1. Why the Millennium Development Goals Need the Church (and Vice Versa) - Richard Stearns
... Christians can bring to the table a unique perspective on poverty that can help to solve its insidious nature. Poverty is often a matter of broken relationships as much as it is about lacking material things. A community's values and behavior can cause or perpetuate poverty, preventing girls from attending school, for example, or turning a blind eye to abuse, violence, or injustice. However, faith and religion are powerful tools that can shape values and change behavior. While these tools can be used badly, often the support of religious communities can be a critical ingredient to the success of antipoverty efforts. ...
2. How much is African poverty really declining? - Tyler Cowen
... Still, the numbers do show a very definite poverty reduction in the case of Ghana and some other countries with good news, so the responses do not seem entirely unconnected to reality. In any case I have long been suspicious about how much African growth has been resource-generated rather than based in ongoing gains in agricultural productivity.
If you would like better news from Africa, here are some figures from last year about declining child mortality. Here are some new results comparing Africa to earlier stages in British history, the original paper is here (pdf).
3. The Perils of Premature Deindustrialization
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/developing-economies--missing-manufacturing-by-dani-rodrik#fgF7IMKv6TYaY2J5.99
... But the developing world’s pattern of industrialization has been different. Not only has the process been slow, but deindustrialization has begun to set in much sooner. ...
... It is not clear why developing countries are deindustrializing so early in their growth trajectories. One obvious culprit may be globalization and economic openness, which have made it difficult for countries like Brazil and India to compete with East Asia’s manufacturing superstars. But global competition cannot be the main story. Indeed, what is striking is that even East Asian countries are subject to early-onset deindustrialization. ...
... An immediate consequence is that developing countries are turning into service economies at substantially lower levels of income. When the US, Britain, Germany, and Sweden began to deindustrialize, their per capita incomes had reached $9,000-11,000 (at 1990 prices). In developing countries, by contrast, manufacturing has begun to shrink while per capita incomes have been a fraction of that level: Brazil’s deindustrialization began at $5,000, China’s at $3,000, and India’s at $2,000.
The economic, social, and political consequences of premature deindustrialization have yet to be analyzed in full. ...
4. Economist Gavin Kennedy has some observations about the previous article The Alleged "Perils" of "Premature De-Industrialisation"
5. How Teaching Girls To Code Is Changing The World
... So in 2011 she founded Girls Who Code, asking: "If you give girls technology, how can they change the world?"
Last summer she got her answer. For eight weeks Girls Who Code hosted 20 New York City high schoolers, who learned robotics, HTML, and app design. She realized that with these tools, girls excel in computer science and tend to develop technology with an altruistic mind-set: an algorithm to detect cancer; a Web site to teach computer skills in 32 languages....
6. Did slavery make economic sense?
THE profitability of slavery is an enduring question of economic history. Thomas Gowan, writing way back in 1942, noted wearily that “the debate […] has been going on, in one form or another, for almost one hundred and fifty years.”
Intuitively, a business that uses slaves should be profitable. You pay your workers nothing, and reap the benefits of their labour. And some economic historians try to show just how lucrative it was....
... Individual businesses might have done well out of the slave trade. But the effect of slavery on wider economic development is also important.
John Elliott Cairnes, an economist, reckoned that slavery stifled economic growth in the South. Cairnes argued that reluctant workers depleted soils more quickly. In addition, scientific agriculture was impossible. Reluctant slaves, with little interest in learning, had no interest in using new farming techniques. And this meant that Southern farms lost competitiveness to their Northern counterparts.
Others reckon that slavery made it difficult for the South to establish trading networks. ...
... Eugene Genovese, writing in 1961, reckoned that the antebellum South was not profit-seeking. In fact, slavery was not even meant to be profitable. Slaveowners were keener on flaunting their vast plantations and huge reserves of slaves than they were about profits and investment. Rational economic decisions were sacrificed for pomp and circumstance. ...
