Kruse Kronicle

Calmly Considered: Climate Change, Yea or Nay?

Allan and I discuss the issue of human-caused climate change, the realities and the economic complexities in dealing with it, and how Scripture informs us on creation care.

Why Population Control Is Not The Answer to Climate Change

Population control is sometimes championed as a way to fight climate change. Bernie Sanders recently raised this idea. The world population is growing. There are 7.7 billion people today. According to United Nations estimates, there will be nearly 11 billion in 2100. Extra people mean extra CO2 emissions. While two children per woman may seem reasonable, women in the poorest countries can average five or sex. Sanders and others believe this excess fertility is why the world population is growing. Fewer children will mean less CO2. Unfortunately, this perception is decades out of date.

We are already at "peak children." Globally, there are 680 million children under the age of five. U.N. projections show a peak of 700 million in about 2060. There are projected to be 650 million children in 2100, fewer than today. Yet the overall population will grow by nearly 50%. How can that be? The compounding effect of people already born will drive population growth over the next century, not excessive birth rates.

Trends in Fertility

Assume women have two children over their lifetime. They replace themselves and one other. Population size will be stable from generation to generation. (The actual replacement fertility rate for an affluent nation is 2.1 children per woman.) Throughout history, the total fertility rate has been six or seven children. One-quarter of children died before their first birthday. Another sizable percentage died before age five. Many of those who made it past five died before marrying and having children. High fertility rates ensured a couple of children would survive to continue the family.

As affluence emerged and health practices changed (first in Europe and then spreading elsewhere), more children survived into adulthood. We needed fewer births to perpetuate a family, but it took a while for customs related to fertility to adjust downward. That lag between declining death and fertility rates led to the population explosion that began two centuries ago. That growth accelerated into the twentieth century and continues into its final stages today. As recently as the 1960s, the global total fertility rate was as high as five children per woman.

Today, the global total fertility rate is about 2.4 and dropping, but the rate is not evenly spread worldwide. Europe, the Americas, China, Japan, and other regions have fertility rates below the replacement rate, well below it in many nations. A handful of smaller poor countries have fertility rates of five or six, but they also have some of the highest child death rates. The world average is fast approaching the 2.1 replacement rate. However, because the global fertility rate has usually been higher than the replacement rate for most of us now living, it means the cohort of people born one year is usually larger than those born the previous year. So let us think about what that means for the future.

The Compounding Effect in Future Fertility

To keep things simple, assume going forward that we birth the same number of children each year, the death rate stays the same, and no one lives past one hundred years. Now say there are 100,000 people aged 100. By next year, all will have died. The group that was 99 will now be 100. Because more of them were born, there will now be maybe 105,000 people 100 years old. After two years have passed, the new group of 100 hundred-year-old people will be the people who are 98 years old today. They will be a still larger group. That will continue for one hundred years.

At the other end of the age continuum, we have the largest number of children ever born in a year and the largest age cohort alive. A year later, this youngest age cohort will replace a smaller cohort a year older than them. But keep in mind that the number of women of childbearing age will increase yearly for the next forty-five years. Therefore, each year the total fertility rate will need to fall slightly below the replacement rate if the population is to stabilize. It can then rise to the replacement rate after forty-five years. This will continue until 2120, when each age cohort is the largest age cohort that has ever existed for that age. This is the primary driver of population growth in the future, but there is at least one other key factor. (Clearly, I am oversimplifying to illustrate my point. We are not down to replacement rate fertility, so there is still some marginal population growth due to "excess" fertility.)

Furthermore, actual global death rates are not constant. They are dropping. People are living longer. So not only is each age cohort larger than before, but it is also living slightly longer. This, too, contributes to population growth over the coming decades.

Therefore, we would need considerably less than replacement-rate fertility to limit global population growth substantially. In fact, there are credible projections of a population peak of fewer than nine billion. Demographers once assumed transition to low fertility and death rates would stabilize at about the replacement rate. Instead, the fertility rate has dropped well below the replacement rate in nearly every affluent nation, in some cases nearly one child per woman. This may look like a good thing from the narrow view of CO2 emissions. From a holistic standpoint, many social scientists are troubled. Depopulation can be as destructive to human well-being as overpopulation.

