... The numbers tell the story: U.S. oil production has reversed its 30-plus
year decline; U.S. imports from OPEC producers have fallen more than 20
percent in the past three years; U.S. natural gas reserves and
production are up significantly and prices have dropped 75 percent in
the past five years. The International Energy Agency forecasts that the
United States could become the world’s largest oil producer by 2020 and
may be energy self-sufficient by 2035. That’s a game changer.
While this is not a free lunch, it should not be feared. The production
process is complicated and expensive, and if the industry is not careful
there can be risks to the environment. But the potential is staggering.
Significant domestic job growth and economic expansion has begun.
But let’s look beyond the impact on the United States and consider a few
of the more profound implications for the rest of the world, because
this revolution is also a game changer for international politics and
the global economy. ...
... Like all revolutions, America’s new energy bonanza raises some
fascinating questions. How might a lighter U.S. presence and heavier
Chinese involvement change the world’s most volatile neighborhood? What
can the next generation of Saudi leaders expect for their country’s
future in a world where OPEC has lost much of its market power? Will
Qatar’s support for Muslim Brotherhood governments in other Arab states
and China’s interest in using the United Arab Emirates as an offshore
trading center for its currency leave the Saudis dangerously isolated?
Can Iran’s revolution survive the need to build a more modern economy?
A world in which the United States is less involved in answering these questions is a new world indeed.
Six years ago I did a series on American Social Indicators, 2007, and another five years ago on World Social Indicators. I've been toying with doing an update of those series this year. But for now, here is an excellent piece at Business Insider highlighting some of my main points: 31 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity. We are living through the most stunning advances in human flourishing in all of history. Here are just a few charts that caught my eye:
This chart explains why many demographers worry about a
population bust, not a population bomb. Replacement rate fertility is 2.1. In
country after country, economic development has led to declining fertility
rates but the rates drop right past 2.1 into population decline. Some countries
in Europe have rates in the 1.0-1.5 range. Assuming there are not reversals in
low fertility countries, and assuming the global trend follows the lead of
developed nations, about thirty years from now there are going to be
significant economic problems. Some are already becoming evident in countries that
have had prolonged low fertility.
This piece is a little too narrow in attributing positive change almost exclusively to markets. I would argue that things are considerably more complicated and the video would be more convining with some balance. But the video does do a powerful placing our economic moment in time in context.
... Fortunately, this deadly and cyclical form of poverty [living on less than $1.25 a day] is already on its
way toward obsolescence, and much faster than many development
economists expected. The first Millennium Development Goal — to halve
the proportion of the world population living in dire poverty by 2015 —
was met five years early, as the rate fell to an estimated 21 percent in
2010, from 43 percent in 1990. Some economists had feared that the
recession would arrest or even reverse the trend, given how
interconnected the global economy is, but the improvement continued,
unabated. Annual growth dipped for developing economies in 2009 but has
since rebounded to about 5.3 percent a year, a figure dragged down by
weaker peripheral European economies.
For much of the improvement, the world can thank one country: China,
which alone accounts for about half of the decline in the extreme
poverty rate worldwide. It has also driven significant gains across the
region. In the early 1980s, East Asia had the highest extreme-poverty
rate in the world, with more than three in four people living on less
than $1.25 a day. By 2010, just one in eight were. But other
middle-income countries, like Brazil, Nigeria and India, have
experienced significant growth, too — in no small part because tens of
millions of the very poor have moved from rural areas to cities, where
they become richer, healthier and more productive for their economies....
... For the poor living in poor countries, particularly the profoundly
unstable ones, gains have been harder-fought and slower, a trend that
the World Bank’s own economists describe as worrisome. But that is not
to play down the successes so far. In 2008, for the first time since the
bank started measuring the statistics, the number of people living in
dire poverty and the dire-poverty rate fell in every region around the
world. Extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa has at last dipped below
the 50 percent mark. Still, many within the development world doubt the
ability of NGOs to cure the world’s most troubled nations of their woes.
“I don’t think we have a recipe for fixing the Congo or South Sudan or
Afghanistan,” says Birdsall, of the Center for Global Development. ....
... By almost every measure – of health, wealth and education – and for most of its people, life in Africa is getting better.
All of these developments are perhaps best
encapsulated by the UN’s Human Development Index. Over decades, that
organisation has measured health, education and poverty indicators
across the world to assess people’s quality of life. Since the turn of
the century, human development has not only improved in every one of
sub-Saharan Africa’s 45 countries but gains were bigger in the 2000s
than in any previous decade.
In many ways, Africa remains the world’s most
miserable place. None of its longstanding problems can be declared
solved and it faces some new ones, including rising global food prices
and climate change, issues discussed this week in Dublin.
The scale of challenges cannot be
underestimated. But Africa’s prospects are improving. The dashed hopes
of the post-independence decades now stand a better chance than ever of
being fulfilled.
... One way of analyzing the changing nature of the US economy is by
looking at how much GDP physically weighs. Former Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan once remarked that the value of US GDP is five
times as great as it was 50 years ago. Yet “the physical weight of our
gross domestic product is evidently only modestly higher today than it
was 50 or 100 years ago.” Very little of the nation’s economic
growth ”represents growth in the tonnage of physical materials — oil,
coal, ores, wood, raw chemicals. The remainder represents new insights
into how to rearrange those physical materials to better serve human
needs.”
In other words, to paraphrase economist Paul Romer, more and more we
create value by coming up with different “recipes” to rearrange the
physical world. Ideas and innovation are what truly drive growth. So
even though America becomes more productive and the size of the economy
bigger, it doesn’t gain any weight — just wealth.
Interesting way of illustrating the how advanced economies are changing.
Business Insider has these three interesting graphs from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Personal taxes are a little below the forty year average but federal spending including transfers is near all time highs, mostly due to an explosion in transfer payments. There is some good news from the New York Times: The Incredible Shrinking Budget Deficit
... The number crunchers at Goldman Sachs have lowered their estimates of
the deficit both this year and next, on the back of
higher-than-expected revenues and lower-than-projected spending.
Analysts started the year projecting that the deficit in the current
fiscal year would be about $900 billion. Earlier this year, they lowered
the estimate to $850 billion. Now they have lowered it again, to $775
billion, or about 4.8 percent of economic output.
“Spending in the fiscal year to date is lower than a year ago and the
nominal growth rate is lower than it has been in decades,” the Goldman
economists wrote in a note to clients. “Revenues have also exceeded
expectations, with a 12 percent gain fiscal year to date. What is more
notable is that the strength in revenues preceded the payroll tax hike
at the start of the year, and the spending decline does not seem to
reflect sequestration, which has just started to take effect.” To
translate: the deficit could come in even smaller than currently
anticipated because of spending cuts and higher tax rates. ...
Not everyone is as postive about the growth projections. See the NYT piece for more details
"... Last year, CO2 emissions in the US fell to an 18-year low, the lowest level since 1994, and C02 emissions from coal fell to a 26-year low, the lowest since 1986. Further, as the WSJ reported this week (“Rise in U.S. Gas Production Fuels Unexpected Plunge in Emissions“)
the US now leads the world in reducing CO2 emissions thanks to the
shale revolution. At the same time that America is using less coal and
more shale gas and reducing C02 emissions, Europe and Asia are becoming
more coal-dependent for electricity generation, and increasing C02
emissions.
Compared to the last time that CO2 emissions were at 2012′s levels —
back in 1994 — real GDP in 2012 was 55% higher and the US population was
17.5% larger, making the drop in greenhouse gas emissions to an 18-year
low in 2012 even more impressive. Adjusted for the population, CO2 emissions per capita last year were the lowest since 1964, almost 50 years ago (see chart above, data here and here).
According to Department of Energy forecasts, the decline in per capita
CO2 emissions is expected to continue so consistently that within about
20 years, greenhouse gas emissions per person in the US will be below
the level in 1949! ..."
"IN recent years poor countries have enjoyed impressive improvements in
GDP per person. But in the rich world they have hardly grown at all." Click on the link to see the short video: Economic growth
Someday I'm actually going to finish reading Haidt's book but in the meantime I found this article fascinating. I think it fits well as I try to listen to the narratives and values underlying confrontation over controversial issues.
... I conducted interviews to find out how people feel about harmless taboo violations—for example, a family that eats its pet dog after the dog was killed by a car, or a woman who cuts up her nation’s flag to make rags to clean her toilet. In all cases the actions are performed in private and nobody is harmed; yet the actions feel wrong to many people—they found them disgusting or disrespectful. In my interviews, only one group of research subjects—college students in the United States—fully embraced the principle of harmlessness and said that people have a right to do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. People in Brazil and India, in contrast, had a broader moral domain—they were willing to condemn even actions that they admitted were harmless. Disgust and disrespect were sufficient grounds for moral condemnation.
