states, New York again has the most unequal income distribution, according to a new report from the Census Bureau. Wyoming has the most equitably distributed income.

Well, yes, that’s something that we would pretty much expect actually. The larger your data set the more variance you expect to have in your data set. We would rather expect to have greater income inequality between the 20 million odd in NY State than we would in the 500,000 in Wyoming. ...

... Which brings us to the 300 million people in the US. Is it really fair to be comparing income inequality among 300 million people with inequality among the 9 million of Sweden? ...

And ...

... Which brings us to the second point. Even here the US number is (marginally) over-stated. For even in the post-tax and post-benefit numbers the US is still an outlier in the statistical methods used. In looking at inequality, poverty, in the US we include the cash that poor people are given to alleviate their poverty. But we do not include the things that people are given in kind: the Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8 and so on. It’s possible (I’m not sure I’m afraid) that we don’t include the EITC either.

This article got me curious so I went to the Wikipedia data and created the following table for select OECD countries:

GINI Coefficent for Select OECD Countries
	Before Taxes & Transfers				After Taxes & Transfers
	Mid 80s	Late 2000s	Change		Mid 80s	Late 2000s	Change
Belgium	44.9	46.9	2.0		27.4	25.9	-1.5
Canada	39.5	44.1	4.6		29.3	32.4	3.1
Denmark	37.3	41.6	4.3		22.1	24.8	2.7
Finland	38.7	46.5	7.8		20.9	25.9	5.0
France	38.0	48.3	10.3		30.0	29.3	-0.7
Germany	43.9	50.4	6.5		25.1	29.5	4.4
Greece	42.6	43.6	1.0		33.6	30.7	-2.9
Israel	47.2	49.8	2.6		32.6	37.1	4.5
Italy	42.0	53.4	11.4		30.9	33.7	2.8
Japan	34.5	46.2	11.7		30.4	32.9	2.5
Luxembourg	38.3	48.2	9.9		24.7	28.8	4.1
Netherlands	47.3	42.6	-4.7		27.2	29.4	2.2
New Zealand	40.8	45.5	4.7		27.1	33.0	5.9
Norway	35.1	41.0	5.9		22.2	25.0	2.8
Sweden	40.4	42.6	2.2		19.8	25.9	6.1
United Kingdom	41.9	45.6	3.7		30.9	34.5	3.6
United States	43.6	48.6	5.0		33.7	37.8	4.1
Average	40.9	46.2	5.2		27.5	30.4	2.7
Wikipedia

The table confirms Worstalls points. "Market income" inequality in the United States is fourth highest on the list but not radically differenet from other nations. But the really inetersting insight for me is that inequality has risen for sixteen of the seventeen nations over the last quarter century, with the United States being right at the average rate of change. That says to me that something is going on beyond factors that are particular to the United States.

One thing nearly all these nations have in common is aging populations. In agregate, people make more as they get older and that could be skewing income numbers. I doubt that explains it all. The data makes me wonder if there is something systemic about the nature of post-industrial societies that leads to more income inequality.

The income ineqaulity after taxes and transfers for the United States has grown a little faster over the last quarter century, putting us in first place. Worstall raises an important issue about the Earned Income Tax Credit. EITC has grown in significance in recent years as policy tool. It isn't clear that it is included in the U. S. GINI. If not, I suspect adding it in with in-kind transfers would put the U. S. at least as low as the U. K. or Canada. I've also read other sources that emphasize that nation to nation GINI comparisons aren't strictly accurate because of different standards for what consitutes income and transfers. Still, I think a general statement can be made that inequality after taxes and transfers has been growing across the board as well.

Growing inequality is an interesting development that continues to be quite a conundrum, despite the various populist interpretations that float about.

How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans

BusinessWeek: How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans

Jump is just one of some 15,000 teachers currently marketing their original classroom materials through the online marketplace, TeachersPayTeachers (TPT). Since signing on to the site, she has created 93 separate teaching units and sold 161,000 copies for about $8 a pop. “My units usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,” she says. “So if you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need from language arts, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources. So once you print out the unit, you just have to add a few books to read aloud to your class, and everything else is there, ready to go for you.”

To be fair, no one else on TPT has been as wildly successful as Jump, but at least two other teachers have earned $300,000, and 23 others have earned over $100,000, according to site founder Paul Edelman. “Of the 15,000 teachers who are contributing, about 10,000 make money in any given quarter,” he adds. ...

Intangible Dividend of Antipoverty Effort: Happiness

New York Times: Intangible Dividend of Antipoverty Effort: Happiness

When thousands of poor families were given federal housing subsidies in the early 1990s to move out of impoverished neighborhoods, social scientists expected the experience of living in more prosperous communities would pay off in better jobs, higher incomes and more education.

That did not happen. But more than 10 years later, the families’ lives had improved in another way: They reported being much happier than a comparison group of poor families who were not offered subsidies to move, a finding that was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

And using the gold standard of social surveys — the General Social Survey, in which researchers have questioned thousands of Americans of all income levels going back to the 1970s — researchers even quantified how much happier the families were. The improvement was equal to the level of life satisfaction of someone whose annual income was $13,000 more a year, said Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and the lead author of the study.

This vast social experiment, involving 4,600 families in Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Chicago and Boston, tested a long-held theory that neighborhood is an important determinant of an individual’s success.

But there was little evidence that the new neighborhoods made much of a difference in either income or education, a disappointment for social scientists, who had hoped that the experiment would lead to new ways of combating poverty.

What researchers did find were substantial improvements in the physical and mental health of the people who moved. Researchers reported last year in The New England Journal of Medicine that the participants who moved to new neighborhoods had lower rates of obesity and diabetes than those not offered the chance to move. Beyond the increase in happiness, the new study found lower levels of depression among those who moved. ...

Ladder of Charitable Giving - Maimonides

I've been reading Taking You Soul to Work by Paul Stevens. In Chapter Eleven, he presents the Ladder of Charitable Giving as articuled by the 12th Century Jewish mystic Maimonides. Nine hundred years later, too many of us have not learned from his important insights. Here is the ladder from the lowest form of charity to the highest form.