The Depopulation Problem

A vibrant society needs a critical mass of productive workers relative to its dependents (primarily children and the elderly.) This is the dependency ratio (dependents divided by workers multiplied by 100). With excessively low fertility rates, it is possible to have a great imbalance with many seniors and too few workers to provide for society. We have already seen that current U.N. projections say we will have nearly the same number of children now as in 2100, but the overall population will be almost 50% larger at eleven billion. That growth is a consequence of a burgeoning number of elders. A smaller population of nine billion may mean fewer total people but an even worse dependency ratio.

Modest help may come from lengthening the number of years people work or a higher participation rate in the workforce for working-age people but at some point, that will be insufficient. Then consider the possibility of medical breakthroughs that cure cancer or dramatically reduce heart disease. That means more people living longer, intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance.

As an ever-shrinking number of people (potentially a minority of the population) is expected to support everyone else, improving living standards will begin to stall and possibly reverse, making the world ripe for any societal dysfunctions. It will not take eighty years for this challenge to become real. Japan is already struggling with these issues. China is already headed down this road. One can envision China opening up to immigration from the remaining regions with the highest fertility rate and investing its resources in growth economies. However, if every nation is headed to fertility rates well below the replacement rates, it is only a temporary fix. The dependency ratio for a world with eleven billion people is already a challenge. The only way to get a peak population under nine billion people is to achieve fertility rates well below replacement rates, substantially intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance just a generation or two down the road. (For more detail, see the Brookings' piece, How will we cope when there are too few young people in the world?)

Decoupled Economic Growth

At the most basic level, climate policy must be about economic growth decoupled from CO2 emissions. Population growth is one issue driving this need for economic growth. But also consider people are advocating for a $15 living wage for every worker in the United States. That would put nearly every U.S. worker in the top 10% of wage earners in the world. Meanwhile, despite astonishing improvements in human well-being around the world and the dramatic reduction in extreme poverty, there are still hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty. A couple billion more have more stable lives but still live well below standards we would consider tolerable. If it is a matter of justice that everyone in the U.S. has a $ 15-an-hour living standard, then it is only just that all citizens of the world have something approximating that standard. The only way that happens is through economic growth. Measures like population control are shortsighted and potentially disastrous. The principal mission is decoupling economic growth from fossil fuel consumption and other disruptive measures like decoupling land use from agricultural production.

Recycle Or Not? The Need To Test Good Intentions

This article from October 2015, asks, Are We Recycling Too Much?

Our study made the first known attempt to combine these various costs and benefits into one analysis to estimate what recycling rate is best. Our conclusion was that recycling up to 10% appears to reduce social costs, but any recycling over 10% costs the environment and the economy more than it helps. The environment and economy suffer as we transport some recycled materials to destinations as far afield as China.

These provocative results certainly require confirmation from future independent and objective research before broad policy goals can be adjusted. Also, many of the benefit and costs associated with waste disposal and recycling vary across regions of the country and world, and thus optimal recycling rates may also vary. For example, we used municipal cost data from Japan for this study because the United States and most European countries do not keep such data.

But if these results hold for other developed countries, then society should collectively rethink how to approach recycling.

And

But the substantial environmental benefits outlined above of using recycled materials in production vary substantially across materials. Aluminum and other metals are environmentally costly to mine and prepare for production. Paper, too, is costly to manufacture from raw sources. But glass and plastic appear relatively easy on the environment when manufactured from raw materials.

These differences are vital. Although the optimal overall recycling rate may be only 10%, the composition of that 10% should contain primarily aluminum, other metals and some forms of paper, notably cardboard and other source of fiber. Optimal recycling rates for these materials may be near 100% while optimal rates of recycling plastic and glass might be zero. To encourage this outcome, a substantial subsidy offered only on those materials whose life cycles generate positive environmental benefits should be applied.

The article illustrates once again that whether we are talking about tax cuts, living wages, rent control, tariffs, or recycling, good intentions unsupported by empirical evidence can be counterproductive.