I had predicted those cross-national differences. What I hadn’t predicted was that differences across social classes within each nation would be larger than differences across nations. In other words, college students at the University of Pennsylvania were more similar to college students in Recife, Brazil, than they were to the working-class adults I interviewed in West Philadelphia, a few blocks from campus. There’s something about the process of becoming comparatively well-off and educated that seems to shrink the moral domain down to its bare minimum—I won’t hurt you, you don’t hurt me, and beyond that, to each her own. ...
... Drawing on the work of many anthropologists (particularly Richard Shweder at the University of Chicago) and many evolutionary biologists and psychologists, my colleagues and I came to the conclusion that there are six best candidates for being the taste buds of the moral mind: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation.
Moral foundations theory helped to explain the differing responses to those harmless taboo violations (the dog-eating and flag-shredding). Those stories always violated the Loyalty, Authority, or Sanctity foundations in ways that were harmless. My educated American subjects (who, in retrospect, I realize were mostly liberal) generally rejected those three foundations and had a moral “cuisine” built entirely on the first three foundations; so if an action doesn’t harm anyone (Care/Harm), cheat anyone (Fairness/Cheating), or violate anyone’s freedom (Liberty/Oppression), then you can’t condemn someone for doing it. But in more traditional societies, the moral domain is broader. Moral “cuisines” are typically based on all six foundations (though often with much less reliance on Liberty), and it is perfectly sensible to condemn people for homosexual behavior among consenting adults, or other behaviors that challenge traditions or question authority.
Everyone values the first three foundations, although liberals value the Care foundation more strongly. For example, they show the strongest agreement with assertions such as “Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.” But this difference on Care is small compared to the enormous difference on items such as these: “People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong.” “Respect for authority is something all children need to learn.” “People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed.” Those three items come from the scales we use to measure the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, respectively. You can see how social conservatives, whose morality rests in large part on those foundations, don’t see eye to eye with liberals. Basically, liberals want to loosen things up, especially in ways that they believe will make more room for women, African Americans, gay people, and other oppressed groups to escape from traditional strictures, express themselves, and succeed. Conservatives want to tighten things up, especially in ways that they perceive will help parents to raise more respectful and self-controlled kids, and will assist the police and other authorities in maintaining order. You can see how those disagreements led to battle after battle on issues related to sexuality, drug use, religion, family life, and patriotism. You can see why liberals sometimes say that conservatives are racist, sexist, and otherwise intolerant. You can see why social conservatives sometimes say that liberals are libertine anarchists. ...
I've been doing some writing about the common misperception of the economy as a zero-sum game and the fear that we will soon (or ever) run out of nonrenewable resources. This is counterintuitive to so many people that I feel the need to address it some detail. I written a draft of this section for my book I'm working on but I need to massage more before posting it here.
In the meantime, Mark Perry has this interesting chart from his post Bad news for pessimists: Malthus was wrong. If commodities are becoming scarcer, then prices will go up. But as this chart shows, commodity prices over the long-haul, are getting less expensive in real dollars. Other databases I've seen show this to be true as far back as at least the mid-1800s. The trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Why? I'll get to that in coming posts but here is the evidence making my point. Read Perry's post for more details on the data.
... Different languages have different ways of talking about the future.
Some languages, such as English, Korean, and Russian, require their
speakers to refer to the future explicitly. Every time English-speakers
talk about the future, they have to use future markers such as “will” or
“going to.” In other languages, such as Mandarin, Japanese, and German,
future markers are not obligatory. The future is often talked about
similar to the way present is talked about and the meaning is understood
from the context. A Mandarin speaker who is going to go to a seminar
might say “Wo qu ting jiangzuo,” which translates to “I go listen
seminar.” Languages such as English constantly remind their speakers
that future events are distant. For speakers of languages such as
Mandarin future feels closer. As a consequence, resisting immediate
impulses and investing for the future is easier for Mandarin speakers. ...
“Capitalism has a purpose beyond just making money. I think the critics of capitalism have got it in this very small box. That it’s all about money. It’s based in being greedy, selfish and exploitative. And yet, I haven’t found it to be that way. Most of the hundreds of entrepreneurs I know and have met did not start their business primarily out of a desire to make money. Not that there’s anything wrong with making money. My body cannot function unless it produces red-blood cells. No red-blood cells and I’m a dead man. But that’s not the purpose of my life.
Similarly, a business cannot exist unless it produces a profit . . . but that’s not the only reason it exists.”
When I was writing a review of Dwight Lee's and Richard McKenzie's excellent book, Getting Rich in America: 8 Simple Rules for Building a Fortune and a Satisfying Life,
I called Dwight to ask a question and we got talking about Rule #5: Get
Married and Stay Married. Dwight pointed out that if you follow the
other 7 rules but don't get married or stay married, you have a
substantial probability of building a fortune and a satisfying life.
But, he said, if you don't get married and stay married, you tend not to
follow at least some of the other 7 rules.
While the upscale college-educated crowd continues to marry at very high rates, marriage rates are plummeting among those further down on the socioeconomic ladder.
... A useful debate about the morality of capitalism must get beyond libertarian nostrums that greed is good, what’s mine is mine and whatever the market produces is fair. It should also acknowledge that there is no moral imperative to redistribute income and opportunity until everyone has secured a berth in a middle class free from economic worries. If our moral obligation is to provide everyone with a reasonable shot at economic success within a market system that, by its nature, thrives on unequal outcomes, then we ought to ask not just whether government is doing too much or too little, but whether it is doing the right things.
Instead, Dr. Butzer argues that Sargon's conquest itself caused
the collapse of trade by destroying cities and disrupting what had
till then been "an inter-networked world-economy, once extending
from the Aegean to the Indus Valley." In other words, as with the
end of the Roman empire, the collapse of trade caused the collapse
of civilization more than the other way around.
A new find suggests farmers in Bible lands built channels for irrigation long before historians thought they did, allowing for cultivated vineyards, olives, wheat and barley.
... “Educational systems could be improved by acknowledging that, in general, boys and girls are different,” said University of Missouri biologist David Geary in their statement. “For example, in trying to close the sex gap in math scores, the reading gap was left behind. Now, our study has found that the difference between girls’ and boys’ reading scores was three times larger than the sex difference in math scores. Girls’ higher scores in reading could lead to advantages in admissions to certain university programs, such as marketing, journalism or literature, and subsequently careers in those fields. Boys lower reading scores could correlate to problems in any career, since reading is essential in most jobs.”
Generally, when conditions are good, the math gap increases and the reading gap decreases and when conditions are bad the math gap decreases and the reading gap increases. This pattern remained consistent within nations as well as among them, according to the work by Geary and Gijsbert Stoet of the University of Leeds that included testing performance data from 1.5 million 15-year-olds in 75 nations. ...
... Two rival reform movements arose to restore the integrity of
Catholicism. Those in the first movement, the Donatists, believed the
church needed to purify itself and return to its core identity. ...
... In the fourth century, another revival movement arose, embraced by
Augustine, who was Bishop of Hippo. The problem with the Donatists,
Augustine argued, is that they are too static. They try to seal off an
ark to ride out the storm, but they end up sealing themselves in. They
cut themselves off from new circumstances and growth.
Augustine, as his magisterial biographer Peter Brown puts it, “was
deeply preoccupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race.” He
reacted against any effort to divide people between those within the
church and those permanently outside. ....
16. A great piece by someone who considers them unaffiliated with any religion. Every Christian and congregation needs to reflect on the insignificance of the church in this writers life. His tribe is growing: The significant insignificance of religion
"... While its portrait is still coming into focus, “Plurals” -- or those born since
1997 -- are highly optimistic, but have been profoundly impacted by recent economic uncertainties.
Also
known as “Generation Z,” “Generation We” and the
“iGeneration,” Plurals have witnessed a culture that celebrated excess,
and has been through a recession and a fledgling recovery. As a result,
this new generation is remarkably realistic
about what is achievable, and feel that they must follow the path that
will make them personally happy, according to Adam Rossow, head of
marketing at iModerate.
“This group is
fascinating for many reasons, but what’s truly impressive is their keen
understanding of the world around them and the valuable lessons they
have learned,” Rossow said. “Happiness
and the individual freedom to pursue it are more important than
financial success.” ...