1. A person gives, but only when asked by the poor.
2. A person gives, but is glum when giving.
3. A person gives cheerfully, but less than he or she should.
4. A person gives without being asked, but gives diretly to the poor. Now the poor know who gave them help and the giver, too, knows whom he or she benefited.
5. A person throws money into the house of someone who is poor. The poor person does not know to whom he or she is indebted, but the donor knows who has been helped.
6. A person gives a donation n a certain place and then turns his or her back in order not to know which of the poor has been helped, but the poor person knows to whom he or she is indebted.
7. A person gives anonymously to a fund for the poor. Here the poor person does not know to whom he or she is indebted, and the donor does not know who has been helped. But, the highest is this:
8. Money is give to preven another from becoming poor, such as provdiding him or her with a job, teaching the person a trade, or setting up the person in business. Thus, the recipient will not be forece to the dreadful alternative of holding out a hand for charity. This is the highest step and the summit of charity's golden ladder. (78)

Pope John Paul II said that poverty isn't so much about money as it is about being excluded from networks of productivity and exchange. There are many today who bemoan materialism as expressed in our modern day consumerism. Yet many of those who protest consumerism take a materilistic view of the poor. Their primary objective is to redistribute wealth away from those who have more than enough to consume (wasting it on things like jets and yachts) so that others can have more to consume (on things like food and health care). This view of poverty sees people primarily as consumers. We are not. We are stewards. We were made to participate in our own care and to participate in networks of productivity and exchange that benfit the community. That doesn't mean that wealth redistribution isn't a piece of addressing poverty but an anthropology that sees poverty primarily as is an issue of consumption is materialistic and dehumanizing.

Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.

New York Times: Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.

... Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks. ...

Here is a chart that shows the differences: Click here

Current Recession vs Double Dip Recession in the Early 1980s

Conversable Economist: The Potential GDP Perspective on Business Cycles

A few themes jump out from looking at the data in this way:

1) If the Great Recession is measured according to  how far the economy had fallen below potential GDP, it is actually quite similar to the effects of the double-dip recession in the early 1980s.

2) If the Great Recession is measured by the size of the drop, relative to potential GDP, it is about 9 percentage points of GDP (from an actual GDP 1 percent above potential GDP to an actual GDP that is 8 percent below potential GDP). The total size of this drop isn't all that different--although the timing is different--from the years around the double-dip recession of the 1980s, the years around the recession of 1973-75, and the recession of 1969-1970.

3) The recovery from the early 1980s recessions was V-shaped, while the recovery from the Great Recession is more gradual. But this change isn't new. The recoveries from all the recessions before the early 1980s were reasonably V-shapes, and the recoveries after the 1990-91 and 2001 recessions were more U-shaped, as well.

Here is the Graph he references:

Gathering Waste and Making Good of It

Worldwatch: Gathering Waste and Making Good of It

... Sanergy, for example, is a company launched by a group of students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Sloan School of Management. The group has designed low-profile sanitation centers that can be constructed anywhere to provide hot showers and clean toilets. These facilities can be built quickly and easily with affordable materials. Waste from the centers is deposited into airtight containers that are collected daily. Then it’s brought to processing facilities that can convert it into biogas. The biogas generates electricity, while the leftover material is made into fertilizer.

The company won a USD $100,000 grant from MIT and has been building its first units in Nairobi. It charges a low pay-per-use fee and hopes to grow by franchising the operation of its units, creating an income opportunity for enterprising residents. As the number of toilets proliferates, so too will the amount of energy the company is able to generate from its processing facilities. It hopes to eventually generate enough energy that it can sell its power to the national grid.

The company’s unique and innovative approach is notable for the way it combines the decentralization of waste collection with the centralization of waste processing. Retrofitting the slums with proper sewage drains is a near impossibility and can be an expensive and potentially politically volatile effort in areas where landownership is at best ambiguous. The self-contained units grant access to sanitary facilities to even those far off the grid. But by centralizing the processing of waste, Sanergy’s facilities will take advantage of the economies of scale present in the waste conversion process. ...

GrowHaus aquaponics farming system

Denver Post: New aquaponics farming system helps cities and drought-stricken regions

An urban farm aimed at providing food for an economically disadvantaged northwest Denver neighborhood is drawing widespread interest because of its unique techniques.

GrowHaus — co-founded by Adam Brock who works in partnership with JD and Tawnya Sawyer of Colorado Aquaponics — uses an aquaponic growing system.

The basic components of the system are a greenhouse containing tubs of well-fed fish and a water-circulation system that runs under the plants or beds of produce. Fish waste is treated within the system and converted to nutrients, which feed the plants. The plants absorb the nutrients and purify the water, which is then recirculated

GrowHaus is using the method — which uses an estimated 10 percent of the water used by traditional agriculture — to produce chard, kale, mustard greens and basil, which are distributed within the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood where it is located.

Though the project initially started as a way for the neighborhood to get cheap, healthy food, it is drawing broad interest as a model for urban- and water-saving agriculture. ...

What to Look For in the Nordic Model

New Geography: What to Look For in the Nordic Model

The Nordic nations, and Sweden in particular, are seen by many as the proof that it is possible to combine innovative and entrepreneurial economies with high tax rates. It is often argued that nations such as the US can gain the attractive social features of Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland — such as low crime rates, high life expectancy, and a high degree of social cohesion — simply by expanding the welfare state. An in depth analysis, however, shows that this line of reasoning is flawed. ...

... Taxes still remain high in the Nordic nations, particularly in Denmark and Sweden. The high tax pressures create high costs for the societies. ...