Save

Save

Anti-GMO: The Lethal Implications

Anthropogenic-driven climate change is a fact. As the climate changes, the poorest of humanity will suffer the greatest. The most ardent climate activists tell us this is settled science. So settled that questioning these conclusions puts you in league with people who deny the Jewish Holocaust ever happened. It is science!

Well, there is another issue around which there is even more scientific consensus. Megan Molteni, writing for UnDark:

According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent of scientists believe these foods are safe to eat. Only 37 percent of the general public agrees. Republicans and Democrats are just as likely to be opposed to transgenic foods, as are people across different age groups. So why is it that we trust the National Academy of Sciences and the WHO when they say climate change is likely caused by humans, but not when they say these foods are safe?

Molteni highlights the recent development of goats modified to include an antimicrobial enzyme that helps humans fight off bacterial cells that cause diarrhea and other infections. The milk from these goats aids children in fighting off these diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, 525,000 children under five died last year from diarrheal diseases, mostly in poor communities in developing nations where waterborne diseases are rampant and vaccines and antibiotic treatments are difficult to acquire and distribute.

The modified goats could reduce millions of children's suffering, even death. A public university developed them and has had nearly two decades of testing and review. The goats could be distributed via whatever strategy seems most effective, even free. There is no sinister corporate entity lurking in the shadows. So why are the goats not in use?

First, regulation. Clearly, GMOs must be evaluated and regulated, but the present regulatory system is such a mishmash of regulation and entities that it is very costly and time-consuming to get approval. Consequently, the process is skewed toward large corporate entities who can work the system, provoking many anti-GMOers to make the regulatory process even more difficult.

Second, anti-GMOers have organized to oppose all GMO usage in developing nations, sometimes pitting well-funded European and American activists against poor agricultural workers who could benefit greatly from the technology.

But as scientists will tell you, "GMO" tells you zero about the merits of any particular product. What tells you about the merits is looking at the actual merits of the product!

Last month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report assessing all the science available on genetically engineered crops. It concluded that we shouldn't be making generalizations about GMOs, but rather asking if a particular crop or GE product makes the world a better place or a more dangerous one, on a case-by-case basis. This was not exactly what people wanted to hear, the authors wrote: "We received impassioned requests to give the public a simple, general, authoritative answer about GE crops. Given the complexity of GE issues, we did not see that as appropriate."

The goats are not the only product caught up in this controversy. The linked article suggests others. In addition to nutrition and health, GMOs also have a role to play in adapting to warmer temperatures, with crops that grow more food with less water and fewer nutrients, for example.

… improving food security and public health without harming the environment will require the concerted use of many methods, from traditional breeding to organic farming. Genetic modification can't hold back rising sea levels or fill aquifers drained by years of drought. But there are important contributions to be made with problems that have been unsolvable by other means, the researchers say — if only regulations would allow it.

Climate activists routinely moralize about people who will not get on board with their initiatives, saying deniers are accountable for countless lives that will one day be diminished or lost due to our inaction on climate change. The poorest folks will suffer the most. This is their scientific conclusion. Yet when the same scientific community says GMO technology is safe, with the potential to save millions of lives in the here and now, while enhancing the welfare of countless others, the activists rise in opposition to the technology. This tells me that while some people are genuinely knowledgeable about the science of climate change and are alarmed about the consequences, the concern by multitudes is less about science and far more to do with subjective narratives with which science (happily for them) agrees. When the "naturalist" narrative is not supported, they disregard science instead of modifying their narrative.

I'd invite you to read Molteni's Spilled Milk article. In the meantime, my climate activist friends, unless you are willing to give full-throated support of GMOs here and now, do not let me ever again here, you decry the "anti-science" climate deniers. You are no different. Subjective considerations drive you every bit as much as climate deniers. Right now, people suffer and die because of your "anti-science" behavior.

Confronting Liberal and Conservative Biases on Science

New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter has an excellent piece about how ideology shapes our embrace/rejection of science. The left loves to rant about the "anti-science" right when the left participates just as much in the same anti-science behavior, and the left's anti-science behavior is every bit as destructive.

"The left is turning anti-science," Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape who as a venture capitalist has become one of the most prominent thinkers of Silicon Valley, told me not long ago.

