1. Carpe Diem: 5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History
- Fewer people are dying young, and more are living longer. ...
- Global economic growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. ...
- War is becoming rarer and less deadly. ...
- Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall. ...
- There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in the world. ...
2. Everyone is putting out their most important economic charts list for 2013: Atlantic: The Most Important Economic Stories of 2013—in 44 Graphs. Economist: 2013 in charts. Huffington Post: The 13 Most Important Charts Of 2013.
3. Economist: The world has become better fed over the past 50 years
MANY people will groan after stuffing themselves on a Christmas feast. A traditional three-course turkey dinner can be as much as 3,500 calories. Such indulgences are a luxury in many parts of the world—but thankfully less so. Over the past half-century, the amount of food that people consume has increased (measured in calories), according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Our interactive map and chart tracks countries across five decades, letting users select places, years on the timeline or any chart-line. (It performs poorly on smartphones; our apologies.) ...
In a related story at NPR: More People Have More To Eat, But It's Not All Good News
... The good news is: The percentage of the world's population getting what the researchers say is a sufficient diet has grown from 30 percent to 61 percent.
In 1965, a majority of the world survived on less than 2,000 calories a day per person. This was especially true in parts of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, China and Southeast Asia. Now, 61 percent of the world has access to 2,500 or more calories a day.
But one thing the scientists discovered is that the countries that have a history of food insufficiency didn't just up and start growing lots more food. Instead, for the most part they're increasing supply by importing food from abroad. ...
I'm unclear why the author thinks importing food is a problem but other challenges he mentions in the article are an issue.
4. Carpe Diem: When it comes to home appliances, the ‘good old days’ are now: they’re cheaper, better, more energy efficient than ever
... In 1981, the 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above from a 1981 Wards Christmas catalog sold for $359.88. The average hourly manufacturing wage then was $7.42, meaning that it would have taken 48.5 hours of work at the average hourly wage for a typical factory worker to earn enough income 32 years ago to purchase the dishwasher above. ...
... The new Kenmore 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above is currently listed on the Sears website for sale at $539.99. At the current average hourly wage of $20.26 for production workers, the average factory worker today would only have to work 26.7 hours to earn enough pre-tax income to buy today’s energy-efficient dishwasher, which is only a little more than one-half of the 48.5 hour time-cost for the 1981 model.
Bottom Line: Today’s modern household appliances are not only cheaper than ever before, they are the most energy-efficient appliances in history, resulting in additional savings for consumers through lower operating costs. The average dishwasher today is not only more than twice as energy-efficient as a comparable 1981 model, but its real cost today is only about 50% of the price of the 1981 dishwasher, measured in hours worked at the average hourly wage. Put those two factors together, and the average American’s dishwasher today is about six times superior to the dishwasher of thirty years ago. ...
5. Carpe Diem: How much did real US median income increase from 1979 to 2007? A lot depends on the measure of income used
"The median income data [often cited] are on tax units rather than households, they do not include many government transfer payments, they are pre-tax rather than post-tax, they do not adjust for changes in household size, and they do not include nontaxable compensation such as employer-provided health insurance.
Does this matter? Yes!"
6. American Interest: Economic Mobility is a Male Problem
The biggest victim of family breakdown might be lower-class men. In City Journal Kay Hymowitz has a fascinating yet alarming piece on how family breakdown hurts men’s prospects more than women’s. One of the most interesting facts she highlights is that if you separate out men from women, women in America are roughly as upwardly mobile as women anywhere else in the world. It’s only when you add men back in and compare the US whole population to populations abroad that things look bleak:
Numerous studies have confirmed that the U.S. has less upward mobility than just about any developed nation, including England, the homeland of the peerage. Yet, if you look at boys separately from girls, as the Finnish economist Markus Jäntti and his colleagues at the Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labor did, the story changes markedly. In every country studied, girls are more likely than boys to climb up the income ladder, but in the United States, the disadvantage for sons is substantially greater than in other countries. Almost 75 percent of American daughters escape the lowest quintile—not unlike girls in the comparison countries of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Fewer than 60 percent of American sons experience similar success. ...
7. AEI Ideas: 3 charts that show what’s really going on with economic mobility in the US
8. Washington Post: Full employment, not inequality, should be the top economic priority - Ezra Klein
... While there are ways to reduce inequality without doing much about employment (say, by taxing the rich and using the proceeds on defense spending), it's hard to imagine full employment not doing much to reduce inequality. ...