... “The only world they know is a digital one -- where they can connect
anytime, anywhere, and to anyone,” Forrester analyst Tracy Stokes
explained. “As a
result, they are highly promiscuous when it comes to media consumption.” ...
A lot has been written recently about the rise of the "Nones," people expressing no religious affiliation. Sociologist Brad Wright offers a fascinating insight by looking at the percentage of people at various stages of life report affliation. Young adults are not suprisingly the group with the highest percentage but Wright offers this chart.
Wright makes this observation:
Once again, the percentage of being unaffiliated increased in each
group, but relatively speaking, it’s increased most among the
middle-aged and the elderly. In both the percentage of the unaffiliated
more than tripled, compared to the 2.5x increase in the young. There is
some lagged effect, as the elderly are catching up the middle-aged in
the past decade, but overall, the rise of the religious nones is
something that spans all age groups. Thus it’s a societal-wide change
more than just an age or generational change.
This data doesn't tell us why there is the rise but I have a theory: Church offers little for discerning significance in life.
A few random thoughts (mostly intuitive perceptions.) For
many older adults who grew up in the church, there is disillusionment with
church life. Young adults have who are interested in the church are out
starting up independent congregations that are narrowly targeted to their
particular age demographic. Older Christians feel rejected. As a traditional
congregation tries to become more appealing to the younger demographic,
long-time congregants experience a loss of rhythms and routines that were
meaningful for them. With those gone, worship no longer seems meaningful. Some
look for other congregations but I sense many see the work of integrating into
a new community faith community as too much work. As the number of
congregations with familiar patterns dwindle and close, they slip out the door
into the ether.
Dr. Eileen Lindner, Deputy General Secretary for Research
and Planning of the National Council of Churches USA, gave a presentation a saw
a couple of years ago. She points out the fifty years ago congregations and
denominations were engaged in a whole range of work that ministered to the
world. Beginning the 1960s and 1970s, para-church organizations began to emerge
to do the things congregations once did ... like Young Life and Habitat for
Humanity. Many of the things churches once did have been replaced by nonprofit organizations
that may not have an explicit faith connection. In one sense, the church is
victim of its own success, having encultured values of service into the broader
culture. But the downside is that it frequently feels like all we are left with
is squabbles about internal politics. Congregations and denominations are
struggling for an identity and purpose in relating to the world.
As I’ve written several times, conservative congregations
typically respond by offering programming directed toward therapeutic healing,
personal piety, or political action to stop the “barbarians at the gates.”
Liberal congregations also offer therapeutic healing and personal piety, but
also frequently include political action they discern is directed toward “social
justice.” To me, much of it appears to a be a “me too” response to broader
movements in the culture, hoping to leach off of the meaning people find in
these movements rather than the church itself generating the meaning for
congregants. Religion (right and left) becomes so captive to the categories and
contours of cultural politics that theological understanding is lost. And if
you want to do political action, there are far more dynamic venues than the
church.
And that brings me back to my overarching theory: Church
offers little for discerning significance in life. Too much of church is about
a narrow personal piety (a niche market) while trying to make ourselves relevant
to the culture with “me too” strategies from the periphery of culture. Until people
see how daily life connects with God’s unending mission, I think the Nones
tribe will continue to grow and prosper.
... According to the World Bank, the world's fertility rate is 2.45, slightly above the replacement rate of 2.1. Some demographers believe that by 2020, global fertility will drop below the replacement rate for the first time in history. Why? Because the world is getting richer.
As
people become wealthier, they have fewer kids. When times are good,
instead of reproducing exponentially (like rabbits), people prefer to
spend resources nurturing fewer children, for instance by investing in
education and saving money for the future. This trend toward smaller
families has been observed throughout the developed world, from the
United States to Europe to Asia.
The poorest parts of the world,
most notably sub-Saharan Africa, still have sky-high fertility rates,
but they are declining. The solution is just what it has been elsewhere:
more education, easier access to contraception and economic growth.
Catastrophe avoided.
Consequently, no serious demographer believes
that human population growth resembles cancer or the plague. On the
contrary, the United Nations projects a global population of 9.3 billion
by 2050 and 10.1 billion by 2100. In other words, it will take about 40
years to add 2 billion people, but 50 years to add 1 billion after
that. After world population peaks, it is quite possible that it will
stop growing altogether and might even decline.
Despite all
indications to the contrary, global population cataclysm isn't at hand
and never will be unless the well-established and widely researched
trends reverse themselves. That's not likely.
Incarceration rates for black Americans dropped sharply from 2000 to
2009, especially for women, while the rate of imprisonment for whites
and Hispanics rose over the same decade, according to a report released
Wednesday by a prison research and advocacy group in Washington.
The declining rates for blacks represented a significant shift in the
racial makeup of the United States’ prisons and suggested that the
disparities that have long characterized the prison population may be
starting to diminish.
“It certainly marks a shift from what we’ve seen for several decades now,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, whose report was based on data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the Justice Department. “Normally, these things don’t change very dramatically over a one-decade period.”
The decline in incarceration rates was most striking for black women,
dropping 30.7 percent over the ten-year period. In 2000, black women
were imprisoned at six times the rate of white women; by 2009, they were
2.8 times more likely to be in prison. For black men, the rate of
imprisonment decreased by 9.8 percent; in 2000 they were incarcerated at
7.7 times the rate of white men, a rate that fell to 6.4 times that of
white men by 2009.
For white men and women, however, incarceration rates increased over the
same period, rising 47.1 percent for white women and 8.5 percent for
white men. By the end of the decade, Hispanic men were slightly less
likely to be in prison, a drop of 2.2 percent, but Hispanic women were
imprisoned more frequently, an increase of 23.3 percent.
Over all, blacks currently make up about 38 percent of inmates in state
and federal prisons; whites account for about 34 percent....
The juvenile incarceration in the US rate has fallen 41 percent in the past 15 years, reaching the lowest level since 1975, a new study finds. What is behind the rapid decline?
Fewer young people are behind bars than at any point since 1975, due in
part to lower rates of juvenile crime and a shift away from
interventions focused on long-term incarceration.
The number of young people in a correction facility on a single day
dropped from a high of 107,637 in 1995 to 70,792 in 2010, according to a
new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation that used data from the US Census Bureau. The incarceration rate – the number of young people confined per 100,000 youths – dropped by 41 percent in the same period.
The
trend might be stronger than the data show, says Bart Lubow, director
of the foundation’s Juvenile Justice Strategy Group. Some of the biggest
decreases in youth incarceration in some states have occurred in the
past two years, and those numbers are not included in the report. ...
The main reasons behind the declining numbers:
A shift in thinking about the best ways to handle kids who break the law.
A sustained period of decreasing juvenile crime.
Fiscal pressures on state governments that have many people – including conservatives who in the past espoused tough-on-crime policies – clamoring for less-expensive alternatives to mass incarceration. ...
... “Even with the drops we’re describing in this report, the US, compared to similarly governed countries like those in Western Europe, has a much, much higher [youth] incarceration rate than any of those places,” he says.
America’s incarceration rate for juveniles is 18 times greater than that of France, and more than seven times greater than that of Great Britain. It’s hard to even compare it with the juvenile incarceration rates in places like Finland or Sweden, where young offenders are seldom locked up. ...
"... President Obama was also right, from a Millennials’ perspective, to
emphasize the need for America to become a leader in sustainable energy
technologies. Seventy-one percent of Millennials believe
America’s energy policy should focus on developing “alternative
sources of energy such as wind, solar and hydrogen technology; only a
quarter believes that it should focus on “expanding exploration and
production of oil, coal and natural gas.” Similarly, the RICN’s “Blueprint for a Millennial America,”
a report prepared by thousands of Millennials who participated in
their “Think 2040” project, placed the development and usage of
renewable sources of energy at the top of all other environmental
initiatives.
The participants’ proposed solutions to the challenge, however, were
not focused on the kind of top-down change so common to Boomers.
.Instead the proposals emphasized taking action at the community
level. No one, the RICN blueprint said , should be asked to “make
sacrifices without fully considering the cost to communities” whose
“texture” is most likely to be impacted dealing with the challenge.
Many politicians fail to notice this unique Millennial perspective.
Members of the generation disagree sharply with their elders on the
best way to address environmental challenges, preferring to tackle them
through individual initiative and grassroots action rather than a
heavy-handed top down bureaucratic approach. ..."