He was reflecting broadly about science and technology. His concerns ranged from liberals' fear of genetically modified organisms to their mistrust of technology's displacement of workers in some industries. "San Francisco is an interesting case," he noted. "The left has become reactionary."

Still, liberal biases may be most dangerous in the context of climate change, the most significant scientific and technological challenge of our time. For starters, they stand against the only technology with an established track record of generating electricity at scale while emitting virtually no greenhouse gases: nuclear power.

Only 35 percent of Democrats, compared with 60 percent of Republicans, favor building more nuclear power plants, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

It is the G.O.P. that is closer to the scientific consensus. According to a separate Pew poll of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 65 percent of scientists want more nuclear power too.

He goes on to note:

Research suggests that better scientific knowledge will not be sufficient, on its own, to overcome our biases. Neither will it be mostly about improving education in STEM fields. To defeat our scientific phobias and taboos will require understanding how the findings of science and their consequences fit into the cultural makeup of both liberals and conservatives.

Explaining in more detail:

It is not hard to figure out the biases. People on the right tend to like private businesses, which they see as productive job creators. They mistrust government. It's not surprising they will play down climate change when it seems to imply a package of policies that curb the actions of the former and give a bigger role to the latter.

On the left, by contrast, people tend to mistrust corporations — especially big ones — as corrupt and destructive. These are the institutions bringing us both nuclear power and genetically modified agriculture.

"When science is aligned with big corporations the left immediately, intuitively perceives the technology as not benefiting the greater good but only benefiting the corporation," said Matthew Nisbet, an expert on the communication of science at Northeastern University.

So when assessing the risks of different technological options, the left finds the risk of nuclear energy looming the highest, regardless of contrary evidence.

This doesn't affect only beliefs about climate change and energy policy. The research identified similar distortions in people's beliefs about the scientific consensus on the consequences of allowing concealed handguns. Biases also color beliefs in what science says and means across a range of other issues.

In the context of climate change, this heuristic presents an odd problem. It suggests that attitudes about climate change have little to do with education and people's understanding of science.

Fixing it won't require just better science. Eliminating the roadblocks against taking substantive action against climate change may require somehow dissociating the scientific facts from deeply rooted preferences about the world we want to live in, on both sides of the ideological divide.

And it is the last sentence that is key. How do we do that? We must create spaces for productive conversations. No matter how emotionally satisfying it may be to engage in tribal disdain for those of another tribe for being "anti-science," this behavior entrenches those we may wish to persuade. And the glaring truth is that very very few of us are pro-science. We are pro-ideology and pro-heuristics and happy to embrace science when it meets these prior concerns. The reality is that there are multiple ways to frame an agenda. So another piece of the puzzle is to enter the mind of opponents and to figure out how to frame concerns in a way that resonates with things they value. But research shows, unsurprisingly, that we nearly always attempt persuasion from the most persuasive angle for us, projecting our values onto others. It usually has the effect of driving the opponent further away.

I think the answer lies in these considerations. I didn't say it was an easy answer. What thoughts do you have?

Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe

Scientific American: Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe

... In the paper, we identify several intuitions that may affect people's perception of GMOs.Psychological essentialism, for instance, makes us think of DNA as an organism's "essence" - an unobservable and immutable core that causes the organism's behaviour and development and determines its identity. As such, when a gene is transferred between two distantly related species, people are likely to believe that this process will cause characteristics typical of the source organism to emerge in the recipient. For example, in an opinion survey in the United States, more than half of respondents said that a tomato modified with fish DNA would taste like fish (of course, it would not).

Essentialism clearly plays a role in public attitudes towards GMOs. People are typically more opposed to GM applications that involve the transfer of DNA between two different species ("transgenic") than within the same species ("cisgenic"). Anti-GMO organizations, such as NGOs, exploit these intuitions by publishing images of tomatoes with fish tails or by telling the public that companies modify corn with scorpion DNA to make crispier cereals.      