... All that said, income inequality and social mobility really are startling trends that people should be very worried about and that the political system should be working aggressively to solve, or at least ameliorate. I don't have many policy disagreements with the folks focusing on inequality. But politics is about prioritization, and what politicians end up doing is in part driven by what problems their political coalitions are most worried about. ...
9. Conversable Economist: Falling Unemployment and Falling Labor Force Participation
10. Business Insider: This Map Shows Which Parts Of The Country Have A Huge Gender Gap In The Workforce
11. PBS: The rise of the 'new rich': 1 in 5 Americans will reach affluence in their lives
It's not just the wealthiest 1 percent.
Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America's economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation's income inequality.
The growing numbers of the U.S. poor have been well documented, but survey data provided to The Associated Press detail the flip side of the record income gap -- the rise of the "new rich." ...
12. Atlantic Cities: America's Wealth Is Staggeringly Concentrated in the Northeast Corridor
13. New York Times: Demand Soaring, Poor Are Feeling Squeezed
... Today, millions of poor Americans are caught in a similar trap, with the collapse of the housing boom helping stoke a severe shortage of affordable apartments. Demand for rental units has surged, with credit standards tight and many families unable to scrape together enough for a down payment for buying a home. At the same time, supply has declined, with homebuilders and landlords often targeting the upper end of the market. ...
14. Bloomberg: North America to Drown in Oil as Mexico Ends Monopoly
The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.
Plagued by almost a decade of slumping output that has degraded Mexico’s take from a $100-a-barrel oil market, President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking an end to the state monopoly over one of the biggest crude resources in the Western Hemisphere. The doubling in Mexican oil output that Citigroup Inc. said may result from inviting international explorers to drill would be equivalent to adding another Nigeria to world supply, or about 2.5 million barrels a day....
15. Oil Price: Cheap Fossil Fuels: Good or Bad for the World’s Poor?
... Let’s try reconciling all of the themes raised in Lomborg’s article and in my comments by reframing them in this way:
• Yes, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a while. For that reason, a smart energy policy needs to focus on shifting the mix of fossil fuels, so far as is possible, to relatively clean natural gas and away from relatively dirty coal, while also keeping the pressure on for energy conservation across the board.
• Price signals are one way to keep the pressure on. A carbon tax is a somewhat crude way to penalize relatively dirty fuels, in that climate change is not the only issue. We should be concerned, too, about sulfur and mercury from burning coal, urban air pollution from gasoline and diesel fuels, and local environmental risks of fracking for natural gas. Still, a carbon tax serves at least roughly to penalize the dirtiest fuels the most.
• And yes, no environmental policy is going to be successful politically if it is seen as a matter of saving the earth versus helping the poor. Fuel subsidies have to go, since, realistically, they are a burden, not a boon, to the poor, but at the same time, some of the budgetary economies from the elimination of subsidies and some of the revenues from carbon taxes should go toward smarter policies to help the world’s least advantaged.
Those ideas might help point us toward policies that are good for both the poor and the planet.
16. askblog: The Market is a Process, not a Decision Mechanism
... I think that many commentators contrast the market and government as mechanisms for making decisions. In this contrast, the market sometimes has an efficiency advantage, but government is presumed to have a moral-authority advantage.
Instead, think of the market as a process for testing hypotheses. The process is brutally empirical, winnowing out losing strategies and poor execution. In contrast, elections are a much weaker testing mechanism. Elections are unable to winnow out sugar subsidies, improvident loan guarantees, schools that produce bad outcomes, etc. ...
17. Quartz: Why the left-leaning Nelson Mandela was such a champion of free markets
One often overlooked aspect of Nelson Mandela’s legacy is South Africa’s economy. Parallel to everything amazing the man is connected to—freeing the country from the shackles of apartheid, subordinating retribution in favor of peace and reconciliation, and unifying a volatile nation at risk of civil war—he laid the groundwork for South Africa as the continent’s economic powerhouse. ...
18. Atlantic: Why Economics Is Really Called 'the Dismal Science'
... But this origin myth is, well, mythical. Carlyle did coin the phrase "the dismal science." And Malthus was, without question, dismal.
But Carlyle labeled the science "dismal" when writing about slavery in the West Indies. White plantation owners, he said, ought to force black plantation workers to be their servants. Economics, somewhat inconveniently for Carlyle, didn't offer a hearty defense of slavery. Instead, the rules of supply and demand argued for "letting men alone" rather than thrashing them with whips for not being servile. Carlyle bashed political economy as "a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing [science]; what we might call ... the dismal science.” ...
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