That last sentence gives me hope for the future. ;-)
Andrew McAfee explains that the resurgence in American manufacturing doesn't mean the creation of new jobs. There is global decline in manufacturing jobs, even as manufacturing grows, due to automation. He ends with this:
... Even if total manufacturing employment goes down because of automation,
he [Ron Atkinson] writes, other industries will pick up the slack by employing more
people. This is because:
"...most of the savings [from automation] would flow back to
consumers in the form of lower prices. Consumers would then use the
savings to buy things (e.g., go out to dinner, buy books, go on travel).
This economic activity stimulates demand that other companies (e.g.,
restaurants, book stores, and hotels) respond to by hiring more
workers."
Fair enough, but what if those other companies are also automating?
One of the most striking phenomena of recent years is the encroachment
of automation into tasks, skills and abilities that used to belong to
people alone. As we document in Race Against the Machine,
this includes driving cars, responding accurately to natural language
questions, understanding and producing human speech, writing prose,
reviewing documents and many others. Some combination of these will be
valuable in every industry.
Previous waves of automation, like the mechanization of agriculture
and the advent of electric power to factories, have not resulted in
large-scale unemployment or impoverishment of the average worker. But
the historical pattern isn't giving me a lot of comfort these days,
simply because we've never before seen automation encroach so broadly
and deeply, while also improving so quickly at the same time.
I don't know what all the consequences of the current wave of digital
automation will be — no one does. But I'm not blithe about its
consequences for the labor force, because that would be ignoring the
data and missing the big picture.
Despite a deep drop in the number of Americans who identify with a
particular faith, the country could be on the cusp of a religious
renaissance, says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll.
Grounded in more than a million Gallup interviews, Newport’s new book, God Is Alive and Well,
argues that the aging of the baby boomers, the influx of Hispanic
immigrants and the links between religion and health could portend a
bright future for faith in America. [The following interview was edited for length and clarity.]
Why did you write this book?
I
think religion is extremely important in America today. All of our
research shows that, and I wanted to get empirical data about religion
out there, rather than just speculation.
We here at Gallup have
had a tracking project since 2008. We do 350,000 interviews a year,
which is a huge and unique dataset that nobody else has. And personally,
I grew up in a religious background and always found it interesting. ...
Of course, this caught my eye ...
You write that mainline Protestants are pretty much doing everything wrong in terms of growing their churches. Why is that?
For
any group to grow, whether it’s a country or a church, you have to have
more people coming in than going out. For example, the Catholic Church
holds its own in terms of percentage of the American population because
of the in-migration of Hispanics. But there is no massive in-migration
of Protestants.
Second, there’s been no evidence that they’ve been
able to evangelize effectively. And third, one way you grow is to have
high fertility rates. Mormons are doing that well because their theology
encourages big families. But Presbyterians, for example, have fewer
children on average [than other Americans]. So, if you look at all the
ways churches could grow, the mainline Protestants haven’t been able to
hit the nail on the head with any of them. —RNS
Our species can’t seem to escape big data. We have more data inputs, storage, and computing resources than ever, so Homo sapiens naturally does what it has always done when given new tools: It goes even bigger, higher, and bolder.
We did it in buildings and now we’re doing it in data. Sure, big data is a powerful lens — some would even argue a liberating one — for looking at our world. Despite its limitations and requirements, crunching big numbers can help us learn a lot about ourselves.
But no matter how big that data is or what insights we glean from it,
it is still just a snapshot: a moment in time. That’s why I think we
need to stop getting stuck only on big data and start thinking about long data.
By “long” data, I mean datasets that have massive historical sweep —
taking you from the dawn of civilization to the present day. The kinds
of datasets you see in Michael Kremer’s “Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990,” which provides an economic model tied to the world’s population data for a million years; or in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth,
which contains an exhaustive dataset of city populations over
millennia. These datasets can humble us and inspire wonder, but they
also hold tremendous potential for learning about ourselves.
Because as beautiful as a snapshot is, how much richer is a moving
picture, one that allows us to see how processes and interactions unfold
over time? ...
... Why does the time dimension matter if we’re only interested in
current or future phenomena? Because many of the things that affect us
today and will affect us tomorrow have changed slowly over time: sometimes over the course of a single lifetime, and sometimes over generations or even eons.
Datasets of long timescales not only help us understand how the world
is changing, but how we, as humans, are changing it — without this
awareness, we fall victim to shifting baseline
syndrome. This is the tendency to shift our “baseline,” or what is
considered “normal” — blinding us to shifts that occur across
generations (since the generation we are born into is taken to be the
norm). ...
I strongly resonate with this article. Trends and trajectories over extended
periods of time are often far more useful than details of the latest twist or
turn in societal development. It is so easy to get lost in the challenges of
the moment. When you stand back and look at our moment in time from the
standpoint of centuries and millennia, we are living in the most astounding age
of human flourishing in the history of the planet. We are never without
challenges but there is good reason to expect that flourishing will improve in
coming generations.
The two groups I find the most insufferable are youth who believe their latest
insights are the magic solution that brings utopia and grumpy old curmudgeons
who mope about, complaining the world is going to hell in a hand basket.
Neither has a sense of the longue durée. We
need to spend less time with journalists and more time with historians.
Seriously, technological innovation always creates dislocations. Fear of machines replacing humans goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. The economy has always adapted and expect it will again.
Alas, that won't help, as this graph
compiled by statistician Simon Hedlin shows. The total dependency ratio
(children and retirees, compared with those of working age) fell in all
G20/OECD nations bar Germany and Sweden between 1960 and 2010. In the
next fifty years, it will rise in all those nations, bar India and South
Africa. In most nations, the ratio will rise by 40% or more; there are
huge increases in dependency in parts of Asia (China and South Korea)
and in eastern Europe. Britain and America are towards the bottom of the
table, but their problems are big enough.
There are many implications. With more dependents to care for, it is
very hard to imagine how we will pay down our debts. And it is also very
hard to imagine how one can possibly expect government spending to
shrink significantly.
"... BiblioTech, a $1.5 million Bexar County paperless
library will have scores of computer terminals, laptops, tablets, and
e-readers – but not a dog-eared classic or dusty reference book in
sight.
“Think of an Apple store,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who led his county’s bookless library project, told NPR when describing the planned library.
The 4,989-squre-foot, digital-only library, one of the first of its
kind, will feature 100 e-readers available for circulation, 50 e-readers
for children, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops, and 25 tablets for
on-site use. Patrons can check out e-readers for two weeks or load books
onto their own devices.
“A technological evolution is taking place,” Wolff says. “And I think we’re stepping in at the right time.” ..."
"UCLA's survey of incoming
college freshmen shows fewer identify as liberals and an increasing
number saying the economy significantly affected their college choice."
"In some ways, this shift isn’t as dramatic as it might first appear.
Even though younger evangelicals are increasingly walking away from the
religious right, they are still self-identifying as Republicans (54 percent) more than Democrats (26 percent). Younger
Christians still agree with the religious right on the issues but
reject the movement’s tactics, tone, and narrow focus on social issues."
8. Scientific American: The Liberals' War on Science. How politics distorts science on both ends of the spectrum.
"Surveys show that moderate liberals and conservatives embrace science
roughly equally (varying across domains), which is why scientists like
E. O. Wilson and organizations like the National Center for Science
Education are reaching out to moderates in both parties to rein in the
extremists on evolution and climate change. Pace Barry Goldwater,
extremism in the defense of liberty may not be a vice, but it is in
defense of science, where facts matter more than faith—whether it comes
in a religious or secular form—and where moderation in the pursuit of
truth is a virtue."
... To better understand
the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed
employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists,
technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs and
workers who are competing with smarter machines.
The
AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that
pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. Jobs that form
the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North
America and Asia.
In the United States, half
of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid
middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17
European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6
million midpay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008
through last June.
Those jobs are being replaced in many cases by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.
"Everything
that humans can do a machine can do," says Moshe Vardi, a computer
scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Things are happening that look
like science fiction." ...
... So machines are
getting smarter and people are more comfortable using them. Those
factors, combined with the financial pressures of the Great Recession,
have led companies and government agencies to cut jobs the past five
years, yet continue to operate just as well.
How is that happening?
-Reduced
aid from Indiana's state government and other budget problems forced
the Gary, Ind., public school system last year to cut its annual
transportation budget in half, to $5 million. The school district
responded by using sophisticated software to draw up new, more efficient
bus routes. And it cut 80 of 160 drivers. ...
... -In South Korea, Standard Chartered is
expanding "smart banking" branches that employ a staff of three,
compared with an average of about eight in traditional branches. ...
... -The
British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced plans last year to
invest $518 million in the world's first long-haul, heavy-duty
driverless train system at its Pilbara iron ore mines in Western
Australia. The automated trains are expected to start running next year.