... So how come the Nordic nations are so prosperous? A key reason is that they, particularly since the 1980s, have compensated for high tax regimes by implementing a range of market reforms. These reforms range from Flexicurity — a combination of strategies to provide flexibility for employers and security for workers — in the Danish labor market, to partial abolition of rent-control in Finland, to school vouchers and partial privatization of the pension system in Sweden. Indeed, the Nordic nations have risen sharply in both the Heritage/WSJ and the Frasier Institute indexes of economic freedom over the years.

It is also important to realize exactly why the Nordic nations have been able to implement large welfare states, and what the benefits have been. The cultural and economic systems in the Protestant Nordic nations have historically given rise to very strong norms related to work and responsibility. Coupled with uniquely homogeneous societies, these norms made it possible to implement larger welfare states in the Nordic nations than those in other industrialized countries. Since the norms relating to work and responsibility were so firmly rooted, Nordic citizens were not as likely as other Europeans or Americans to try to avoid taxes or misuse generous public support systems. Also, the "one-solution-fits-all" systems of the welfare state are typically less disruptive in a strongly homogeneous social environment, since most of the population has similar norms, preferences, and income levels.

However, with time the norms have evolved. In the World Value Survey of 1981-84, almost 82 percent of Swedes responded that "claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled is never justifiable", but in the survey of 1999-2004, only 55 percent held the same belief. It is no coincidence that much of the public policy debate in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland has focused on curbing overutilization of welfare systems.

Many of the favorable social outcomes in the Nordic nations relate to our unique culture, and the policies cannot simply be copied. ...

Russia reveals shiny state secret: It's awash in diamonds

Christian Science Monitor: Russia reveals shiny state secret: It's awash in diamonds

Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing "trillions of carats," enough to supply global markets for another 3,000 years.

The Soviets discovered the bonanza back in the 1970s beneath a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem.

They decided to keep it secret, and not to exploit it, apparently because the USSR's huge diamond operations at Mirny, in Yakutia, were already producing immense profits in what was then a tightly controlled world market.

The Soviets were also producing a range of artificial diamonds for industry, into which they had invested heavily.

The veil of secrecy was finally lifted over the weekend, and Moscow permitted scientists from the nearby Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy to talk about it with Russian journalists.

According to the official news agency, ITAR-Tass, the diamonds at Popigai are "twice as hard" as the usual gemstones, making them ideal for industrial and scientific uses.

The institute's director, Nikolai Pokhilenko, told the agency that news of what's in the new field could be enough to "overturn" global diamond markets. ...

New technique paves the way for instant 3D-printed biological tissues

ZietNews: New technique paves the way for instant 3D-printed biological tissues

... The latest advance comes from University of California, San Diego Nanoengineering Professor Shaochen Chen, whose group has demonstrated the ability to print three-dimensional blood vessels in seconds.

If the technique proves scalable, it could revolutionize regenerative medicine. Imagine being able to recover from a heart attack by replacing your faulty aortic valve with a brand new one, made of your own cells. No more pig valves, no more mechanical solutions, no more waiting for a donor. The donor is you.

How does it work? All printers require feedstock. For 2D printers, that’s ink. For 3D, it can be plastic, some metals – or in this case, biocompatible hydrogels. What’s new here is the adaptation of techniques ideal for printing large objects – such as car parts or tools for the home – to a micro and nano scale, in order to print the tiny veins responsible for shipping oxygen and nutrients around the body.

The new approach, reported in Advanced Materials, is called dynamic optical projection stereolithography (DOPsL). ...

 

U.S. Income Inequality: It's Worse Today Than It Was in 1774

Atlantic: U.S. Income Inequality: It's Worse Today Than It Was in 1774

Here's a finding that would have made for great occupy sign last year: American income inequality may be more severe today than it was way back in 1774 -- even if you factor in slavery.

That stat's not actually as crazy (or demoralizing) as it sounds, but it might upend some of the old wisdom about our country's economic heritage. The conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Scraping together data from an array of historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than anywhere else in the world that we have record of. 

Suffice to say, times have changed. ...

... We are much richer nation, and much better off today, than 240 years ago. In the 1770s, America was a heavily agrarian country of yeoman farmers, merchants, and tradesmen, with an economy that accounted to just a few billion dollars in present values. Like India or Russia today, both of which technically enjoy more income equality than the United States, early Americans were relatively poor compared to us. They were just relatively poor together. The first wave of industrialization in the 19th century increased living standards, but also offered bigger rewards to factory owners than their workers. That pattern neatly fits our classic understanding of what's supposed to happen when economies move from farming to manufacturing. And by now, we've gone through several epic rounds of economic upheaval that have left us with a vast gulf between the rich and the rest, as well as a welfare state that tries to mitigate some of the side effects of that difference. 

So, awful as it might sound, the fact that the United States is less economically egalitarian than during its rural, slave-society ancestors is not inherently a reason to fret. ...

They offer this chart (among others):

 

 

A Very European Break Up: She's German. He's Greek.

HT: Greg Mankiw

This is really funny. Who knew economics could be so romantic.

Bryan Caplan on Romney's 47% Remark

Econolog: Will False Belief in the SIVH Destroy Romney's Candidacy?

Bryan Caplan writes:

Many people believe that voters' positions are determined by their objective self-interest.  I call this the SIVH - the Self-Interested Voter Hypothesis.  A massive body of evidence shows that the SIVH is just plain wrong.  Self-interest has no more than sporadic marginal effects on political views.

Successful politicians usually seem well-aware of the weakness of the SIVH.  To win support, they appeal to the public interest and ideology, not self-interest. ...

If you haven't read his The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, it is one of the better books I've read in recent years on poltical behavior. Concerning Romeny's released comments about writing off the bottom 47% as  prospective voters because they will all vote their self-interests to keep getting goodies, Caplan writes:

... Wrong, wrong, wrong.  The 47% won't vote for Obama "no matter what."  Almost half of voters who earn less than the median income vote Republican in the typical election.  A person doesn't support the nanny state because he wants government to take care of him; a person supports the nanny state because he wants government to take care of us.  I say this even though I'm far more opposed to the nanny state than Romney has ever been.

