... 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.
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. ...
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. ...
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 global study of religious adherence released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center
found that about one of every six people worldwide has no religious
affiliation. This makes the “unaffiliated,” as the study calls them, the
third-largest group worldwide, with 16 percent of the global population
— about equal to Catholics. ...
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.
(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)
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!
AP has a story summarizing Global Trends 2030, a report put out by the U.S. Intelligence community.
... The study said that in
a best-case scenario, Americans, together with nearly two-thirds of the
world's population, will be middle class, mostly living in cities,
connected by advanced technology, protected by advanced health care and
linked by countries that work together, perhaps with the United States
and China cooperating to lead the way.
Violent
acts of terrorism will also be less frequent as the U.S. drawdown in
troops from Iraq and Afghanistan robs extremist ideologies of a rallying
cry to spur attacks. But that will likely be replaced by acts like
cyber-terrorism, wreaking havoc on an economy with a keystroke, the
study's authors say.
In countries where there are declining birth rates and an aging population like the U.S., economic growth may slow.
"Aging
countries will face an uphill battle in maintaining living standards,"
Kojm said. "So too will China, because its median age will be higher
than the U.S. by 2030."
The rising populations
of disenfranchised youth in places like Nigeria and Pakistan may lead
to conflict over water and food, with "nearly half of the world's
population ... experiencing severe water stress," the report said.
Africa and the Middle East will be most at risk, but China and India are
also vulnerable.
That instability could lead
to conflict and contribute to global economic collapse, especially if
combined with rapid climate change that could make it harder for
governments to feed global populations, the authors warn.
That's
the grimmest among the "Potential Worlds" the report sketches for 2030.
Under the heading "Stalled Engines," in the "most plausible worst-case
scenario, the risks of interstate conflict increase," the report said.
"The U.S. draws inward and globalization stalls." ...
Here is the overview from the report:
Over the next two decades, the relative power of major international
actors will shift markedly. Around 2030, after nearly a century as the
preeminent global economic power, the United States will be surpassed
by China as the world’s largest economy. With its trade in goods
expected to nearly double that of the U.S. and Europe, China’s
international economic clout will reach new heights. By 2030, India
will become the world’s most populous country and third-largest economy,
while Brazil’s economy will rank fourth in size. India and Brazil will
join China at the high table of 21st century international
politics alongside the United States, even as the relative weight of
Russia and Japan diminishes. The European economy will remain in the
top tier, but it is not clear whether Europe will be able to act with
common purpose to leverage this source of strength.
With its enhanced economic base, Beijing could rival Washington in
overall military spending, even as a slowing Chinese economy and
internal political conflict complicate China’s ability to lead
internationally. The United States will remain primus inter pares
in light of its continued advantages across the full spectrum of
national power and the legacy benefits of its leadership. It will,
however, be operating in a post-Western world in which the bulk of
global economic power is held by countries whose per capita incomes are
far below those of the traditional great powers. This reality will
leave China, India, Brazil, and other players focused on internal
development and domestic challenges, torn between their desire to be
global powers and their interest in free-riding on Western management of
the international system.
How will the rise of the rest impact the international system? The National Intelligence Council’s draft Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds maps out three broad scenarios:
Reverse Engines. Under this scenario, the
international system would consist of several powerful countries — but
no single state or bloc of states would have the political or economic
leverage to drive the international community toward collective action.
Such a world, characterized by a global vacuum of power, assumes that
the United States will no longer be willing or capable of sustaining the
predominant leadership role it has assumed since 1945. With no other
country able to step in to replace the U.S. as a global leader, the
resulting divergence of interests would lead to fragmentation and the
inability of great powers to work cooperatively to solve global issues.
Mercantilism and protectionism could lead economic globalization to go
into reverse, constraining technological breakthroughs required to
manage scarce global resources. Conflict and disorder would follow.
Great Power Convergence. An alternative scenario is
what the NIC calls a “fusion” world, in which major powers work
together to adopt and enforce a set of globally accepted rules and
norms. As U.S. predominance over the international system recedes, other
emerging powers would step in to assume greater responsibility for the
management of international affairs commensurate with their swelling
economic might. Emerging powers emerge as full stakeholders in a global
order that is transformed by power shifts but remains liberal and
pluralistic. Great power concert (perhaps enabled by democratization in
China) to meet global challenges increases the stability of the
international system even as power is diffused within it. U.S.
resilience enables it to create enduring partnerships with rising powers
to sustain the basis of liberal order. Technological advances create
new possibilities for joint management of key global challenges,
rewarding positive-sum behavior by the great powers.
Multipolar Divergence—U.S. Primacy. A third
scenario, one the NIC calls “fragmentation,” involves a multipolar
system characterized by a divergence of views among great powers that
challenges global governance. The United States would continue to
maintain disproportionate global influence and leverage that influence
to address global challenges by working through coalitions of
like-minded states. A multispeed global economy accelerates the
diffusion of power but an alternative coalition to the West does not
form, with developing giants consumed by their domestic challenges –
even as the global middle class explodes in ways that transform politics
within the rising powers. With inclusive global institutions
effectively stalemated, the United States instead turns to its old and
new allies in Europe and Asia, who would continue to see Washington as
their partner of choice in advancing the norms and rules of a liberal
order. The risk of conflict increases with the continued rise of new
powers like China and the rapid pace of technological change.
One key conclusion of the NIC study is that the future role of the
United States in the international system is a decisive variable in
determining what kind of “alternative world” will exist in 2030. The
choices U.S. leaders make – about how to marshal (and preserve) domestic
resources, how vigorously to assert U.S. military and economic
leadership overseas, and how much to invest in alliances old and new –
will be central to determining which of the above pathways the
international system will follow over the coming 20 years. To a certain
extent, the answer to the question of how the “rise of the rest”
impacts the U.S.-led international system is that it is not up to them…
so much as it is up to us.
Last year, I had the privilege of visiting the leaders of
the Synod of Syria and Lebanon and the Synod of the Nile (Egypt) a year ago,
partner denominations to the Presbyterian Church USA. I heard firsthand about
the struggles of Christians in these countries. It was made apparent to me that
a central component to any lasting peace in the region is for moderate Muslims,
Christians, and religious minorities to form a healthy civil society. Dedicated
Christians from our partner denominations in these regions have worked diligently toward that end.