The trains are part of what Rio Tinto calls its "Mine of the Future"
program, which includes 150 driverless trucks and automated drills.
Like
many technologically savvy startups, Dirk Vander Kooij's
furniture-making company in the Netherlands needs only a skeleton crew -
four people ...
... -Google's driverless car and the Pentagon's
drone aircraft are raising the specter of highways and skies filled with
cars and planes that can get around by themselves. ...
... "Trying to keep it from happening would have
been like the Teamsters in the early 1900s trying to stop the
combustion engine," Lavin says. "You can't stand in the way of
technology."
The upside of emerging technology is that most will make goods and services
less expensive. That improves our living standard. The downside is that much of
the work we used to do in order to earn the wages to buy goods and services is
rapidly changing. As the last sentence of the article notes, this is not the
first time we have been in these circumstances. Years ago I read that in 1885,
approximately 80% of everything we consumed in the U.S. was produced at home.
By 1915, 80% was produced outside the home. It created massive economic
dislocations. Each time these disruptions occur it has been hard for the people
living at that time to foresee what the new economic order would look like.
It is critical that Christian thinkers wrestle with the challenges of technological
innovation. Creative destruction (the market dynamic where jobs and industries
are destroyed in the wake of creating new ones) has always been a difficult one
for ethics. It is painful but the social cost of other alternatives is also
quite high. Anti-technological calls to abandon consumerism or, conversely,
just saying that “the market will sort it all out,” are not legitimate
responses. I think topics like this should be at the center of our theological
reflection about human labor and the economy.
(Reuters) - The percentage of workers belonging to unions tumbled to 11.3 percent in 2012, the lowest percentage in 76 years, led by dramatic declines in states where lawmakers have put organized labor in the political crosshairs, government figures showed on Wednesday.
The total number of union members fell by nearly 400,000, from 11.8 percent of the workforce in 2011, the Labor Department report on union membership said. The rate of 11.3 percent of the workforce was the lowest since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt was president. ...
... Some analysts blame unions for the drop.
Membership has been falling since 2008, when it was 16.1 million, or
12.4 percent of the workforce, federal data shows. It peaked in 1954,
when 28.3 percent of workers were represented by organized labor.
"They must now admit that they are not investing
enough staff and funds in organizing and not embarking on an
imaginative journey to rediscover the relevancy of unions," said Gary
Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University.
"Essentially, workers are feeling tremendous job insecurity ... Yet as
today's figures suggest, workers are not turning to unions to act as
their voice." ...
1. Too often Westerners perceive African economy as a monolithic basket case. There are actually many regions of that are very hopeful. Ozwald Boateng explains Why entrepreneurs are back in Africa
3. Lots of recent talk about whether or not e-books will ever actually totally supplant hard copy books. This week Mashable explores Why Are People Still Buying CDs? (And people are still buying them.)
7. I almost didn't link this article because I could swear I've linked it before. Why Does Deja Vu Happen?
8. Several months ago I saw a speech expert interviewed has offered voice training to a number of famous figures. One was Margaret Thatcher. They showed her speaking in the 1970s and then in the 1980s, after receiving voice training. A big piece of the change was lessening the modulation in tone and pitch, which tends to vary more widely with female voices. The changes were intended to make her sound more authoritative, which both men and women, unjustified as it may be, more often associate with male vocal traits. But apparently, the thing that really triggers gender detection in our language is the way we use S's. Change Your Perceived Gender by Pronouncing S's Differently
... If the nation’s independent and
nondenominational churches were combined into a single group they would
represent the third largest cluster of religious adherents in the
country, following the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist
Convention; second largest in the number of churches – following the
Southern Baptist. Overall, this research found over 35,000 churches
representing more than 12,200,000 adherents. In total, four percent of
the US population worships in an independent or nondenominational
church.
And the phenomenon is on the rise. Our study
identifies a larger number of people engaged in nondenominational
churches than Barry Kosmin found in the American Religious Identification Survey
in 2008 where they estimated 8 million Americans identified as
nondenominational Christians. In their studies, this count was up
significantly from only 0.1% or 194,000 in 1990. According to the General Social Survey,
the percent of Protestants claiming “no denomination or
non-denominational” has risen from roughly four percent in the 1970s to
fifteen percent in 2006. (The Ties that Bind: Network Overlap among Independent Congregations Christopher D. Bader Christopher P. Scheitle and Buster Smith).
Pew’s Religious Landscape Study
also found significant numbers of Americans affiliate with independent
and nondenominational churches, although the exact number and percent is
not entirely clear given how they divided their labeling. It is
absolutely clear, as Kosmin said recently,
that “The rise of non-denominational Christianity is probably one of
the strongest trends in the last two decades…. It is nearly as sharp an
increase as the no-religion response.” Additionally, the Baylor Survey of Religion report claims non-denominational churches are the fastest growing Protestant churches
in America and in 2006, as it is now, they are the second largest
Protestant group just behind the Southern Baptist Convention....
... These congregations should be seen as a separate and distinctive
religious reality. If we begin to think of them as not just individual
aberrant outliers or lone isolated congregations but rather as a unique
religious phenomenon – as a distinctive religious market segment – then
we can begin to address the question of why they have become so popular
in the past few decades. As a group, they are a significant reality –
one that demands consideration, study and reflection on why they are so
prevalent currently. ...
... Megachurches often get associated with the nondenominational movement
but in fact only about 35% of the Protestant churches over 2000
attenders are nondenominational. Nevertheless, roughly half of the
nation’s largest and fastest growing Protestant churches, as determined
by the most recent Outreach Magazine listing were nondenominational. ...
Five years ago I wrote a piece called, Technophysio
Evolution and Demographic Transition, explaining the dynamics and trends of
global population growth and decline. Slate has and excellent article
explaining the Demographic Transition Model.
Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.
The world’s seemingly relentless march toward overpopulation achieved
a notable milestone in 2012: Somewhere on the planet, according to U.S.
Census Bureau estimates, the 7 billionth living person came into existence.
Lucky No. 7,000,000,000 probably celebrated his or her birthday
sometime in March and added to a population that’s already stressing the
planet’s limited supplies of food, energy, and clean water. Should this trend continue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a five-part series marking the occasion, by midcentury, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity.”
A somewhat more arcane milestone, meanwhile, generated no media
coverage at all: It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth.
That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first
time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3
billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years,
respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has
slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’
best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within
the lifespan of people alive today.
And then it will fall. ...
... Why is this happening? Scientists who study population dynamics point to a phenomenon called “demographic transition.”
“For hundreds of thousands of years,” explains Warren Sanderson, a
professor of economics at Stony Brook University, “in order for humanity
to survive things like epidemics and wars and famine, birthrates had to
be very high.” Eventually, thanks to technology, death rates started to
fall in Europe and in North America, and the population size soared. In
time, though, birthrates fell as well, and the population leveled out.
The same pattern has repeated in countries around the world. Demographic
transition, Sanderson says, “is a shift between two very different
long-run states: from high death rates and high birthrates to low death
rates and low birthrates.” Not only is the pattern well-documented, it’s
well under way: Already, more than half the world’s population is
reproducing at below the replacement rate. ...
... One of the most contentious issues is the question of whether birthrates in developed countries will remain low. The United Nation’s most recent forecast,
released in 2010, assumes that low-fertility countries will eventually
revert to a birthrate of around 2.0. In that scenario, the world population tops out at about 10 billion
and stays there. But there’s no reason to believe that that birthrates
will behave in that way—no one has every observed an inherent human
tendency to have a nice, arithmetically stable 2.1 children per couple.
On the contrary, people either tend to have an enormous number of kids
(as they did throughout most of human history and still do in the most
impoverished, war-torn parts of Africa) or far too few. We know how to
dampen excessive population growth—just educate girls. The other problem
has proved much more intractable: No one’s figured out how to boost
fertility in countries where it has imploded. Singapore has been encouraging parenthood for nearly 30 years, with cash incentives of up to $18,000 per child. Its birthrate? A gasping-for-air 1.2. When Sweden started offering parents generous support, the birthrate soared but then fell back again, and after years of fluctuating, it now stands at 1.9—very high for Europe but still below replacement level.
The reason for the implacability of demographic transition can be
expressed in one word: education. One of the first things that countries
do when they start to develop is educate their young people, including
girls. That dramatically improves the size and quality of the workforce.
But it also introduces an opportunity cost for having babies. “Women
with more schooling tend to have fewer children,” says William Butz, a
senior research scholar at IIASA. ...