So will false belief in the SIVH destroy Romney's candicacy?  Probably not.  Given his successful political career, I doubt he sincerely believes the SIVH.  Why would he say it?  Because he was preaching to the faithful - and the faithful love to hear that their opponents are driven by nothing more than base self-interest.

Bingo! Sounds to me like Romney was reinforcing a narrative that people in the room with open checkbooks would be wanting to hear. I think David Brooks gets it right at the end of his Thurston Howell Romney piece:

Personally, I think he’s [Romney] a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign. Mr. Romney, your entitlement reform ideas are essential, but when will the incompetence stop?

I suspect the "47%" comment might become for liberals what the "You didn't build that" comment has become for conservatives. Both comments neatly dovetail with a sinister narrative each side has about the other. Meanwhile, the national debt has passed the $16 trillion mark and what concrete plan do we have from either candidate on what to do about it? (cue chirping crickets)

sigh

;-)

Churches open doors to all

USA Today: Churches open doors to all

... The number of multicultural churches -- those in which at least one in five people is from a different ethnic group -- is still relatively tiny. Even within diverse denominations such as the Assemblies of God, where about a third of the churches have minority congregations, or the Southern Baptists, where 20% of churches have minority congregations, only a small percentage meet that one-in-five criteria.

Mark DeYmaz, pastor of Mosaic Church, a diverse non-denominational church based in Little Rock, says he believes the number is going to grow. DeYmaz said his congregation of 600 is about 40% white, 33% African-American, 15% Hispanic, with the rest from a variety of backgrounds.

When Mosaic opened in 2001, DeYmaz said he knew of few diverse churches. Now he knows of several hundred. ...

... Gary McIntosh, professor of Christian Ministry and Leadership at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., doubts that multiethnic churches will ever become commonplace.

He said it's human nature for churches to attract people who share a common background or culture. That doesn't mean they are intentionally segregated, McIntosh said.

"Churches gather around to worship Jesus Christ -- but there are always secondary factors that draw people together," he said. ...

... "If one segment of the church says, 'We are going to tell all of you how it's going to be,' that's not healthy," Barker said.

That kind of shared leadership is crucial for multiracial churches to succeed, said Soong Chan Rah, professor of church growth and evangelism at North Park University in Chicago and author of Many Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church.

Churches have to move from welcoming diverse newcomers to sharing life with them, Rah said.

"It's not just getting people sitting in the same room on Sundays," he said.

Smarter Robots, With No Pesky Uprisings

Businessweek: Smarter Robots, With No Pesky Uprisings

Measured against the hopes and horrors of science fiction, Baxter, a new manufacturing robot from a company called Rethink Robotics, is a huge disappointment. Although it’s got two Olympic swimmer-length arms and a set of expressive digitally rendered eyes and eyebrows, Baxter is legless and speechless. It can’t hold a conversation, pass for a human, or rise up against its masters in apocalyptic rebellion. But Baxter’s creators are out to spark a different kind of revolution. They hope the robot, adept at the mindlessly repetitive tasks common on most assembly lines, can increase the productivity of U.S. manufacturing firms and help them retain jobs that would otherwise migrate overseas to low-wage countries like China.

Boston-based Rethink is the brainchild of Rodney Brooks, a pioneering roboticist who has, perhaps more than anyone, ushered robots from sci-fi stories into people’s living rooms. Brooks, a former director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is a co-founder of iRobot (IRBT), the maker of the Roomba vacuum and the IED-disarming Packbot, a workhorse of the U.S. military. Both machines have redefined the term “robot” with a narrow scope of responsibilities and a simple user interface. The deep-red and charcoal-gray Baxter, which goes on sale next month, is the result of nearly four years of work by Rethink, which is emerging from stealth mode this week. ...

... With five cameras, a sonar sensor that detects motion 360 degrees around the robot, and enough intelligence to learn new tasks within an hour, Baxter is designed to work safely alongside humans and do simple jobs like picking items off a conveyor belt. At $22,000 a unit, it is also cheap enough so that, performing menial labor for three years’ worth of eight-hour shifts, it functions as the equivalent of a $4-an-hour worker. “We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars doing this kind of work in China,” says Brooks. “We want companies to spend that here, in a way that lets American workers be way more productive.

To teach Baxter a new job, a human grabs its arms, simulates the desired task, and presses a button to program in the pattern. When the robot doesn’t understand what a person is trying to tell it during training, it looks up with a confused expression. Part of the original idea was that Baxter would be so easy for even unskilled workers to train that Rethink wouldn’t have to produce a manual. It ultimately did print one, but Brooks hopes no one uses it.

Another core idea behind Baxter is that it will ultimately be upgradeable, just like a smartphone. The company plans to update Baxter’s software for free every few months, enabling more complex behaviors like two-handed manipulation and the ability to push buttons on other machines. ...

Food Crisis, Drought and Vertical Farms

CBC: Food Crisis, Drought and Vertical Farms

Climate scientists will tell you droughts and other extreme weather events is the new normal. One way or another, farming needs to adapt to a new reality. A possible solution is vertical farming. Imagine taking a bunch of greenhouses, stacking them one on top of each other, and plunking it down in a city. Once dismissed as an expensive and unrealistic idea, vertical farms are now cropping up around the world, but huge challenges still face the young industry. Day 6 producer Dominic Girard looks into this growing food trend. Click "Read More" for all kinds of info related to this story.

Go to the site to listen to the radio piece. Here is a short video about vertical farming.

A Philosopher Defends Religion

New York Times Review of Books: A Philosopher Defends Religion Book Review

The gulf in outlook between atheists and adherents of the monotheistic religions is profound. We are fortunate to live under a constitutional system and a code of manners that by and large keep it from disturbing the social peace; usually the parties ignore each other. But sometimes the conflict surfaces and heats up into a public debate. The present is such a time.