We are hearing a great deal about the violence in Syria, and
with good reason. The immediacy of the suffering is tragic. But I sense that
Egypt may be the bigger story in the long run. There are more than eighty million
Egyptians, dwarfing the size of other nations in the region. There is also a
history of stronger, more tolerant, societal institutions. If Egypt is transformed
into an Islamist state, then I think the implications well be tragic and far
reaching for much of the rest of the region.
As I recall, about 90% of Egyptians are Muslim. About 9% are
Coptic Orthodox Christians. About 1% are Protestant. Moderate Muslims
and Christians alike were part of the protests that ousted Mubarak. Moderate Muslims
and Christians are leading the protests against Morsi’s power grab and against
the troubling new constitution that is being proposed.
While in Egypt, I had the privilege of dining in the home of
a young family who also acted as our tour guides for a day. The wife and mother of this family has been posting
articles and pictures relating to the protests on Facebook, like this picture
of brave women taking the front row of a march towards
the presidential palace carrying their own shrouds (coffin cloth) in their
arms.
And this picture of a Christian
doctor treating an injured member of the Muslim Brotherhood on the grounds of a
church in Cairo.
Three hours ago my friend posted that the
referendum on the constitution has now been delayed until the 12th. The
pressure has been to get this constitution passed as quickly as possible and
there is some hope this delay may lead good things.
Let us all remember to keep Egypt in our prayers. Let us
pray that moderate Muslims and Christians will be able to influence events
toward the creation of a healthy civil society, delivering Egypt from the
bondage of extremist elements, even was we continue to pray for an end to the horrific suffering in Syria.
It's a stunning thought: The United States, long dependent on foreign
oil, may actually achieve energy independence over the next two decades.
And by 2030 it could become a net exporter of oil. ...
... That intriguing possibility has generated most of the headlines, but
the IEA report draws attention to another trend that's just as
important: A possible reversal of globalization trends that until now
have mostly caused a net outflow of jobs from the United States to
lower-cost nations, such as China and India. ...
... Some economists have been predicting a second phase of globalization,
in which foreign labor costs rise and it becomes more cost-effective to
produce things in developed nations such as the United States. And now,
the booming U.S. energy sector may give that trend a boost.
The IEA report points out that abundant energy in the United States
will have at least two secondary effects: It will make the U.S. an
energy supplier to the rest of the world. And it will lower costs for
U.S. manufacturers, since energy is a key input for factories who run
assembly lines.
Energy is already a growing industry that supports perhaps 10 million
U.S. jobs, and while the growth of some fields, such as green energy,
may sometimes be overstated, it's clear that energy jobs tend to be
high-paying ones that can help replace some of the blue-collar jobs that
have been lost. ...
... ower energy costs will also be a growing competitive advantage for U.S.
manufacturers. Some foreign manufacturers—especially those based in
Europe—already find it cheaper to build certain things in America,
especially products that are sold here. If the gap in energy costs
grows, it will only lure more firms across the pond.
Some economists believe a "reshoring" trend is already underway....
(Reuters) - China's outgoing leader and his likely successor are pushing the ruling Communist Party to adopt a more democratic process this month for choosing a new leadership, sources said, in an attempt to boost its flagging legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
The extent of the reform would be unprecedented in communist China
where elections for the highest tiers of the party, held every five
years, have been mainly exercises in rubber-stamping candidates already
agreed upon by party power-brokers.
The
Communist Party, which has held unbroken power since 1949, is
struggling to maintain its popular legitimacy in the face of rising
inequality, corruption and environmental degradation, even as the economy continues to bound ahead.
President
Hu Jintao and his heir, Xi Jinping, have proposed that the party's 18th
Congress, which opens on Thursday, should hold elections for the elite
Politburo where for the first time there would be more candidates than
available seats, said three sources with ties to the party leadership. ...
One theory of economic development is that as long as the masses are poor,
there is little incentive to develop sound economic and governmental
institutions. As prosperity begins to emerge, those who have benefited have
more to lose through arbitrary and ineffective institutions. The presence of a
rising middle class creates a hope among the poor that they too can prosper.
Citizens begin to press for better institutions and greater accountability.
Better institutions and accountability leads to more prosperity. And on the
cycle goes.
Jobs going to other countries in China's 'great industry transfer'
Rising wages and shrinking export demand are forcing manufacturers to relocate to neighboring Southeast Asian nations and many that remain are seriously considering moving, a foreign trade official from the Ministry of Commerce said.
The official, who declined to be named, said that "nearly one-third of Chinese manufacturers of textiles, garments, shoes and hats" are now working "under growing pressure" and have moved all, or part, of their production outside China in what he called the great industry transfer.
Favored destinations are usually members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, especially Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.
And in all likelihood, "the trend will continue" with more traditional labor-intensive manufacturers transferring production, he told China Daily. ...
... China's labor costs have surged recently by 15 to 20 percent annually, squeezing margins and driving some companies to bankruptcy.
According to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, from January to June the minimum wage was raised, on average, by 20 percent in 16 provinces.
The minimum wage in Shenzhen now stands at 1,500 yuan ($238) per month, setting the highest standard for the whole Chinese mainland.
Many developing countries in Southeast Asia have lower labor costs.
The monthly wage for manufacturing jobs in Vietnam was, on average, 600 yuan in 2011, equivalent to the level of 10 years ago in Dongguan, an industrial town in South China's Pearl River Delta....
...But lower costs in other countries could soon change, some said.
"The advantage (of labor and production costs) in Southeast Asian countries will only last for a few years," said Chen Jian, a general manager of a garment company headquartered in Foshan, on the Pearl River Delta.
"The trend is just like what happened some 10 years ago when many manufacturing industries in Hong Kong and Taiwan moved to the Pearl River Delta to chase cheap labor. But now you can see how much our labor costs have gone up."
The tide of brain drain – from developing countries to industrialized nations – has turned. Human capital is returning home to Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, while some European professionals squeezed by the recession, turn toward developing countries for advancement.
"Brain drain" – the flow of intellect and skilled labor from poor to rich countries – has been so constant in modern times that the Nigerian cabdriver who was educated as a doctor back home is just as much a fixture of New York City's landscape as a fledgling Broadway actress or Wall Street banker.
Academics and college-educated engineers from Brazil to China to Poland
have long set off for the world's more developed nations for better
opportunities, sometimes in their own fields, often behind steering
wheels or in fast-food or restaurant kitchens.