Many readers will remember the book The Big Sort
by Bill Bishop. It argues that Americans are increasingly clustered in
like-minded political communities. If one categorizes a county by how
its residents voted in presidential elections, as of 2004 nearly half
(48%) of Americans lived in “landslide” countries where one presidential
candidate got at least 60% of the vote. In 1976, that number was 27%.
A new article (currently and graciously ungated) by political scientists Samuel Abrams and Morris Fiorina
challenges this account, however. Abrams and Fiorina argue that
presidential voting is not a reliable indicator of partisanship, as
voting may depend on idiosyncratic features of candidates. Better, they
argue, is party registration, which more reliably measures people’s
underlying partisan preference (if any).
When landslide counties are identified using party registration and this same 60/40 threshold, the trend is the complete opposite
of a Big Sort. The fraction living in such counties was 50% in 1976;
in 2008, it was 15%. This same conclusion emerges using thresholds
lower than 60/40.
Abrams and Fiorina conclude: ...
I think Bishop's thesis is right. Still, it is interesting to hear some skeptical analysis.
A group of Chinese intellectuals has called on the government to
implement urgent political reforms and respect human rights or risk
"violent revolution".
In an open letter 71 top academics warned that growing economic
imbalances were fuelling social unrest and an uprising could erupt if
reforms were not implemented immediately, Hu Xingdou, one of the
signatories, told AFP Monday.
"If urgent systematic reforms needed by Chinese society continue to
suffer setbacks and stagnate, then official corruption and social
dissatisfaction will boil up to a crisis point," said the letter, posted
on the Internet last week.
"China will once again miss the opportunity for peaceful reform, and slip into the turbulence and chaos of violent revolution." ...
... While the latest call for reform steered away from Charter 08's advocacy
of western-style democracy, it called on the Communist Party fully to
implement the freedoms of speech, press and association that are
protected by the constitution but routinely ignored by the authorities
and police. ...
If you look behind the often dire headlines and examine the long-term trends, you'll see that crime is falling, lifespans are increasing, and poverty is ebbing. In other words, there's solid evidence for hope.
There's much more good news than bad news. But bad news travels fast and
commands attention. Good news is like water carving a valley or a tree
gradually extending its branches. Good news is a child learning a little
more each day or a business quietly prospering. We hardly notice it.
Examine the data over time, and you'l find irrefutable evidence of
progress: the decline of war and violent crime, the increase in life
spans; the spread of literacy, democracy, and equal rights; the waning
of privilege based on race, gender, heredity, beliefs (Jina Moore and a
team of Monitor writers say this much more specifically in our cover
story: "Progress Watch 2012").
Every so often there are vivid scenes of good news -- Neil Armstrong bouncing onto the moon, revelers atop the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela walking out of Robben Island prison. But most of the time good news is incremental, which causes it to be taken for granted.
Not
bad news. When we hear it, we sit up and ask, "What just happened?"...
... And
when there's a shortage of bad news in the present, we can always turn
to the future. Welcome to worry, dread, and pessimism. Sure, things seem
OK now, but just over the horizon a disaster is brewing. Don't be a
sap. Bad things are on the way.
They probably are. And they'll
shock us and again make us wonder if life is out of control. But in this
last issue of our news magazine for 2012, we're looking in the rearview
mirror to see how things are going, and we're finding plenty of reason
for hope. ...
In PurItan New England, Protestant and Catholic churches are declining while evangelical and Pentecostal groups are rising. Why the nation's most secular region may hint at the future of religion.
This is a lengthy article that is hard to summarize. Here are a few interesting excerpts:
... The recent changes in New England have been significant:
•Between 2000 and 2010, the
Catholic church has lost 28 percent of its members in New Hampshire and
33 percent in Maine. It has closed at least 69 parishes (25 percent) in
greater Boston.
•Over the same period, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) established 118 new churches in northern New England, according to the 2010 Religion Census. About 50 of them inhabit buildings once owned by mainline churches.
•Other denominations are growing, too, including Pentecostals: Assemblies of God (11 new churches in Massachusetts) and International Church of the Foursquare
Gospel (13 new churches in Massachusetts and Maine). The Seventh-day
Adventists, an evangelical group, opened 55 new churches in
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine between 2000 and 2010, according
to the Religion Census. Muslims and Mormons are experiencing membership
gains as well.
More change looms on the horizon.
In 2013, northern New England will lose its only mainline Protestant
seminary and accredited graduate school of religion when the Bangor Theological Seminary closes in May. Three months later, Southern Baptists
will open Northeastern Baptist College – the first SBC-affiliated
pastor-training college in northern New England – in Bennington, Vt. ...
... Much of the church growth in secular New England
stems from immigrants and the cultures they create in pursuit of
spiritual grounding. Researchers at the Emmanuel Gospel Center (EGC), a
Boston-based Christian organization that studies urban ministries, call
it a "quiet revival." It is often overlooked because the Religion Census
tracks only denominations, yet nondenominational churches account for
some of the fastest-filling pews, or folding chairs, as the case may
more often be. ...
And ...
... In Westbrook, Maine, the
Seventh-day Adventists last year acquired a new regional headquarters – a
14,500-square-foot library. In Northfield, Mass., near the Vermont
border, a 217-acre campus will be handed to a Christian institution in
2013 as a gift from Oklahoma's Green family, billionaire owners of a craft store chain, who bought and renovated the property in order to give it away.
Some churches that offer an
alternative to prevailing regional values, in both New England and
around the country, are attracting new disciples. Liberal Unitarian
Universalists have seen some of their fastest growth in recent years in
Oklahoma, Tennessee, and other conservative Southern states.
In New England, the converse is
true. Churches that echo the prevailing culture's moral relativism and
liberal sensibilities sometimes struggle to differentiate themselves.
Yet when a doctrine-minded pastor like Joey Marshall unpacks the Bible,
verse by verse, many people yearn for his unflinching message. To
accommodate growing numbers, Mr. Marshall's Living Stone Community
Church in Standish, Maine, moved from a traditional 50-seat structure to
a former paintball facility. ...
And ...
... Churches that have equated faith
with political activism, in fact, are watching their ranks thin. Lewis,
the Bangor Seminary dean, sees emphasis on politics as one reason some
mainline denominations have seen their membership decline accelerate in
the past 10 years.
"In the mainline denominations,
liberalism is dead, but they just don't know it yet," says [Steve] Lewis, an
ordained Methodist elder. "Liberalism has moved so far toward the social
consciousness [agenda] that it's lost its spiritual roots. What they
need [in the mainlines] is a passionate spirituality." ...
3. Four Harvard and MIT grads are experimenting with direct aid to the poor. "GiveDirectly, the brainchild of four Harvard and MIT graduate students, is so simple, it's genius. Give poor Kenyan families $1,000 -- and let them do whatever they want with it." Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever?
"... Despite
its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for
rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and
conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has
sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of
the health service.
Their success is envied by the centre right
in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to
grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006.
The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right
government had been re-elected after serving a full term.
As the
state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a
former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a
visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all
welfare services are now owned by private equity firms". ..."
"... We
have reached a point in our economy where it is becoming increasingly
clear that businesses are being measured not just for their profit, but
also for their impact. And I’m not just talking about writing a check or
funding a charity; I’m referring to business models for which community
involvement and inspirational brand building are the profit centers.
(Think Warby Parker, TOMS, and startups such as SOMA.) I recently went
to a conference where the founders of a startup posited a powerful idea:
the future of marketing is philanthropy. But I think the even bigger
idea is the future of business is morality. My grandfather saw this
early on.
At a time when the moral framework of America appears
to be fractured – or at the very least confused – businesses are in the
propitious position to espouse cultural standards that can help restore
values that our youth can use to build the next generation of positive
enterprise. In fact, whether businesses succeed in creating and
promoting positive cultures might determine whether they stay in
business at all. The future of business is morality, and the future is
now.
Whether it’s the job of the corporation or not to set the
moral tone for society, the expectation is trending towards companies
setting the right example for others to follow. With the sharp rise in
entrepreneurship, young companies have the opportunity to establish
strong cultures early on and share them with their communities. Money
must have a moral center, and from greater consciousness in business,
greater profit will follow. ..."
"New data show an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teens in the U.S. and Canada over the past two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe."
More people moved out of California in 2011 than moved in, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau, signaling that the Democrat-run state’s economic woes continue to drive residents away.
Most statisticians attribute California’s net loss of 100,000 people last year to its high cost of living, increased population density and troubling unemployment rate.
The widening middle class in Mexico is also encouraging some immigrants to remain in that country instead of moving to California.
