Saturday Links

1. How effective has the Millennium Villages Project been?

Here is a recent Op Ed in the NYT the Millennium Villages Project by Joe Nocerra, Fighting Poverty, and Critics.

2. Global Economic Growth Has Hit A Two-And-A-Half Year High

3. What Every U.S. Family Really Needs for a Minimum Living Standard

... Computers have become nearly ubiquitous, as cell phones have replaced what was once a reliable indicator of minimum living conditions in the U.S.: the landline. Very soon we'll need to start measuring minimum living conditions in a new way. What if it's your broadband bill you can't afford? Or the computer or smart phone you actually need way more than a dishwasher?

4. The Global Decline of the Labor Share

The stability of the labor share of income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models. We document, however, that the global labor share has significantly declined since the early 1980s, with the decline occurring within the large majority of countries and industries. We show that the decrease in the relative price of investment goods, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age, induced firms to shift away from labor and toward capital. The lower price of investment goods explains roughly half of the observed decline in the labor share, even when we allow for other mechanisms influencing factor shares such as increasing profits, capital-augmenting technology growth, and the changing skill composition of the labor force. We highlight the implications of this explanation for welfare and macroeconomic dynamics.

5. The Myth of Part-Time America

... The scare stories are good scares, but they're not good stories, since they start at the end and forget the beginning and middle. The truth about Part-Time America is that a part of America has always been working part-time, and there's not much evidence that we're seeing a terrifically new phenomenon. ...

6. Women Want Work-Life Balance More Than A Big Paycheck

...The survey, which included more than 5,300 working women across 13 countries, asked women questions about what they would need in their careers to feel like they "have it all."

The most interesting result comes from their definition of success. Five to 10 years ago, 56% of women attributed success with earning a big paycheck, but only 45% of women think the same today. And while 39% of women previously defined success as finding the balance between work and personal life, that number has grown to 63% today. ...

I'll add that this dynamic contributes to differences in pay by gender. In aggregate, men are still more singularly focused on work and work is a more central part of male identity.

7. Men's average height 'up 11cm since 1870s'

... The researchers said the gene pool "cannot account for substantial increases in mean stature over four or five generations".

Growth is significantly affected by what happens in the first two years of life, they said.

So, a high rate of illnesses such as respiratory diseases or diarrhoeas - which caused many infant deaths - would also affect survivors' development and therefore their subsequent height.

Infant mortality rates fell significantly throughout the period studied.

Another factor taken into account by the researchers was an increasing move to smaller families - meaning fewer people to feed.

Higher income, more sanitary living conditions and better education about health and nutrition could also have had an effect, they said. ...

Economist Robert Fogel developed the term technophysio evolution in response to his study of the phenomenon. See The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World.

8. US birthrate decline slowing?

The US birth rate could be leveling off after a four-years of drop:  4 million Americans were born in 2012, just a few hundred fewer than2011. Teen births are in a "stunning turnaround," and the birthrate for older moms is increasing. ...

9. What's Killing Poor White Women?

For most Americans, life expectancy continues to rise—but not for uneducated white women. They have lost five years, and no one knows why.

10. Amish Community Not Anti-Technology, Just More Thoughtful

Many outsiders assume the Amish reject all new technology. But that's not true.

One Amish man in Lancaster County, Pa., checks his voicemail about four times a day. His shop is equipped with a propane-powered forklift, hydraulic-powered saws, cordless drills, and a refrigerated tank where milk from dairy cows is stored.

The difference between Amish people and most other Americans is the deliberation that takes place before deciding whether to embrace a new technology. Many Americans assume newer technology is always better, and perhaps even inherently good. ...

11. Religion In Workplace Increasingly Diverse; Comes With Potential Pitfalls

12. The shocking un-truth about church budgets

The church’s rapidly changing role in society requires new ways of looking at the allocation of financial resources. ...

... In the past we churches thought of ourselves as the backbones of society, places where good, moral and faithful people gather to pool resources so we can go out into the world and feed the homeless and convert people in order to save their souls. Keeping administrative costs as low as possible would help us to help the needy.

While many good and righteous things have come out of this view of ourselves, the truth is that that way of thinking is a pretty arrogant self-assessment borne out of a climate of popularity and ease. ...

... What we are now is mission outposts. We are islands in a world full of increasingly adrift people. We are places of solace and hope, community and hospitality for people who are too smart to believe in God and pretty convinced they don’t need the church — until they do. ...

13. 26 Maps That Show How Ethnic Groups Are Divided Across America

14. A Point of View: Why embracing change is the key to happiness

... And every analysis of what makes lucky and happy people lucky and happy demonstrates they adapt fast and well to new situations and people, and so are defended by complex social circles and acclimatised to change. They offer and request help and are free to embrace what's positive in life's inevitable alterations. They don't try to impose stillness on a universe which is in motion. They know real security involves a degree of exposure.

Sadly, most human authorities play to our fears and offer us stasis. They build us, if you like, shark cages for our time in the ever-changing water - consoling little pens which can't protect us when something huge and horrible arrives and we end up like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws - all at sea. They offer apparently eternal values - eternity being unchanging and therefore reliable - the brotherhood of men, the wisdom of the free market, the evil of outsiders, the true path to heaven, the rewards of obedience. An incumbent government will warn against "changing horses in midstream" and we may accept a dire status quo because of how much worse the alternative might be. ...

Comments

[Charming Billy]

Those maps are misleading. The region with the largest proportion of British (English, Welsh, and Scottish) ancestry is in the South East, but this never shows up on these kind of maps.

[Michael W. Kruse]

Not sure if the maps are misleading or if the respondents are. ;-) One map shows that a large number of people in the SE simply say they are "American." I suspect many of those are English, Welsh, and Scottish (and Irish) but they self-identified otherwise.