Intuitions about purposes and intentions also have an impact on people's thinking about GMOs. They render us vulnerable to the idea that purely natural phenomena exist or happen for a purpose that is intended by some agent. These assumptions are part and parcel of religious beliefs, but in secular environments they lead people to regard nature as a beneficial process or entity that secures our wellbeing and that humans shouldn't meddle with. In the context of opposition to GMOs, genetic modification is deemed "unnatural" and biotechnologists are accused of "playing God". The popular term "Frankenfood" captures what is at stake: by going against the will of nature in an act of hubris, we are bound to bring enormous disaster upon ourselves.

Disgust also affects people's attitudes towards GMOs. The emotion probably evolved, at least in part, as a pathogen avoidance mechanism, preventing the body from consuming or touching harmful substances. We feel repelled by things that possibly contain or indicate the presence of pathogens such as bodily fluids, rotten meat, and maggots. This would explain why disgust operates on a hair trigger: it is better to forego an edible meal under the misguided assumption that it is contaminated, than to consume sickening, or even lethal, food that is erroneously thought to be safe. Hence, disgust can be elicited by completely innocuous food. ...

... The impact of intuitions and emotions on people's understanding of, and attitudes towards, GMOs has important implications for science education and communication. Because the mind is prone to distorting or rejecting scientific information in favour of more intuitive beliefs, simply transmitting the facts will not necessarily persuade people of the safety, or benefits, of GMOs, especially if people have been subjected to emotive, anti-GMO propaganda.

In the long run, education starting from a young age and specifically targeted at tackling common misconceptions might immunize the population against unsubstantiated anti-GMO messages. Other concerns can be addressed and discussed in the wider context of agricultural practices and the place of science and technology in society. However, for now, the best way to turn the tide and generate a more positive public response to GMOs is to play into people's intuitions as well. For instance, emphasizing the benefits of current and future GM applications — improved soil structures because herbicide resistant crops require less or no tilling, higher income for farmers in developing countries, reduced vitamin A deficiency, virus and drought resistance, to name a few — might constitute the most effective approach to changing people's minds. Given the benefits and promises of GM technology, such a change is much needed.

This is one of the most insightful articles I've read. I think his advice in the last paragraph is particularly important and needs to be heeded when dealing with any number of unjustified oppositions to factual realities - from climate change to vaccinations to nuclear power. Yet our propensity is to shout the facts louder and use opposition to the facts as a rallying cry for our tribe versus the "anti-science" dolts from the other tribe.

Eco-friendly 3D printed supercar

Behold the "Blade."

GDP Decoupling from Energy and Resource Use

Harvard Business Review: Stuff: When Less Is More

One of the most persistent economic misconceptions I see is the presumed fixed relationship between a unit of GDP and the energy/resources consumed in the process. This false relationship is projected into the future to show that growth is leading to total collapse in the near future. These graphs dispel the validity of that relationship.

However, the article points out that this incredible increase in productivity makes products cheaper, so consumption of the products grows dramatically. That does create a greater aggregate demand for energy/resources. The question is whether or not the decoupling of energy and resources can one day get out ahead and then go into decline through some combination of innovation and slowed demand. These two graphs were especially interesting.

"Material intensity continues to fall dramatically. In the U.S., the amount of resources extracted per dollar of GDP has decreased by nearly 75% over the past 90 years."

"Energy intensity, the portion of the total energy supply required to produce a material, has also dropped markedly. For example, the manufacture of 1.5 gigatons of steel would have gobbled up one-fifth of the world's total primary energy supply (TPES) in 1900. In 2010 it used only about one-fifteenth."

Why "Sustainable Development" is Not the Answer

New York Times: A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development - Eduardo Porter

If billions of impoverished humans are not offered a shot at genuine development, the environment will not be saved. And that requires not just help in financing low-carbon energy sources, but also a lot of new energy, period. Offering a solar panel for every thatched roof is not going to cut it.

"We shouldn't be talking about 10 villages that got power for a light bulb," said Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University in India who was among the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

"What we should be talking about," she said, "is how the village got a power connection for a cold storage facility or an industrial park."

Changing the conversation will not be easy. Our world of seven billion people — expected to reach 11 billion by the end of the century — will require an entirely different environmental paradigm....

... The "eco-modernists" propose economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it requires dropping the goal of "sustainable development," supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity's footprint by using nature more intensively.