Texas — home to lower taxes, less regulation and what the Manhattan Institute calls a “labor pool with the right skills at the right price” — is one of the most attractive destinations for companies departing from California, according to the Census Bureau. ...
"The country reported 85 executions in 2000 but only 43 in 2012, according to a new report released by the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus, far fewer people are being sentenced to death row in the first place. The year 2000 saw 224 new inmates sentenced to death, while 2012 saw only 78, according to the report."
15. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had a great piece Why 'If We Can Just Save One Child ...' Is a Bad Argument, referring to a statement President Obama made at Newtown, CT. When we deal with complex topics like gun control, we are always
talking about tradeoffs. For instance, I know how we can save more
than 30,000 lives. The were 32,367 traffic fatalities last
year. Let's set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. Nearly all those lives would be saved. Should we do this "if we can save just
one more life"? I, like Friedersforf, am not advocating any particular
policy. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of making statements like this, as politicians often do.
"I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a
result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that
served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive.
The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they
splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old
evangelicalism whimper and wane."
He speaks of an Evangelical "collapse" having happened. That may be a bit premature but I think his articulation of trends is right.
A mass shooting is four or more people murdered in 24 hours. A mass public shooting occurs in a public place like a business or a school, but excludes events like domestic killings, gang violence, and robbery attempts. Brad Plummer at The Washington Post has a chart today that shows the instances of all mass shootings (Graph of the day: Perhaps mass shootings aren’t becoming more common.)
Consistent with the thesis of my post, this graph does not show a society spiraling out of control with violence. It shows a remarkably stable pattern, altough a pattern that is well above the rates for other OECD nations.
This month's Atlantic magazine predicts that we are on the verge ofa U.S.-based manufacturing renaissance,
as companies see the advantages to making more goods at home, such as
more control over the final product, lower energy costs from moving
goods across an ocean, and a falling "wage gap."
Simply put, U.S. factory workers are a much better deal than they were just ten years ago. ...
(Reuters) - The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.
Their report, conflicting with United Nations
studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to
avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7
billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland".
More crops for use as biofuels and increased meat consumption in emerging economies such as China and India, demanding more cropland to feed livestock, would not offset a fall from the peak driven by improved yields, it calculated.
If the report is accurate, the land freed up from crop farming would be some 10 percent of what is currently in use - equivalent to 2.5 times the size of France, Europe's biggest country bar Russia, or more than all the arable land now utilized in China.
"We
believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net
global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse
Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the
Rockefeller University in New York.
"Happily,
the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but
rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he
wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and
Development Review. ...
The chart above shows the 30 occupations that are expected to experience the largest job growth between 2010 and 2020, according to employment forecasts from the BLS.
Between 2010 and 2020, the BLS estimates that the total number of U.S.
jobs will increase by 20.4 million, from 143 million in 2010 to 163.5
million by 2020. The number of jobs created this decade in the top 30
fastest growing occupations – 9.3 million – will represent almost half
of all of the new jobs created by 2020.
What’s really interesting is that only five of the top 30 occupations
expected to create the most jobs by 2020 require a college degree or
more (nursing, post-secondary teachers, elementary school teachers,
accountants and physicians), and ten of the fastest growing occupations
don’t even require a high school diploma. Moreover, of the top nine
occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade, only one
(nursing) requires a 4-year college degree. ...
There has been a substantial reduction in both the extreme poverty rate
and the number of people living in extreme poverty since the early
1980s, according to information from the World Bank poverty database.
The World Bank maintains data on developing world nations, which
include both low income and middle income nations. The analysis below
summarizes developing world (low and middle income nations) poverty
trends from 1981 to the latest available year, 2008 (Table and Figure
1).
The article also includes this graph:
Go to the article for a number of interesting nuances in how poverty has changed.
The
horrific massacre in Newton, Connecticut, is to sparking debate about
guns and violence, as well it should. As the discussion gets underway, I
think it is helpful to get a sense of where we stand in the flow of history as
it relates to violence in the United States. Here are a few
things to consider.
Below is data
from the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The annual report compiles
reported crimes. It strength is the use of hard data. Its biggest weakness is the
absence of unreported crime. The willingness of people to report crime varies
by type of crime and their willingness to report may change over time. Also, law enforcement’s diligence with
different types of crime may change over time. Tougher enforcement can lead to fewer
incidents of actual crime, even as incidents
of reported crime rise. Nevertheless,
the UCR is an important measure.
Crimes
are grouped in two categories:
Violent - murder and non-negligent manslaughter,
forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
Property - burglary,
larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.
Violent
crime is at a forty year low.
A second
measure is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Twice a year, surveys ask members of households if they have been victims of particular crimes, reported or
not. The strength of the survey is that it captures unreported crime. A
weakness may be that some crimes, like domestic violence, are underreported.
The NCVS
is also broken into two categories:
Violent - rape, robbery, and assault.
Property
- burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.
(A
different methodology was used in 2006 that makes it incomparable with other
years. Also, 2011 data has been published and shows an uptick in crime.
However, the 2002 and 2010 data in the recent report, used as comparison points, do
not match earlier publications and I have yet to determine why. I chose not to
include it here until I have a better understanding.)
An
interesting question: Was there truly less crime fifty years ago or were people
simply less likely to report crimes? I doubt there is a definitive answer. Murder
is sometimes used as a proxy for overall violence in society. Here is the United States murder
rate per 100,000 population:
Additionally,
there is this estimation of the murder rate over the last 300 years. (Source: The Public
Intellectual)
The
lowest murder rate ever was 4.6 in 1963. It was 4.7 in 2011.
It can conclusively
be said that that violence in American society is not spiraling out of control.
We are living in one of the least violent eras in
American history. But this is not the
whole story.
(Go to
the source linked above for info about individual countries.)
The 4.7
homicide rate for the United States is a near record low but it is still two or
three times the rate of other Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development nations. Guns are a big part of this difference. The good news is
the precipitous decline in aggravated deaths. The bad news is how much more violence there is in
the United States compared to other nations, even at all-time lows.
… And
yet those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.
"There
is no pattern, there is no increase," says criminologist James Allen Fox
of Boston's Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since
the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.
The
random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox
says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer. …
… Grant
Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has
written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings
rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And
mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He
estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first
decade of the century.
Chances
of being killed in a mass shooting, he says, are probably no greater than being
struck by lightning.
Still,
he understands the public perception - and extensive media coverage - when mass
shootings occur in places like malls and schools. "There is this feeling
that could have been me. It makes it so much more frightening." …
(I realize
that does not seem to square with the statement about mass shootings peaking in 1929. I suspect a typo and "1999" was what was intended.)
This
data was reported in March of 2010. According to a recent Los Angeles Times
article, Deadliest
U.S. mass shootings, there have been nine mass shootings in the United
States in the first three years of this decade. That projects out to thirty for this decade. But there have been five mass shootings in the last five months.
There clearly has been an uptick in mass shootings over the past year.
On
a final note, the Sandy Hook massacre involved young children at school. Over
the past twenty years, the number of children 5-18 years old murdered at school
has ranged from a low of 14 (school years ending in 2000 and in 2001) and a
high of 34 (schools years ending 1993 and in 1998.) (Source: Indicators of School Safety: 2011) According to an article in the Guardian, Mass
shootings at schools and universities in the US – timeline, over the last fifty years there have been
six school mass shootings (including Sandy Hook) that have taken the lives of
children 5-18. Three of the mass shootings were at primary schools (Stockton, CA,
in 1989; Nickel Mines, PA, 2006; and now Sandy Hook.)
So
here are a few observations and comments:
The United States has an excessively violent culture.
Violence has lessened significantly in recent years. We are not spiraling into
chaos.
Guns are an important factor in the excessive homicide rates. I don't know why citizens need to own semi-automatic weapons. But there is more
than access to these guns that needs to be addressed here.
While a case can be made that mass murders have been declining in the long run,
the sudden frequency of them in recent months is alarming (five in five months).
Nothing that is said above should take away from our outrage at the senseless
death of innocent children and their teachers. But Friday’s shooting should not
send us into despair that things are spiraling out of control. Friday’s
shooting should motivate us to ask anew how we can accelerate our march toward
becoming a less violent society.
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1. Pray for Egypt Today!
More than 50 million Egyptians are voting today on a constitution that would be a giant step backward for Egypt and much of the Middle East, marginalizing women and religious minorities. A nation that has historically been a voice of moderation, the largest Muslim nation in the region, will likely move toward becoming an Islamist state. Remember to pray for Egypt. (See the Economist'sThe Founding Brothers)
2. Our prayers are with families of the victims at the Sandy Hook elementary school. Grace and peace to the entire community.