But now that tide is turning; immigrants no longer always see developed countries as a better place to be. ...
... Emerging economies not only are faring better than most of the developed
world in the current recession, they also continue to grow, drawing
back their expatriates and, in some cases, even luring new high-skilled
citizens of the US and Europe.
It is the "democratization of talent," says Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
"Everyone went to four or five English-speaking countries before, [and
all other nations] got the third-rung talent. Today, knowledge is no
longer monopolized anywhere." ...
... Benefits are not just measured in the individuals' skills or number of jobs generated but also in a host of ancillary benefits.
"When
you've lived in an OECD country and you see how things work there, I
would think you become less tolerant of a corruption, of things that
don't work, inefficiency, people sitting on their thumbs," says Georges
Lemaitre, an expert on workforce migration at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "You want to see your own country with much more available services and with the efficiency that you are used to."
Such benefits, he adds, could become a global pattern in coming years, both from new migration and reverse migration.
In the meantime, those countries losing their allure could also lose their competitive edge. ...
The author of Poor Economics on why aid that assumes the poor will do the right thing is misguided – and why political corruption does not necessarily mean economic stagnation.
... Until Poor Economics appeared last year, the debate about aid had been broadly polarised into two positions. On the left was Jeffrey Sachs, arguing that the single biggest factor keeping poor people poor is poverty. If foreign aid can lift them out of the poverty trap long enough to free them from the disease, ignorance and debt that thwart their potential, then pretty soon they will be able to solve their own problems for themselves. On the right, William Easterly argued that the real problem isn't a poverty trap but aid itself, which creates a dependency culture that keeps the poor poor, and distorts their only real roadmap to prosperity – the free market.
As Banerjee saw it, both positions owed more to polemic and conjecture than empirical evidence. Aid budgets run into billions, yet very little work had been done to analyse their outcomes. He and Duflo, both economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thought a better approach would be to appropriate the methodology of the pharmaceutical industry, and subject different types of aid to randomised controlled trials. In 2003 they established a Poverty Action Lab, and by 2010 its researchers had conducted more than 240 experiments in 40 countries, in a Herculean attempt to find out what actually works.
The results are fascinating. Recipients of free or subsidised mosquito nets, say, or water chlorination tablets, or schooling, or contraception, often prove bafflingly disinclined to use them. Such apparent indifference to life-saving gifts seems puzzling to the point of perverse. Even microcredit, widely lauded as the panacea to world poverty, turns out to be less revolutionary than previously thought. But Poor Economics doesn't vindicate Easterly, because the authors discovered that tiny adjustments to the delivery mechanism of aid can radically transform its efficacy. For example, offering Kenyan farmers half-price fertiliser at sowing time didn't work, because they hadn't saved enough money from harvest time to buy it. But selling farmers a full-price voucher directly after the harvest, when they could afford it, to be exchanged for fertiliser at sowing time when they needed it, increased fertiliser use by 50%. When aid is carefully designed to navigate the specific socio-cultural landscape of its recipients' lives, it begins to deliver the sort of results Sachs claims.
"This book will not tell you whether aid is good or bad," its authors write, "but it will say whether particular instances of aid did some good or not." Their overwhelming message is that there is no Big Idea or golden bullet, so we should stop thinking about "Aid", and start thinking about "aid". Poor Economics makes this case so persuasively that I can't honestly see how anyone could disagree after reading it. The surprise for me was the book's striking parallels between poverty in the developing world and in the UK, and its relevance to our attempts to help the poor in Hartlepool or Glasgow. When studied closely, it becomes clear that people who live on less than a dollar a day are not uniquely mysterious, but subject to the very same psychological and behavioural patterns as the rest of us. ...
I've been working my way through the book. It is a fascinating read and there is much to digest. This article does a great job of summarizing the central points of the book.
Until recently, federal prosecutors had won settlements in nearly every battle involving charges of foreign bribery by multinational corporations and their executives. But in late February — indeed, the very week that Mr. Stanley was sentenced — the Justice Department had an embarrassing setback: it abruptly withdrew the biggest case ever brought against individuals under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
It was an extraordinary turn of events. The F.B.I. had recorded 800 hours of video and audio as part of a sting operation involving supposed arms contracts in Africa. Twenty-two executives had been arrested.
Then the whole case fell apart. In a withering appraisal, the federal judge in the case, Richard J. Leon, called the government’s effort “a long and sad chapter in the annals of white-collar criminal enforcement.” Its approach to the law, Judge Leon said, had been “very, very aggressive.”
THE development opened the door for critics who assert that federal authorities have overstepped in trying to fight corruption overseas. They say that the crackdown, which began in earnest three years ago, has made it harder for companies to win legitimate business and that it has needlessly instilled fear among executives. Many companies would rather make any charges brought under the act go away with a quick settlement than try to fight them in court.
“We are seeing companies getting scooped up in aggressive enforcement actions and investigations,” said Lisa A. Rickard, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform, which is pushing to modify the law. “A culture of overzealousness has grabbed the Justice Department.”
“The last time I checked,” Ms. Rickard added, “we were not living in a police state.”
Such heated criticism aside, federal authorities say they are unbowed.
Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant United States attorney general who has stepped up enforcement actions under the act, said he saw no reason to change course. In fact, he is expanding his staff — and his range of potential targets. ...
... AS they pursue their overall campaign, federal authorities have their work cut out for them. As business has gone global, so has graft, particularly as companies in rich nations push into poorer regions. The World Bank estimates that $1 trillion in bribes is paid annually to government officials. In Africa alone, $148 billion is siphoned off annually, according to Transparency International, a global nonprofit group that tracks corruption. ...
... Leading the efforts to modernize the corruption act — or weaken it, in the eyes of the government — is the Chamber of Commerce. The group, in Washington, has been in discussions with the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission about new guidelines on enforcement. That guidance, expected later this spring, would give corporations a better notion of what they need to do to stay on the right side of the law.
Corporate America clearly wants its views heard.
“You are dealing with criminal liability, and that strikes fear and terror through the heart of the corporate suite,” said Ms. Rickard at the chamber.
In a letter signed by more than 30 trade associations, the chamber asks that the guidance allow companies with strong compliance programs to use that as a defense against liability. It also asks that the definition of a “foreign official” be more limited and that companies not be held accountable for the past wrongdoing of foreign companies they may purchase, among other provisions. ...