One of the things atheists tend to believe is that modern science is on their side, whereas theism is in conflict with science: that, for example, belief in miracles is inconsistent with the scientific conception of natural law; faith as a basis of belief is inconsistent with the scientific conception of knowledge; belief that God created man in his own image is inconsistent with scientific explanations provided by the theory of evolution. In his absorbing new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished analytic philosopher known for his contributions to metaphysics and theory of knowledge as well as to the philosophy of religion, turns this alleged opposition on its head. His overall claim is that “there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” By naturalism he means the view that the world describable by the natural sciences is all that exists, and that there is no such person as God, or anything like God. ...

Looks interesting.

US CO2 Emissions Lowest in 20 Years, Lowest Per Capita in 50 Years

Slate: A Fracking Good Story

Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. are at their lowest level in 20 years. It’s not because of wind or solar power.

... But, beyond this well-trodden battlefield, something amazing has happened: Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years. Estimating on the basis of data from the US Energy Information Agency from the first five months of 2012, this year’s expected CO2 emissions have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14 percent from their peak in 2007.

The cause is an unprecedented switch to natural gas, which emits 45 percent less carbon per energy unit. The U.S. used to generate about half its electricity from coal, and roughly 20 percent from gas. Over the past five years, those numbers have changed, first slowly and now dramatically: In April of this year, coal’s share in power generation plummeted to just 32 percent, on par with gas. ...

... The reduction is even more impressive when one considers that 57 million additional energy consumers were added to the U.S. population over the past two decades. Indeed, U.S. carbon emissions have dropped about 20 percent per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961. ...

... This flies in the face of conventional thinking, which continues to claim that mandating carbon reductions—through cap-and-trade or a carbon tax—is the only way to combat climate change.

But, based on Europe’s experience, such policies are precisely the wrong way to address global warming. Since 1990, the EU has heavily subsidized solar and wind energy at a cost of more than $20 billion annually. Yet its per capita CO₂ emissions have fallen by less than half of the reduction achieved in the U.S.—even in percentage terms, the U.S. is now doing better. ...

... Climate economists repeatedly have pointed out that such energy innovation is the most effective climate solution, because it is the surest way to drive the price of future green energy sources below that of fossil fuels. By contrast, subsidizing current, ineffective solar power or ethanol mostly wastes money while benefiting special interests. ...

Gavin Kennedy on Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"

Adam Smith's Lost Legacy: False Prospectus for "An Invisible Hand"

Gavin Kennedy offers observations in response to a piece by Peter Foster in the Financial Times about Smith's two famous uses of the "invisible hand" metaphor, once in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and in the Wealth of Nations. Read Kennedy's whole post for more context.

... In Moral Sentiments, Smith was not glibly crediting “the rich” with “spread[ing] the wealth despite themselves”.  The plain fact was that the “proud and unfeeling landlords” had absolutely no choice but to share their crops with the landless labourers as their sole source of basic subsistence because without food neither the labourers  nor their families would survive a week – they had no other source of sustenance – and without food the labourers could not work and their families would not grow up to replace them, and the landlords would also starve. It was this dependence on their labourers which “led” them to order that they be fed, metaphorically expressed as the landlords being led by an invisible hand”. Moreover, given that agriculture, upon which societies depended and had done so since it was introduced 11,000 years ago as humans left the forests, their distributions of food, which had continued through many regimes, mostly tyrannical, were managed by the landlords’ overseers, not noted for their humanity.  Of the accumulated wealth of the rich – basic conveniences and dressage of their castles – next to nothing was shared with the poor.

In Wealth Of Nations, the blanket term, “businessmen” also hides an important point made by Smith, namely the fact that he was referring to the specific case of some, but not all merchants, who were characterised by their felt insecurity for the fate of their capital if they sent it abroad.  Instead, this sub-set of all businessmen, were “led” by that insecurity, metaphorically expressed as “an invisible hand” – insecurity in the man’s head could not be seen, i.e., it was “invisible” – to do what they chose to do out of their fears.  By so doing, unintentionally they were led to add to the arithmetical size of national “revenue and employment”, which was a public good.

In both cases, the immediate cause of their doing a public good (the propagation of the species and an addition to the arithmetical total of “revenue and employment”) was metaphorically described by Smith as them being “led by an invisible hand”.  He made no claims to nosense that there was an actual “invisible hand” present and working miraculously in “markets”, through “supply and demand”, the “price system”, “general equilibrium”, or any of the other nonsense wromgly in his name. ...

... Smith also taught how self-interested individuals could act in disregard of the consequences of their actions, for which he gives over 80 examples in Wealth Of Nations, which did not add to the public good.  Self-interest also led merchants to favour tariffs, prohibitions, and ‘jealousy of trade’ ...

Subsidiarity Defined: Downsizing Social Programs

National Catholic Register: Subsidiarity Defined: Downsizing Social Programs

There seems to be a lot of confusion in regard to exactly what the Church teaches about economics.

On one side, there are those whose reasoning goes something like this: “The Catholic Church is for poor people, so it is for large governmental social welfare programs and something like socialism.”

On the other, there are those who reason along these lines: “Since the Catholic Church is against socialism and communism, therefore it is unabashedly for capitalism. Government should therefore stay out of economics — as should the Church — and leave the whole money-making thing to market forces.”

And then in the middle there are large numbers of Catholics who don’t know what the Church actually thinks on this issue, because they hear seemingly contradictory things from polar opposite sides, which both claim to be touting Church teaching.

There is some truth in both points of view, but neither of these sides expresses the Church’s central economic principle, subsidiarity. And it’s likely that the folks in the middle haven’t heard a whole lot, if anything, about it.

Since I can’t do everything in one short blog post, I’d like expound on the principle of subsidiarity in this post, and then, in the next two, show how subsidiarity corrects both the polar views noted above.

The principle of subsidiarity is both simple and far more profound than it seems at first sight. “Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which ‘a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good’” (Catechsim of the Catholic Church, 1883).

This is both a moral and, we might say, a cosmological principle.

Let’s begin with the cosmological part. ...