Traffic deaths in the USA continued their historic decline last year,
falling to the lowest level since 1949, the government announced
Monday.
A total of 32,367 motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians died in 2011,
a 1.9% decrease from 2010. Last year’s toll represents a 26% decline
from 2005, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
said. ...
... The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as
well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The
state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white
students.
“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have
any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health
commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in
the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011....
....The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells. ...
... The research is still in its early stages, and many questions remain.
The researchers are not entirely sure why the treatment works, or why it
sometimes fails. One patient had a remission after being treated only
twice, and even then the reaction was so delayed that it took the
researchers by surprise. For the patients who had no response
whatsoever, the team suspects a flawed batch of T-cells. The child who
had a temporary remission apparently relapsed because not all of her
leukemic cells had the marker that was targeted by the altered T-cells. ...
....In 2011, 1.4 million chlamydia infections were reported to the CDC.
The rate of cases per 100,000 people increased 8%, to 457.6 in 2011 from
423.6 in 2010.
The CDC reported 321,849 gonorrhea infections. The
rate increased 4% to 104.2 cases per 100,000 in 2011 from 100.2 in
2010. Like chlamydia, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease,
a major cause of infertility in women.
Last year, 13,970 primary and secondary syphilis cases were reported. The rate of 4.5 cases per 100,000 was unchanged from 2010. ...
7. You may be bilingual but can you write in two languages, one with each hand, at the same time?!
10. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones speculates on why liberals have more exaggerated perceptions of political differences. We Are More Alike Than We Think
11. A surprising "right to work" bill was signed into law in Michigan, of all places. That has spurred a lot of debate about unions and the right to work. Michael Kinsley wrote a thoughtful piece opposing RTW, The Liberal Case Against Right-to-Work Laws. David Henderson has piece in support of RTW, The Economics of "Right to Work".
12. Slate has a piece about The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement.
Keith Kloor opines on the division between mondernist environmentalists
(or eco-pragmatists) and conservation traditionalists.
...
Modernist greens don't dispute the ecological tumult associated with the
Anthropocene. But this is the world as it is, they say, so we might as
well reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. To this
end, Kareiva advises conservationists to craft "a new vision of a planet
in which nature—forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient
ecosystems—exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."
This
shift in thinking is already under way. For example, ecologists
increasingly appreciate (and study) the diversity of species and
importance of ecosystem services in cities, giving rise to the
discipline of urban ecology. That was unthinkable at the dawn of the
modern environmental movement 50 years ago, when greens loathed cities
as the antithesis of wilderness. ...
13. One of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes I remember from my
childhood was when this woman ends up trapped in a department store at
night. The mannequins begin calling to her. She discovers she is actually a mannequin who
has over stayed her time out in the world and it is time for the next
mannequin to spend some time outside the store. This story confirms my worst nightmares: In Some Stores, the Mannequins Are Watching You
15. One of the biggest concerns about fracking technology is the enormous amount of water it uses. A company has figured out how to recycle water so that far less water is used in the fracking process. Solving fracking's biggest problem
... 3D printing represents the latest version of what industry experts call
"additive manufacturing" — a way to turn practically any computer
designs into real objects by building them up layer-by-layer using
plastics, metals or other materials. The technology could end up
affecting every major industry — aerospace, defense, medicine, transportation, food, fashion — and have an even bigger impact on U.S. manufacturing than the robot revolution. ...
20. Michael Cheshire has a great piece in Leadership Journal on "What I learned about grace and redemption through my friendship with a Christian pariah." Going To Hell with Ted Haggard
".... A while back I was having a business lunch at a sports bar in the
Denver area with a close atheist friend. He's a great guy and a very
deep thinker. During lunch, he pointed at the large TV screen on the
wall. It was set to a channel recapping Ted's fall. He pointed his
finger at the HD and said, "That is the reason I will not become a
Christian. Many of the things you say make sense, Mike, but that's what
keeps me away."
It was well after the story had died down, so I had to study the screen
to see what my friend was talking about. I assumed he was referring to
Ted's hypocrisy. "Hey man, not all of us do things like that," I
responded. He laughed and said, "Michael, you just proved my point. See,
that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and
forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys
can't forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you
talk to me about God, you explain that he will take me as I am. You say
he forgives all my failures and will restore my hope, and as long as I
stay outside the church, you say God wants to forgive me. But that guy
failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to
him." Then he uttered words that left me reeling: "You Christians eat
your own. Always have. Always will."
He was running late for a meeting and had to take off. I, however, could
barely move. I studied the TV and read the caption as a well-known
religious leader kept shoveling dirt on a man who had admitted he was
unclean. And at that moment, my heart started to change. I began to
distance myself from my previously harsh statements and tried to
understand what Ted and his family must have been through. When I
brought up the topic to other men and women I love and respect, the very
mention of Haggard's name made our conversations toxic. Their reactions
were visceral."
21. Leonardo Bonucci got a yellow card for faking collision during a
soccer game. It should have been a red card. No one deserves to be a professional soccer player with acting skills
this bad!
When the economy became unreliable, people decided to rely on themselves to propel their careers.
“We see the labor market itself following the trend that we call ‘the individualization of work' — people working for themselves,” says Iain MacDonald, CEO of SkillPages. “People are increasingly either moving jobs more often, doing what they love, or doing what they really like to do, rather than what they have to do.”
Nearly one in three workers in America are freelancers, contractors, or contingent workers, according to the Freelancers Union, and 19 percent of them say that they've doubled their income within the past year.
According to a survey by Elance, the average freelancer expects to earn 43 percent more in 2013 than they did in 2012. Furthermore, 70 percent claim they're happier and 79 percent say they're more productive working as a freelancer than a full-time employee. ...
A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.
The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are dramatic: infant mortality has declined by more than half between 1990 and 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.
At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.
But while developing countries made big strides – the average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 28 in 1970 – the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries between 1990 and 2010. The two years of life they gained was less than in Cyprus, where women gained 2.3 years of life, and Canada, where women gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. ...
... The World Health Organization issued a statement Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differ substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others are similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries – representing about 15 percent of the world’s population – produce quality cause-of-death data. ...
Infant mortality and life expectancy at birth are probably the two best indicators of human well-being. So many interconnected factors must be present for improvement in these numbers to be realized. The reality is that human flourishing is getting better. Better does not mean utopia or the consummated Kingdom of God. Better means better. The challenge is to learn from what is going right and strengthen it.
All-natural domesticity has adherents on both sides of the political spectrum.
The current cultural mania for DIY domesticity—backyard chickens,
urban knitting circles, the rise of homeschooling, the sudden ubiquity
of homemade jam—shows no sign of abating. Across the country,
progressives are embracing home and hearth with new vigor under the
guise of environmental sustainability, anti-consumerism, and better
health.
The movement has made for some very odd attitudes, especially when it
comes to gender. The terms "liberal" and "conservative" barely seem to
apply. The new progressive morality about food sometimes feels as retro
and conservative as anything dreamed up during the 1950s. In many
well-educated, well-heeled quarters, what you cook determines your worth
as a mother (Is it organic? Local? BPA-free?), laziness in the kitchen
is understood to doom your children to lives of obesity and menial
labor, and the very idea of convenience is slatternly and shameful. In this culture, we have Berkeley heroes like Michael Pollan writing scoldingly about how feminism killed home cooking. Michelle Obama, every Democrat's favorite organic gardener, has been criticized for saying she doesn't like to cook. And not by Fox News, but by food writer and noted latte-apologist Amanda Hesser in the New York Times....
... It's hard to know what to make of all this. Crunchy progressives are
arguing that quitting your job to become a homemaker is a radical
feminist act, far-right evangelicals are talking about "women's
empowerment" via Etsy, lefty liberal writers are excoriating the First
Lady for hating to cook, and dyed-in-the-wool conservatives are giving
birth in their bathtubs with midwives and self-hypnosis tapes.
Both sides of the political spectrum turn to domesticity for many of
the same reasons: distrust in government and institutions from the EPA
to the public schools to hospital maternity wards, worries about the
safety of the food supply, disappointment with the working world, the
desire to connect with a simpler, less consumerist way of life.
The fact that domesticity is so appealing speaks to the failure of
these systems. Until these things are fixed, I predict we'll see an
increasing number of people from all parts of the political spectrum
deciding to go the DIY route with their food, their homes, their
children. And yes, this will mean more progressive people opting for
lifestyles that seem uncomfortably retro. But maybe too we'll see Rush
Limbaugh at the farmer's market.
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