... Mr. Breuer and other government lawyers have spoken out against the provisions. They have been joined by 33 human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Oxfam America and Transparency International. ...
WASHINGTON — A World Bank report shows a broad reduction in extreme poverty — and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world.
The report shows that for the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty — on less than $1.25 a day — fell in every developing region from 2005 to 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate.
The progress is so drastic that the world has met the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline. ...
... The report contained a raft of statistics showing broad declines in poverty throughout the 2000s. For the first time since the World Bank started keeping statistics in 1981, poverty fell in every region of the world on a three-year timeframe. In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty fell below 50 percent for the first time. And between 1981 and 2008, poverty fell to just less than a quarter of the developing world’s population from more than half .
Much of the story was about China, which moved nearly 700 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2008, with the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty falling to 13 percent from 84 percent during that period. The country’s annual pace of economic growth never dipped below 9 percent, even in 2009, when the world’s economy contracted.
But perhaps the most surprising success story is sub-Saharan Africa, where the proportion of people living in extreme poverty actually increased through the 1990s, before declining in the 2000s.
“People used to worry, ‘Is Africa going to be poor forever?’ ” said Mr. Kenny of the Center for Global Development. “Well, it doesn’t really look like it, does it?”
Extreme poverty in the Middle East and North Africa fell to just 2.7 percent in 2008 from 4.2 percent in 2002. And extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa fell to 47.5 percent in 2008 from 55.7 percent in 2002. ...
Women overseas are reaching new heights professionally. Here's what we can learn from our emerging market counterpart.
The mention of women in emerging economies often evokes a picture of oppressed and poverty-stricken victims, relegated to the sidelines of male-dominated cultures. That’s the usual narrative, exemplified by the best-selling Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn. Yes, these problems are real and of critical importance. But educated women in Brazil, Russia, India and China — the BRIC economies which represent the four largest emerging markets — and the United Arab Emirates, are telling a different tale: one of agency and power.
Just as in the U.S. — where female college graduates now outnumber men — BRIC women are flooding into universities and graduate schools. They represent 65% of college graduates in the UAE, 60% in Brazil and 57% in Russia. These figures represent more than just a tiny elite: Between 15 and 25% of young women in the BRICs/UAE are now college-educated — a substantial number. And they’re not just earning degrees: They are bursting with the desire to use them.
Highly educated women the world over are ambitious, but ambition and aspiration among BRIC/UAE women is off the charts. New data from the Center for Work-Life Policy show that 85% of female college graduates in India and 92% in the UAE consider themselves very ambitious, compared to a paltry 36% in the U.S. In India, 86% of college-educated women are shooting for the top job, closely followed by their counterparts in Brazil (80%) and China (76%).
And turbo-charged ambition is paying off. In Brazil, 14% of the CEOs of large companies are female; in India, the figure is 11%. Meanwhile, the number of women who head up Fortune 500 corporations in the United States and FTSE 100 firms in the United Kingdom is stuck at less than 5%. What’s behind these startling numbers? Our study — which is based on rich, new data — describes opportunities and obstacles, which are surprisingly different from those in the West. ...
Here is just one example of the positive impact a large "evil" multi-national corporation has on economic development among the poor. There are many other stories similar to these that are rarely seen in the press.
... Seventy percent of the world's cocoa grows in West Africa, and most of that in one country, Ivory Coast. Since 1999, Ivory Coast has been through a bloody succession of military coups, rigged elections, and civil wars. "We were concerned about running into a ceiling on production there," says Harold Poelma, managing director of Cargill Cocoa. So Cargill began looking for other options. The solution that it came up with perfectly illustrates the company's global reach and long view.
Cocoa trees look like something Dr. Seuss would draw, with clusters of hard-shelled pods, as big and colorful as Halloween gourds, sprouting directly from the trunk and limbs. They don't grow just anyplace. They need shade, warmth, and humidity, as well as deep, rich soil -- conditions generally found within a band 20 degrees north and south of the equator. That band passes through Vietnam.
Cargill was one of the first U.S. multinationals to return to Vietnam when President Bill Clinton normalized relations with the government in Hanoi in 1995. Today it is the country's largest domestic producer of livestock feed and a central player in Vietnam's fast-moving shift from a state-controlled agricultural economy to one where small farmers are encouraged to work private plots for private gain. The effect of that shift has been transformative. Not long ago, Vietnam was importing a million tons of rice a year. Last year it became the world's second leading rice exporter. "Same people, same land," Vietnam's director of crop production, Dr. Nguyen Tri Ngoc, told me in his Hanoi office, speaking through a translator. "Before, farmers were not really farmers. They were workers in the fields, and they worked under the supervision of the government." And the difference now? "Free markets!" he says in English.
In 2004, Cargill launched a public-private partnership with one of its biggest customers, chocolate giant Mars, and the governments of Vietnam and the Netherlands. The aim: to create something that had never before existed in Vietnam, a cocoa-export economy.
First, Cargill had to convince a front line of growers to switch to cocoa from well-established crops like coffee, black pepper, and cashews. Two years before the first harvest (it takes at least that long for cocoa seedlings to produce fruit), before there was anything to buy, Cargill opened two fully staffed cocoa buying stations on major roads, in Ben Tre and Dak Lak provinces. It made an early commitment to transparency, posting on the Cargill website and offering by text message both the daily international price on the London market and what Cargill is paying locally; growers can lock their price for three weeks, the time it takes to ferment and dry the beans after harvest. Cargill also built a network of more than 100 demonstration farms, where curious growers can learn from their neighbors. And in February 2011 the company took delivery of the first Vietnamese cocoa beans to carry UTZ certification -- an independent sustainability program through which growers can earn an extra $100 per ton.
This year Vietnamese farmers will produce about 2,500 metric tons of cocoa, 70% of which will go to Cargill. That's a tiny sliver of the 3.4 million-ton global market, but the growth trend is impressive: 40,000 acres under cultivation in 2010, compared with 1,200 in 2003, and already 32,000 active growers in 12 provinces. Poelma sees the potential for 100,000 tons by 2020. Instead of shipping all of that to Cargill's North Sea Canal processing plant in Wormer, the Netherlands -- a voyage that takes 24 days -- Cargill hopes to have a Cargill factory in Vietnam by then, processing cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, and cocoa powder for export to growing markets in China and India.