... Of course any account of the economic effect of slavery should note the effect of treating human beings as capital equipment. The direct impact on the utility of the slaves themselves of this condition represented a terrible economic cost. And there was also an opportunity cost to the broader economy, which lost out on the potential human capital and entrepreneurial contributions slaves might have made as free workers. Abolition of involuntary servitude to say nothing of chattel slavery, was clearly a moral imperative. We can also feel pretty safe concluding that, whatever the benefit of the system to slave-owners, its abolition made as much economic sense as anything can.
7. When a Church Matches Missions with Entrepreneurship
Pastor Daniel Harrell had a heart for missions, so upon unexpectedly receiving roughly $2 million from a land sale, his Minnesota church was energized to use the funds accordingly. Though they had various debts to pay and building projects to fund, the church was committed to allocating at least 20 percent to service “outside of their walls.”
“The sensible way to spend the 20 percent would have been to find a successful service agency and write the check,” Harrell writes, in a recent piece for Christianity Today‘s This Is Our City.* “But I hated that idea. Surely we could leverage this money in a way that would let us get personally involved.” ...
Still, the numbers do show a very definite poverty reduction in the case of Ghana and some other countries with good news, so the responses do not seem entirely unconnected to reality. In any case I have long been suspicious about how much African growth has been resource-generated rather than based in ongoing gains in agricultural productivity.
If you would like better news from Africa, here are some figures from last year about declining child mortality. Here are some new results comparing Africa to earlier stages in British history, the original paper is here (pdf).
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/how-much-is-african-poverty-really-declining.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.aAp22Sw9.dpufStill, the numbers do show a very definite poverty reduction in the case of Ghana and some other countries with good news, so the responses do not seem entirely unconnected to reality. In any case I have long been suspicious about how much African growth has been resource-generated rather than based in ongoing gains in agricultural productivity.
If you would like better news from Africa, here are some figures from last year about declining child mortality. Here are some new results comparing Africa to earlier stages in British history, the original paper is here (pdf).
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/how-much-is-african-poverty-really-declining.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.aAp22Sw9.dpufStill, the numbers do show a very definite poverty reduction in the case of Ghana and some other countries with good news, so the responses do not seem entirely unconnected to reality. In any case I have long been suspicious about how much African growth has been resource-generated rather than based in ongoing gains in agricultural productivity.
If you would like better news from Africa, here are some figures from last year about declining child mortality. Here are some new results comparing Africa to earlier stages in British history, the original paper is here (pdf).
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/how-much-is-african-poverty-really-declining.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.aAp22Sw9.dpuftill, the numbers do show a very definite poverty reduction in the case of Ghana and some other countries with good news, so the responses do not seem entirely unconnected to reality. In any case I have long been suspicious about how much African growth has been resource-generated rather than based in ongoing gains in agricultural productivity.
If you would like better news from Africa, here are some figures from last year about declining child mortality. Here are some new results comparing Africa to earlier stages in British history, the original paper is here (pdf).
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/how-much-is-african-poverty-really-declining.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.aAp22Sw9.dpuftill, the numbers do show a very definite poverty reduction in the case of Ghana and some other countries with good news, so the responses do not seem entirely unconnected to reality. In any case I have long been suspicious about how much African growth has been resource-generated rather than based in ongoing gains in agricultural productivity.
If you would like better news from Africa, here are some figures from last year about declining child mortality. Here are some new results comparing Africa to earlier stages in British history, the original paper is here (pdf).
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/how-much-is-african-poverty-really-declining.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.aAp22Sw9.dpufStill, the numbers do show a very definite poverty reduction in the case of Ghana and some other countries with good news, so the responses do not seem entirely unconnected to reality. In any case I have long been suspicious about how much African growth has been resource-generated rather than based in ongoing gains in agricultural productivity.
If you would like better news from Africa, here are some figures from last year about declining child mortality. Here are some new results comparing Africa to earlier stages in British history, the original paper is here (pdf).
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/how-much-is-african-poverty-really-declining.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.aAp22Sw9.dpuf
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