... So, what does that mean for those leaning to the “left” and “right”? We’ll have a look in my next posts.

Mobile Technology Helps Farmers save Time, Water, and Electricity

Worldwatch: Mobile Technology Helps Farmers save Time, Water, and Electricity

Managing irrigation pumps and water systems is a difficult and costly task for many farmers in developing countries. The amount of time and energy farmers spend watering their crops often compromises time that could otherwise be used for family and community obligations. It also compromises their safety at night, when they are most vulnerable to animal predators. A new innovation from the India based company, Ossian Agro Automation, called Nano Ganesh seeks to transform the way farmers manage their water systems by giving them the freedom to turn pumps on and off, from any location, with their mobile phone. ...

... In 2008 Ostwal altered the technology so that it could function over an unlimited range granting farmers the flexibility to start and stop the flow of water from anywhere there is a mobile connection. Nano Ganesh also allows farmers to check the availability of electricity to the pump and verify the on and off status of its operation. Both of these features offer cost-saving benefits to farmers who otherwise may not be able to shut their pumps off before their fields have become overly saturated. This is important for two reasons. One is that over-watering can lead to soil erosion and nutrient depletion. The second reason is that the inability to remotely shut-off water pumps leads to unintentional water and electricity waste. With the help of Nano Ganesh farmers will be able to conserve water and electricity more effectively. This will minimize the environmental and financial costs of farming. In fact, the product description suggests that farmers can recover the cost of the technology in just 11 days from the water and electricity savings it will produce. ...

Body disposal technology widens green funeral choice

Reuters: Body disposal technology widens green funeral choice

(Reuters) - Burnt, buried or frozen and turned to powder are some of the options for dealing with the remains of a loved one whose last wishes include lessening death's environmental impact.

Our demise can have a big environmental impact. Around three quarters of people in the United Kingdom alone are cremated after they die but cremation uses about the same amount of domestic energy as a person uses in a month.

Globally, cremation emits over 6.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, accounting for around 0.02 percent of world carbon dioxide emissions, experts estimate.

It also causes mercury pollution when tooth fillings are vaporized. Currently, up to 16 percent of all mercury emitted in the United Kingdom comes from crematoria, which could rise to 25 percent by 2020 without any action, according to government figures.

The UK government is forcing cremators to fit mercury filters by the end of 2012 to halve mercury emissions although statistics are not yet available on progress towards this goal. ...

EU to limit use of crop-based biofuels - draft law

Reuters: EU to limit use of crop-based biofuels - draft law

(Reuters) - The European Union will impose a limit on the use of crop-based biofuels over fears they are less climate-friendly than initially thought and compete with food production, draft EU legislation seen by Reuters showed.

The draft rules, which will need the approval of EU governments and lawmakers, represent a major shift in Europe's much-criticized biofuel policy and a tacit admission by policymakers that the EU's 2020 biofuel target was flawed from the outset.

The plans also include a promise to end all public subsidies for crop-based biofuels after the current legislation expires in 2020, effectively ensuring the decline of a European sector now estimated to be worth 17 billion euros ($21.7 billion) a year. ...

Winning the War on Poverty?

Atlantic: Wait, We're Winning the War on Poverty? A New Study Says: Absolutely

... But a new paper from Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan says it's missing everything. "We may not have won the war on poverty, but we are certainly winning," they write.

When they looked at poorer families' consumption rather than income, accounted for changes in the tax code that benefit the poor, and included "noncash benefits" such as food stamps and government-provided medical care, they found poverty fell 12.5 percentage points between 1972 and 2010.

The graph below tells the story. The official poverty rate (shown in DARK BLUE) is higher today than it was in the early 1970s. But when you measure after-tax income (RED) or consumption (GREEN), the story changes: Poverty rates have declined steadily, and dramatically, since the 1960s.

Vertical Farming (TEDx)

Vertical Farming is Here: Dickson Despommier at TEDxYouth@MSC

US incomes fall to 1989 levels. How did that happen?

Christian Science Monitor: US incomes fall to 1989 levels. How did that happen?

A Census report signals that for much of America, the economic downturn has produced not one lost decade but two.But the data also show that federal safety-net programs helped keep people out of poverty. ...

... Economists haven't reached a consensus about what forces have caused the middle-class stagnation, but they have pointed to some that may be involved to varying degrees:

Globalization: The rest of the world is playing catchup to the nation that came to dominate in technology and sheer productive muscle during the 20th century. In theory, the US can still prosper as emerging nations from China to Brazil rise, but recent years have seen fierce global competition. America needs to boost its skills faster to stay in the game.

Technology: As with globalization, in theory this isn't a job-destroying force, just one that causes the nature of jobs to change. But some argue that rapid technological advances are having an especially hard impact on many middle-wage jobs that can be largely automated.

Inequality: A wage premium for the educated, the decline of labor unions, and the failure of the minimum wage to keep up with inflation have been among the factors widening the income gap between the rich and the middle class or poor. Some economists say that gap makes for a less vibrant nation. "Lack of opportunity means that its most valuable asset -- its people -- is not being fully used," Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University has argued. When the rich are able to win big tax cuts it "leads to underinvestment in infrastructure, education and technology, impeding the engines of growth."

Debt and government: Another line of reasoning, taken by some conservative economists, is that economic growth is slowing as America becomes more of a European-style welfare state, with more people receiving public services and government spending accounting for a larger share of the economy. Some say the rising level of public debt, in particular, is emerging as an obstacle to be reckoned with. Others cite high levels of regulation and "crony capitalism," in which government policies favor some industries or companies at the expense of others.

Two other factors, mentioned by Census officials as affecting the recent data, are demographic aging of the population (income typically goes down as people hit retirement age) and a skewing of new jobs in 2011 toward the lower end of the wage spectrum.

The prescriptions for the road ahead depend on the diagnoses of causes, but many economists agree on the need for stronger education, better matching of skills with job opportunities, and an effort to overhaul the nation's fiscal policy, including taxes.