None of that happens without the eager participation of thousands of small growers. One I met last summer was Trinh Van Thanh, a smooth-cheeked 43-year-old with a wife, three daughters, and roughly four acres of land in Baria-Vungtau province, a two-hour drive southeast from Ho Chi Minh City. Five years ago Thanh was growing pepper and coffee and raising pigs, and he was struggling. His pepper trees were afflicted by blight. The yield from his mature coffee trees was declining year by year. He says he was $5,000 in debt.
Thanh planted his first cocoa saplings, as Vietnamese farmers often do, in the shade of his coffee trees. He enrolled in an agricultural extension program in Ho Chi Minh City, where he learned how to build a specialized slow-drip irrigation system based on technology invented on an Israeli kibbutz. When the first crop came in, Thanh made the ambitious choice to ferment and dry the cocoa beans himself. Ultimately, he built more fermentation boxes and drying tables than he needed for his own crop, which meant he could perform those value-adding services for other growers. Soon he wasn't just farming, he was running a collection station. Next he planted a cocoa-tree nursery. Then he launched an irrigation consulting business. (The man gets the concept of a virtuous cycle.) Thanh still sells all his beans to Cargill but maybe not for long. What he really wants to learn how to do next, he told me, is make and sell chocolate.
Thanh's success so far almost defies belief. He says his mini cocoa conglomerate will gross more than $850,000 this year. And if his daughter, who's about to graduate from high school, wants to go to college in America -- and he hopes that she will -- he can easily afford it.
Later in Hanoi, I tell Ngoc all about my visit to Baria-Vungtau province. When does a farmer like Thanh, I ask him, become too much of a capitalist for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam? Ngoc beams. "No limit!" he says. Again in English. ...
The early 21st century seems awash in wars: the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, street battles in Somalia, Islamist insurgencies in Pakistan, massacres in the Congo, genocidal campaigns in Sudan. All in all, regular fighting is taking place in 18 wars around the globe today. Public opinion reflects this sense of an ever more dangerous world: One survey a few years ago found that 60 percent of Americans considered a third world war likely. Expectations for the new century were bleak even before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their bloody aftermath: Political scientist James G. Blight and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested earlier that year that we could look forward to an average of 3 million war deaths per year worldwide in the 21st century.
So far they haven't even been close. In fact, the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.
Armed conflict has declined in large part because armed conflict has fundamentally changed. Wars between big national armies all but disappeared along with the Cold War, taking with them the most horrific kinds of mass destruction. Today's asymmetrical guerrilla wars may be intractable and nasty, but they will never produce anything like the siege of Leningrad. The last conflict between two great powers, the Korean War, effectively ended nearly 60 years ago. The last sustained territorial war between two regular armies, Ethiopia and Eritrea, ended a decade ago. Even civil wars, though a persistent evil, are less common than in the past; there were about a quarter fewer in 2007 than in 1990.
If the world feels like a more violent place than it actually is, that's because there's more information about wars -- not more wars themselves. Once-remote battles and war crimes now regularly make it onto our TV and computer screens, and in more or less real time. Cell-phone cameras have turned citizens into reporters in many war zones. Societal norms about what to make of this information have also changed. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker has noted, "The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence," so that we see today's atrocities -- though mild by historical standards -- as "signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen." ...
My second book has been released. It’s entitled Upside: Surprising Good News about the State of Our World, and it’s available on Amazon, Christian bookstores, and various other places… if there are any left ;-)
The guiding question for this book is whether the world is getting better or worse. Now, I realize that you’re probably thinking right now that that’s too narrow of a topic, but bear with me, it’s a question worth asking. ...
... My book develops two paradoxes. One, many, many things in the world are getting better, but most people are convinced that things are getting worse. Two, most people think that their lives are getting better, but their community and nation is getting worse. In my book I explore the reasons for these paradoxes.
After that—since I’m a data-driven guy—I present information about what’s happening in the world. I cover areas that most people take as important, such as income and poverty, health, education, happiness, crime, freedom, faith, marriage, families, and the environment.
In each of these areas, I present the best available data about how things are changing. The data come from sources such as the US Census Bureau, the World Bank, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and various sociological surveys.
I finish with examining various explanations for why so many things are getting better, and what we should do in response. ...
I can't wait to read this book! As long time Kronicle readers know, I've visited this topic over and over again at my blog. I did a World Social Indicators - 2008 series that details some of these issues. The incredible amount of pessimism in the face of the greatest expansion of global prosperity and physical well-being in the history of the world is just astounding.
The dwindling allure of building factories offshore.
“WHEN clients are considering opening another manufacturing plant in China, I’ve started to urge them to consider alternative locations,” says Hal Sirkin of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “Have they thought about Vietnam, say? Or maybe [they could] even try Made in USA?” When clients are American firms looking to build factories to serve American customers, Mr Sirkin is increasingly likely to suggest they stay at home, not for patriotic reasons but because the economics of globalisation are changing fast.
Labour arbitrage—taking advantage of lower wages abroad, especially in poor countries—has never been the only force pushing multinationals to locate offshore, but it has certainly played a big part. Now, however, as emerging economies boom, wages there are rising. Pay for factory workers in China, for example, soared by 69% between 2005 and 2010. So the gains from labour arbitrage are starting to shrink, in some cases to the point of irrelevance, according to a new study by BCG.
“Sometime around 2015, manufacturers will be indifferent between locating in America or China for production for consumption in America,” says Mr Sirkin. That calculation assumes that wage growth will continue at around 17% a year in China but remain relatively slow in America, and that productivity growth will continue on current trends in both countries. It also assumes a modest appreciation of the yuan against the dollar. ...
... Many multinationals will continue to build most of their new factories in emerging markets, not to export stuff back home but because that is where demand is growing fastest. And companies from other rich countries will probably continue to enjoy the opportunity for labour arbitrage for longer than American ones, says Mr Sirkin. Their labour costs are higher than America’s and will remain so unless the euro falls sharply against the yuan. ...
In 2003, President Lula inherited a poor, resigned nation on the verge of an economic implosion. Eight years later, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, leads an emerging, optimistic nation. Dan Steinbock explores how Brazil can realize its full growth potential in the post-crisis landscape.
One interesting note is the continued decoupling of the rest of the world from the American economy.
When Lula won the presidency in 2002, Brazil’s main trading partners were the United States (25.5%), the Netherlands (5.3%), Germany (4.2%) and China (4.2%).
Over the eight years, the U.S. share collapsed, while the Chinese share more than tripled. By 2009, Brazil’s main trading partners were China (13.2%), the United States (9.6%), Argentina (7.8%) and the Netherlands (5.0%).
Steinbock's presription for Brazil's economic health?
In order to realize its full BRIC potential, Brazil has to undertake seven critical steps. First, reduce the importance of the informal sector. Second, correct macroeconomic deficiencies (including the high interest rate and a relatively high government-debt-to-GDP ratio).
Third, reduce the notorious red tape. Fourth, streamline the labor code. Fifth, contain political corruption. Sixth, improve the quality of public services (e.g., education, justice and security). And seventh, develop new infrastructure.
In order to engage in the Asian trajectory of growth, however, even more reforms are needed, including far greater trade openness, significantly higher investment and savings and substantially lower public and foreign debt.
SHANGHAI — America’s huge trade deficit with China has raised concerns about American competitiveness and jobs moving overseas. But a new study offers a glimmer of hope to Americans: Last year, American exports to China soared 32 percent to a record $91.9 billion.
A study by a trade group called the U.S.- China Business Council says China is now the world’s fastest-growing destination for American exports. ...
... I recently put these questions to Abdolreza Abbassian, a food economist at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Here's what he told me.
Skyrocketing Prices
Abbassian attributed the price rise to several factors — some familiar to me (and probably to you), some less familiar.
1. The rise of biofuels, like ethanol made from corn. This market, driven largely by government subsidies, has created demand that is what economists call "price inelastic" — demand stays strong even as prices rise.
2. More demand from the developing world, particularly for meat. Livestock eat grain, so increasing demand for meat means increasing demand for grain. This source of demand has also been price inelastic, Abbassian said.
3. Disappearing stockpiles.
Because of WTO rules, the U.S. and Europe have been moving away from subsidies that led to vast reserves of wheat and corn.
Subsidies still exist in the U.S. and Europe, but they've taken a different form. Governments used to buy and stockpile surplus food from farmers. Now it's more common for governments to give farmers subsidy payments without actually buying any of the food they produce, Abbassian told me.
This sounds super wonky, but it has a huge impact on the price of food.
Big stockpiles mean that the supply of food remains relatively constant, even when there are disasters like the vast fires that destroyed last summer's Russian wheat crop.
But in the absence of stockpiles, unexpected shocks like those fires in Russia last summer have a huge impact on supply. That, in turn, contributes to huge price spikes.
"What you get is a world market that is increasingly tight, without much of a buffer," Abbassian told me. "Without a buffer, you have volatility. It's as simple as that."
4. Speculation
The volatility created by declining stocks is in turn compounded by speculation — traders betting on the rise or fall of prices.
Abbassian argued that bringing more transparency to commodities futures markets might mitigate this issue.
"If we know who is buying it and what are they buying it for, that may get those who are just there to gamble to be more cautious about their positions," he said.
Who is going to go hungry?
At any given moment, there are about a billion people in the world who don't have enough food to eat. When food prices go up, more people do go hungry — but the increase isn't as dramatic as you might think.
That's partly because many of the world's poorest people simply have no money and no access to food. Many live in countries where wars and other crises make it hard to get food to people. They would be hungry even if the price of food had not spiked.
What's more, in many poor countries, the local harvest is a more important factor than the price of global commodities. And many countries in Africa have had strong harvests of staples such as white corn and cassava.
One often overlooked region likely to be hit hard by the price increases is Central Asia, Abbassian said. This recent FAO report has lots of region-by-region detail. ...
TOKYO — Japan’s economy contracted in the fourth quarter when compared with the previous three months, though analysts are optimistic about the country’s prospects for the rest of the year.
Japan’s gross domestic product fell 0.3 percent in the October-December quarter as the end of generous government incentives on environmentally friendly cars resulted in a temporary decline in spending. At an annualized rate, Japan’s economy shrank 1.1 percent from the previous quarter.
The contraction, the first in five quarters, brought Japan’s economy for 2010 to $5.47 trillion, the Japanese Cabinet Office said. That compared with a $5.88 trillion economy for fast-growing China. The latest numbers were further evidence of China’s rapid ascent as an economic superpower, as China surpassed Japan last summer after the half-year gross domestic product numbers were released. Just five years ago, China’s gross domestic product was around $2.3 trillion, about half Japan’s.
Japan’s economy has stagnated over the last two decades, reflecting its continued decline in economic and political clout.
The country had the world’s second-largest economy after the United States for much of the last four decades. In the 1980s, its rapid growth even led to talk of the Japanese economy’s overtaking that of the United States. ...
IN his State of the Union address last month, President Obama set the stage for a coming policy debate and his re-election bid with a catch phrase. Six times, he called on Americans to “win the future.” And he used the variant “winning the future” three other times. But is this really a good way to frame the economic challenges we face? ...
... More troublesome to me as an economist, though, is that calling on Americans to “win the future” misleads us about the nature of the policy choices ahead. Achieving economic prosperity is not like winning a game, and guiding an economy is not like managing a sports team. ...
... The gains from trade would be much the same if your neighbor were manufacturing a good — knitting you a scarf, for example — rather than performing a service. And it would be much the same if, instead of living next door, he was several thousand miles away, say, in Shanghai.
Listening to the president, you might think that competition from China and other rapidly growing nations was one of the larger threats facing the United States. But the essence of economic exchange belies that description. Other nations are best viewed not as our competitors but as our trading partners. Partners are to be welcomed, not feared. As a general matter, their prosperity does not come at our expense. ...
...The president is right that we should encourage a greater number of highly educated foreigners to migrate here. Because skilled workers pay more in taxes than they receive in government benefits, increasing their supply would reduce the fiscal burden on the rest of us. But if these foreign students decide to return home, as many do, we shouldn’t worry that they are competing against us.
Instead, we should view higher education in the United States as one of our most successful export industries. The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population but most of the best universities. Is it any wonder that students from many nations flock here to learn? And as they do so, they create opportunities for Americans — from the professors who teach the classes to the grounds crews who maintain the campuses.
When the foreign students head home, they take the human capital acquired here to become productive members of their own communities. They spread up-to-date knowledge, so it can foster prosperity everywhere. Some of this knowledge is technological. Some of it concerns business, legal and medical practices. And some is even more fundamental, such as the values of democracy and individual liberty. Nothing could be better for the United States than these thousands of American-trained ambassadors who have seen at first hand the benefits of a free and open society.