Some economists also argue for policies targeted to boost the level of innovation and entrepreneurship. ...

Economists who are clergy

Marginal Revolution: Economists who are clergy

After noting Reverend Malthus and Israel Kirzner, Cowen writes:

Who else comes to mind?  The School of Salamanca, and going back many medieval theologians wrote on economic issues.  Paul Heyne.  Heinrich Pesch.  Galiani was an Abbey.  Philip Wicksteed was a Unitarian theologian.  The still underrated Richard Whately was the Archbishop of Dublin.  Bishop George Berkeley wrote on monetary theory, as did Reverend Jonathan Swift.

The 18th century clergyman John Witherspoon wrote on monetary economics.  Thomas Chalmers, who wrote on the Poor Laws and theories of underconsumption in the early 19th century, was ordained in the Church of Scotland.

Did all these 19th century figures really want to be economists, really want to be clergy, or both?

Any nominations? (And might I add, we need a whole lot more of them!)

PCUSA 1001 New Worshiping Communities: East End Fellowship

Installment number twelve in my series on 1001 New Worshiping Communities in the PCUSA. This is the last one for now. As others become available, I'll post them. (Series Index)

 

U.S. Solar Industry Bracing for Utility Backlash Over Metering

Business Week: U.S. Solar Industry Bracing for Utility Backlash Over Metering

Growing installations of rooftop solar panels are increasing concern that U.S. utilities may refuse to buy power generated by the systems, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Utilities are required to purchase electricity generated by solar panels installed on consumers’ homes under so-called net- metering policies, an arrangement that may become less viable as solar systems become more common, said Rhone Resch, chief executive officer of the Washington-based trade group.

California, the largest solar market, capped the amount of panels utilities are required to connect to their grids and other states are considering similar policies. Some utilities see the requirement to buy solar power from every rooftop system as a threat to their profitability, Resch said.

“Net metering works for us now, but we’re going to see a backlash from utilities as solar penetration increases over the next few years,” Resch said today in an interview at the Solar Power International conference in Orlando, Florida.

California regulators capped the amount of rooftop solar that may be connected to the grid at 5 percent of a a utility’s power needs, and is studying the long-term impact upon their profits. ...

Peter Enns on Resisting Political Eschatologies

Peter Enns: Dear Christian: If the Thought of Either Romney or Obama Getting Elected Makes You Fearful, Angry, or Depressed, You Have What we Call a Theological Problem - Peter Enns

Before we get going here, let’s be clear on what

I.am.saying.

and what

I.am.not.saying.

This is not a cynical, “I’m above it all,” anti-political rant.

I am not telling you both candidates are the same.

I am not telling you not to vote.

I am not telling you to stop arguing about politics and coming to strong convictions. Have at it.

I am saying that if you get so worked up about it that you become really angry, or you actually “fear for our country,” or are thinking of moving to Greenland or freezing yourself if “that guy” gets elected, you may need to step back and think about what’s happening inside of you.

You can and should be genuinely concerned about health care, our economy, and many other issues–there are issues of justice and compassion.

But, listen for the rhetoric in others and in yourself.

If you fear for your way of life, that if the wrong person gets elected all is lost and you simply don’t have any hope for your future or the future of your children, you have accepted what we like to call in the industry a “rival eschatology.”

I’ve just lost half of you, but hang with me. ...

Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China's workers

An interesting piece on how Chinese workers experience their changing lives. Very insightful.

Are free markets the secret to Sweden's success?

Christian Science Monitor: Are free markets the secret to Sweden's success?

Nima Sanandaji has written an interesting paper about Sweden. It largely points to the same historical facts that I have mentioned in my previous writings, namely that Sweden during its most free market oriented era, from 1870 to 1950, had the highest rate of per capita economic growth in the world. After massive tax and spending increases during the 1950s and 1960s, Sweden stopped outperforming other countries, and after a dramatic leftist shift in economic policies implemented by Socialist Olof Palme after he became prime minister in 1969, Sweden started to seriously lagg other countries. However, free market reforms implemented in the 1990s, and in recent years, have enabled Sweden to once again outperform other Western countries in growth.

He also discusses possible cultural factors, and also points out that Sweden in 1920 had a relatively low level of economic inequality, despite the fact that government spending and taxation at that time was only 10% of GDP.

Here is the conclusion from the Sanandaji report, The surprising ingredients of Swedish success – free markets and social cohesion:

Conclusion:

Scandinavian societies have developed a unique culture with a strong work ethic and strong ethical attitudes regarding the claiming of welfare benefits. There are also high levels of trust and social cohesion. This social capital, which was built up before the advent of the modern welfare state, has played an important role in the success of Scandinavian countries.

For many decades, this pre-existing culture, allowed countries such as Sweden to have extensive welfare systems without the social difficulties, rise in worklessness and other effects that many would have predicted. Scandinavian countries have also reaped the rewards of relatively free market policies in some areas of economic life to reach impressive levels of wealth creation.

To characterise the Swedish model either as a social democratic utopia or a failed socialist experiment is a mistake. Sweden is a successful country in terms of having a low poverty rate and long life expectancy. However, these factors have much to do with non-government facets of Swedish society that pre-existed the welfare state.

As Milton Friedman has previously noted, the millions of US residents of Swedish descent also display low rates of poverty. They combine this with a living standard that is significantly better compared with Swedes living in Sweden. The transformation of Sweden from an impoverished agrarian society to a modern industrialised nation is a rarely mentioned, but quite significant, example of the role of free markets in lifting a country out of poverty and into prosperity. Low levels of inequality and low levels of government spending characterised this period of economic transformation. The golden age of Swedish entrepreneurship - when one successful firm after another was founded in this small country and gained international renown – occurred at a time when taxes and the scope of government were quite limited.