As we confront the many hard policy choices ahead, let’s prepare for the future. Let’s invest for the future. Let’s be willing to make hard sacrifices for a more prosperous future. But let’s not presume that the future is a game requiring winners and losers.
... The national media dismisses the election results as a provincial fuss, saying that voters were simply fed up with Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), along with its main rival, and will back any alternative, however quirky. Yet the vote bodes ill for Mr Kan ahead of April elections for 13 governors, 44 prefectural assemblies and umpteen mayorships and municipal assemblies.
The media may be missing a trick. Nagoya citizens not only gave Mr Kawamura three times the votes of his DPJ rival. Nearly three-quarters of them supported a referendum to dissolve the current Nagoya assembly, an unprecedented revolt.
Should Messrs Kawamura and Omura manage to stuff the new assemblies with their supporters in the spring elections, they could help unleash forces of decentralisation in Japan. Both intend to merge the city and prefectural governments, to create a regional block to draw investment and jobs away from Tokyo and help reshape government to cope with an ageing society. They plan to cut local taxes by 10%, slash salaries for elected officials, and shed overlapping public services. ...
CAIRO, Feb 9, 2011 (IPS) - Over recent years, Egypt has witnessed mounting tension between its Muslim majority and its sizeable Coptic Christian minority. But in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the site of ongoing mass protests against the ruling regime, members of both faiths chant in unison: "Muslim, Christian, doesn't matter; We're all in this boat together!"
Since Jan. 25, Egyptians countrywide have hit the streets in the hundreds of thousands - even millions - to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and his 30-year-old regime. The first week of demonstrations was marked by almost daily clashes between police and protesters, in which hundreds were killed and thousands injured.
The demonstrations were initially organized by online activist groups of no particular religious affiliation, such as the 6 April protest movement and the Youth Movement for Freedom and Justice. Nevertheless, some commentators have attempted to paint the uprising as a would-be "Iran-style" Islamic revolution.
In statements that would later be parroted by much of the western media, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Jan. 31: "Our real fear is of a situation that could develop and which has already developed in several countries including Iran itself - repressive regimes of radical Islam."
But according to protesters arrayed in Tahrir Square, which on Tuesday was home to hundreds of thousands of protesters, Muslim-Christian unity remains a central feature of the almost daily rallies. ...
Although today is the dawn of the Chinese New Year, most people are unaware that Chinese Christians are gearing up to be the world's most potent missionary force.
China? Christians? Sure enough. For decades now they've had plans to evangelize the Muslim world that lies along the old Silk Road route. This could be one of the most ambitious missionary enterprises in 2,000 years of Christianity. No national church has amazed the world as much as that of the Chinese. From 1 million at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, it's grown to 100 million followers, a breathtaking growth in 60 years.
Evangelical Chinese Christians have come up with a way to evangelize a large portion of the world that will never see a western missionary. These are countries with large Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu populations, most of them located somewhere along a 7,000-mile route stretching from Xian in central China to the cities of Jerusalem, Antioch and Istanbul in the Middle East. Those were the ancient terminuses of the famous Silk Road.
Mission experts estimate there are some 2 billion people in these countries who've never heard of Christianity. And what nationality has businesses and enterprises in every nation on the Earth? And which is the most populous country with the fastest-growing church? Starting several decades ago, Chinese Christians began to strategize how to secretly plant churches along this Silk Road through an initiative called the Back to Jerusalem movement. The idea was to start businesses in countries from India to Iran that would never suspect that the Chinese grocer or restaurant owner down the street would like to convert them.
In the past 20 years, preparations to send teams to these countries has ramped up considerably. ...
Religion declines with economic development. In a previous post that rattled around the Internet, I presented a scholarly explanation for this pattern: people who feel secure in this world have less interest in another one.
The basic idea is that wealth allows people to feel more secure in the sense that they are confident of having their basic needs met and expect to lead a long healthy life. In such environments, there is less of a market for religion, the primary function of which is to help people cope with stress and uncertainty.
Some readers of the previous post pointed out that the U.S. is something of an anomaly because this is a wealthy country in which religion prospers. Perhaps taking the view that one swallow makes a summer, the commentators concluded that the survival of religion here invalidates the security hypothesis. I do not agree. ...
...In my own (as yet unpublished) research on this question, I have looked at several other facets of the security hypothesis that go some way toward explaining why Americans remain more religious than their European cousins.
The conclusions are not very flattering so far as the quality of life in this country is concerned. In her recent book, Third World America, Arianna Huffington made the case that this country is regressing to the inequitable conditions more typically found in a far poorer country.
Despite having great wealth, the riches are unevenly distributed. Such income inequality is typical of developing countries and it has worsened considerably in recent decades. Moreover, we lack the well-developed welfare state found in Europe that serves to redistribute wealth and provides a safety net for the poor. ...
... The bottom line, then, is that Americans feel far less secure economically, and in relation to their health and well-being, than would be expected given the overall wealth of the country in terms of GDP per capita. This existential insecurity provides a fertile ground for religion. Scholars might appeal to historical factors such as the Puritan founders but history counts for little in these matters given that virtually every country has a devout past. ...
Unlike most European societies, the USA has had a "free market" economy for religion. Religions and denominations, and their institutions, must compete for adherents since none of them have monopolistic power or the coercive power of the state. That creates a mix of vibrant adaptive competitors. This is different from the monopolistic and subsidized religious environment in Europe. As a nation with monopolistic religion becomes wealthier, I think it likely that society will become more secularized. Not so where there is open competition.
... How many poor people are there in the world and how many Are there likely to be in 2015?
To calculate the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty, we update the World Bank’s official $1.25 a day poverty estimates for 119 countries, which together account for 95 percent of the population of the developing world. To do this, we take the most recent household survey data for each country, and generate poverty estimates for the years 2005 to 2015 using historical and forecast estimates of per capita consumption growth, making the simplifying assumption that the income distribution in each country remains unchanged.
Global poverty figures are then calculated by adding together the number of poor from each country. (See the Appendix for a full account of our methodology.) Our results indicate that the world has seen a dramatic decrease in global poverty over the past six years, and that this trend is set to continue in the four years ahead. We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, the total number of poor people around the world fell by nearly half a billion people, from over 1.3 billion in 2005 to under 900 million in 2010. Looking ahead to 2015, extreme poverty could fall to under 600 million people—less than half the number regularly cited in describing the number of poor people in the world today. Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.
When measured as a share of population, progress remains impressive, but is more in line with past trends. In the early 1980s, more than half of all people in developing countries lived in extreme poverty. By 2005, this was down to a quarter. According to our estimates, as of 2010 less than 16 percent remained in poverty, and fewer than 10 percent will likely be poor by 2015.
The first Millennium Development Goal defines a target (MDG1a) of halving the rate of global poverty by 2015 from its 1990 level. In an official report prepared for the U.N. MDG conference this past September, the World Bank stated that we are 80 percent of the way toward this target and are on track to meet it by 2015, though the Bank warned that “the economic crisis adds new risks to prospects for reaching the goal.”3
Our assessment is considerably more upbeat. We believe that the MDG1a target has already been met—approximately three years ago.4 Furthermore, by 2015, we will not only have halved the global poverty rate, as per MDG1a, but will have halved it again.
Over the past half century, the developing world, including many of the world’s poorest countries, have seen dramatic improvements in virtually all non-income measures of well-being: since 1960, global infant mortality has dropped by more than 50 percent, for example, and the share of the world’s children enrolled in primary school increased from less than half to nearly 90 percent between 1950 and today.5 Likewise there have been impressive gains in gender equality, access to justice and civil and political rights. Yet, through most of this period, the incomes of rich and poor countries diverged, and income poverty has proven a more persistent challenge than other measures of wellbeing.6 The rapid decline in global poverty now underway—and the early achievement of the MDG1a target—marks a break from these trends, and could come to be seen as a turning point in the history of global development. ...
Here are some interesting charts and graphs:
I particularly liked this graph:
Nigeria will soon have more poor people than India.
...Meanwhile, the perception is that American children live a relatively easy life and coast their way through school. They don't do any more homework than they have to; they spend an extraordinary amount of time playing games, socializing on the Internet, text-messaging each other; they work part time to pay for their schooling and social habits. And they party. A lot. These stereotypes worry many Americans. They believe the American education system puts the country at a great disadvantage. But this is far from true.
The independence and social skills American children develop give them a huge advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They can think for themselves, and they can innovate. This is why America remains the world leader in innovation; why Chinese and Indians invest their life savings to send their children to expensive U.S. schools when they can. India and China are changing, and as the next generations of students become like American ones, they too are beginning to innovate. So far, their education systems have held them back.
My research team at Duke looked in depth at the engineering education of China and India. We documented that these countries now graduate four to seven times as many engineers as does the U.S.The quality of these engineers, however, is so poor that most are not fit to work as engineers; their system of rote learning handicaps those who do get jobs, so it takes two to three years for them to achieve the same productivity as fresh American graduates.As a result, significant proportions of China's engineering graduates end up working on factory floors and Indian industry has to spend large sums of money retraining its employees. After four or five years in the workforce, Indians do become innovative and produce, overall, at the same quality as Americans, but they lose a valuable two to three years in their retraining. ...
THE human development index (HDI) is an attempt to give a snapshot of a country's success by combining three important indicators: health, education and wealth. The most recent global HDI ranking from the United Nations' Development Programme places Norway top, with the United States fourth (out of 169 countries). But with over 300m people living in 50 states, America varies greatly, so the American Human Development Project releases a state-based version of the HDI. We have put the two indices together to see where America's states would rank if they were countries. Because the indicators used in the two indices were slightly different, we calculated our index from scratch using comparable data (though we used a proxy for educational attainment). Our index still has Norway as number one but America drops to eighth.
Which rich countries are doing the most to help poor ones? Rich and poor nations are linked in many ways—by foreign aid, commerce, the environment, and more. Each year, the CDI rates rich-country governments on how much they are helping poor countries via seven key linkages: aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology. The CDI then takes the average for an overall score.
To see if countries live up to their potential to help, scoring adjusts for size. So small countries can beat big ones. Scores are on a standard scale and 5 = average. ...
Check out the interactive map. Sweden and Denmark top the list. Japan and South Korea are at the bottom. U. S. is smack in the middle.
You've no doubt seen a map similar to the one below showing the breakdown of party control by congressional district.
Closer analysis will reveal that Democrats are big in Urban districts and Repubilcans more rural and suburban areas. The Economist article, from which this map (and the two following) came, says:
Run down the top 30 incorporated places in America; the only ones represented by Republicans are Fort Worth, Texas and (as of January) Columbus, Ohio. Every other major city in Texas, and in fact every other major city in the South, is represented mainly by Democrats.
But then it shows two other eletoral maps ... one for Germany and one for France:
There isn't the same sort of urban/rural dynamic at work. So why is there such a difference? The Ecomonist doesn't offer an explanation and I don't really know either. What do you think?
Candidates Courted Growing Bloc for Edge in Sunday Election Run-Off.
RIO DE JANEIRO—Brazilians will take to the polls Sunday to determine their next president, but already one big winner of this political season has emerged: evangelical Christians.
Former cabinet minister Dilma Rousseff is expected to win the run-off, with pollster Datafolha projecting a 56% to 44% spread against former São Paulo Gov. José Serra. The surprise is how much the final stretch of the campaign in this predominantly Catholic country was shaped by an increasingly powerful bloc of conservative Protestants.
Ever since Brazil returned to democracy in 1985, presidential elections have been dominated by economic concerns as the country lurched from crisis to crisis. Potentially explosive issues such as whether to legalize abortion and gay marriage were rarely on the front burner, though the nation of 190 million is often called the world's biggest Catholic country.
This time, a grass-roots campaign of sermons, Internet videos and DVDs distributed mainly by evangelical pastors thrust moral questions like abortion and gay marriage abruptly onto the political agenda and forced Ms. Rousseff and Mr. Serra to declare positions. Joined by some conservative Catholic bishops, the evangelicals mobilized at least partly in response to the government's approval last year of a broad social plan supported by Ms. Rousseff's party that included calling for greater gay rights and abortion rights.
In order to shore up support among religious conservatives, both Ms. Rousseff and her rival, Mr. Serra, added opposition to legal abortion to their campaign platforms. That meant a big move to the right for Ms. Rousseff, an ex-Marxist guerrilla who has supported legalizing abortion in the past. ...
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