Sweden shifted to radical social democratic policies in the 1960s and 1970s, with a gradual reversal beginning in the mid 1980s. The social democratic period was not successful, as it led to much lower entrepreneurship, the crowding out of private sector job production and an erosion of previously strong work and benefit norms. The move towards high taxes, relatively generous government benefits and a regulated labour market preceded a situation in which Swedish society has had difficulty integrating even highly-educated immigrants, and where a fifth of the population of working age are supported by various forms of government welfare payments.

It is also important to remember that Sweden, like other Scandinavian nations, has compensated for policies of high taxes and welfare benefits by improving economic liberty in other fields. Some reforms, such as the partial privatisation of the mandatory pensions system and voucher systems in schools and healthcare surpass reforms in most developed nations. Since these reforms, and the reduction in taxes from the very-high levels of the 1970s to mid 1980s, Swedish relative economic performance has improved.

Swedish society is not necessarily moving away from the idea of a welfare state, but continual reforms are being implemented that increase economic liberty and incentives for work within the scope of the welfare system. Such trends are also visible in Finland and Denmark, with only oil-rich Norway being an exception.

The Growing Might of Solar Power

New York Times: The Growing Might of Solar Power

From California to New Jersey, the summer sun was hot this year — and so was the solar industry. While the business of solar energy is still small enough and young enough to record firsts at the fearsome pace of a toddler, the milestones are getting more substantial. ...

... The number of megawatts installed in the second quarter of this year was around 742, more than double the 343 megawatts installed in the first quarter of 2011, according to a report released Monday that was commissioned by the Solar Energy Industries Association.

The same report, showed that the United States now has 5.7 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, enough to power one million homes, according to the the report, which was prepared by GTM Research, a Boston-based consulting company.

Then again, even in California, where more than one-third of the new installations were located, the new high-water mark for daily solar power production represents only 1 percent of total demand. Wind energy — which is counter-cyclical with solar energy, as the wind is weakest when the sun shines brightest — represented 3.7 percent of demand on the day of peak solar-energy generation. ...

... It may be worth noting that amid all the news about solar expansion and milestones, the federal Energy Information Administration reported on Monday that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions declined 2.5 percent from 2010 to 2011.

“Electric power generation from natural gas, the least carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels, increased by 3 percent, while generation from coal declined by 6 percent,” the agency reported, noting that carbon dioxide emissions from burning natural gas are around half those that result from burning coal.

“Power generation from renewable sources continued to rise, mostly because of record-breaking supplies of hydroelectricity and increasing generation from wind, solar, and other renewable sources,” the agency’s report added.

More evidence of the Kruse Plan at work. Switch to natural gas as a near-term intermediate step, while giving alternative energy and nuclear power a chance to emerge.

Vertical farm: Farmer takes crops to new heights

Orange County Register: Vertical farm: Farmer takes crops to new heights

By filling a tall order through its hydroponic farming method, Alegria Fresh is delivering what it says is healthier and tastier produce on a modest lot in Laguna Canyon.

LAGUNA BEACH – In a quarter-acre lot tucked into Laguna Canyon, Erik Cutter is feeding his neighbors food he says is fresher, healthier and safer than anything else available in Southern California.

Alegria Fresh is the first hydroponic, vertical farm on the West Coast, and Cutter is hoping to become a model for high-yield, resource-efficient growing. The farm – 150 7-foot-tall towers that hold more than 8,000 plants – produces everything from arugula to zucchini, and in only 1,200 square feet. Each plant grows in reusable coconut fiber instead of soil, and each pot is linked to an automatic watering system. The result is about 90 percent less water used and 10 times more food yielded than a conventional farm. ...

... The towers allow a farm to pop up in virtually any size space, and the hydroponics help ensure quality. With no soil, soil-borne diseases and toxins are out of the picture. Plants are fed automatically with a nutrient-rich solution that can be adjusted to improve health and sweetness. ...

... The power of food, however, diminishes greatly in the time it takes to travel from farm to table, he said. Alegria Fresh aims to get its produce into customers' hands within two hours of harvest. After harvesting, drivers on a produce route deliver vegetable bouquets to subscribers' homes, starting at $20 each week. Each bouquet can be made into about five salads. ...

A new approach to water desalination

How Hybrid Solar Energy Systems Empower Remote Communities

SunTech Connect: How Hybrid Solar Energy Systems Empower Remote Communities

In my previous blog post, we discussed the potential and need to drive the adoption of hybrid solar energy systems to empower remote communities in developing nations with reliable access to electricity.

In this blog, I will focus on some communities who have successfully implemented such hybrid solar energy systems.

Mali is a landlocked country in Western Africa, and suffers from acute electricity shortage. Although a number of generation plants are planned, most of these plants will only start generating after 2017 due to constraints. However, Ouelessebougou city in the Koulikoro region of the country decided to take matters in their own hands to assuage this issue. The city used two diesel generators that generated 440 kilowatts of electricity to power a water pumping station and scores of surrounding households. To reduce their reliance on costly diesel and increase power generation capacity, the city invested in a 216-kilowatt solar energy system.

The results were remarkable as the city managed to reduce their reliance on diesel generators by 75%.

In another example, ...

In One City, Signing Up for Internet Becomes a Civic Cause

New York Times: In One City, Signing Up for Internet Becomes a Civic Cause

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With Google’s promise last year to wire homes, schools, libraries and other public institutions in this city with the nation’s fastest Internet connection, community leaders on the long forlorn, predominantly black east side were excited, seeing a potentially uplifting force. They anticipated new educational opportunities for their children and an incentive for developers to build in their communities.

But in July, Google announced a process in which only those areas where enough residents preregistered and paid a $10 deposit would get the service, Google Fiber. While nearly all of the affluent, mostly white neighborhoods here quickly got enough registrants, a broad swath of black communities lagged. The deadline to sign up was midnight Sunday.

The specter that many blacks in this city might not get access to this technology has inflamed the long racial divide here, stoking concern that it could deepen. ...

PCUSA 1001 New Worshiping Communities: Kairos Church

Installment number eleven in my series on 1001 New Worshiping Communities in the PCUSA. (Series Index)