"Natural systems will not, as a general rule, be protected or enhanced by the expansion of humankind's dependence upon them for sustenance and well-being," they wrote.

To mitigate climate change, spare nature and address global poverty requires nothing less, they argue, than "intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world."

As Mr. Shellenberger put it, the world would have a better shot at saving nature "by decoupling from nature rather than coupling with it."

This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small-scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world's surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water.

As the manifesto notes, as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity was supposedly in harmony with Mother Nature. Over the last half century, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed per average person declined by half. …

… Development would allow people in the world's poorest countries to move into cities — as they did decades ago in rich nations — and get better educations and jobs. Urban living would accelerate demographic transitions, lowering infant mortality rates and allowing fertility rates to decline, taking further pressure off the planet.

"By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends," the manifesto argues. …

Read the whole thing. Decoupling is essential. We have already seen this with land use. We are using no more land for agriculture in the United States than we were 100 years ago. Before that time, it took a fixed amount of land to feed each person. That same decoupling is developing worldwide, but it could be accelerated. The amount of energy consumed per unit of GDP has now begun to decline. We see this decoupling with other resources. Add a move to solar and nuclear power in combination with decoupling, and we have a real chance to drive down carbon emissions drastically.

I haven't yet read the whole EcoModernist Manifesto linked in the article, but the parameters and reasoning laid here are the best articulation of my views on economic development and sustainability that I have read.

Groups Aim to Lure Conservatives Out of the Closet on Climate Change

Forbes: Groups Aim to Lure Conservatives Out of the Closet on Climate Change

This is an excellent article! Climate change and the left-wing narrative of "capitalism-is-exploitation" have been closely intertwined. Scientists tend to lean left-wing already, but when Al Gore became the official face of climate change, that relationship between science and ideology became cemented. The problem is that whenever you wed a scientific challenge to an ideology in a deeply partisan culture, you guarantee rejection by half the populous. The challenge is to find ways to build coalitions across multiple political "tribes."

"A new Republican-led group, the ClearPath Foundation, is angling to breach those prison walls [captivity to climate change skeptics] — not just for members of U.S. Congress, but for moderates and conservatives everywhere who yearn for a meaningful role in the climate conversation. ...

... [Low engagement is] not for lack of understanding, Powell noted. The problem, rather, is that messages on global warming tend to come from groups associated with the far left, and to a lesser extent, the far right of the political spectrum. In between sits a vast audience comprised of political moderates and conservatives who understand the science and, when asked, support many economic and entrepreneurial initiatives that would help curb planet-warming emissions. And yet, no one is speaking directly to them, Powell said — a realization that has provided ClearPath with its mission. ...

And this is key:

... Evidence emerging from the social sciences suggests that the strategy makes some sense — not least because scientific literacy has been shown to be a poor predictor of whether or not most people consider climate change to be an issue of concern. Much more telling are the shared value systems and general world-views that act as both the glue for intellectual tribes within the larger community, and the filter by which those tribes ignore or discount messages emanating from the outside.

Virtually everyone is susceptible to this sort of motivated reasoning, according to one 2012 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, such that conservatives tend to hear undertones of "government overreach" in the words "climate change," while liberals tend to hear "insatiable corporate greed" when the discussion turns to economic and market-driven solutions to the problem.

From that 2012 study:

"[P]eople who subscribe to a hierarchical, individualistic world-view — one that ties authority to conspicuous social rankings and eschews collective interference with the decisions of individuals possessing such authority — tend to be skeptical of environmental risks. Such people intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such risks would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior that hierarchical individualists value. In contrast, people who hold an egalitarian, communitarian world-view — one favoring less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to individual needs — tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, to which they attribute social inequity. They therefore find it congenial to believe those forms of behavior are dangerous and worthy of restriction."...

YES! YES! A thousand times YES! Thus these attempts to frame climate issues in a way that energizes conservative and moderate involvement.

... That's not to suggest, of course, that Republicans and Democrats won't continue to disagree on the best strategies for addressing global warming. It's a safe bet, after all, that many on the left will find GOP-sponsored solutions to be too slow, too shortsighted, or too mindful of industry interests — just as those on the right will view left-leaning initiatives as economically fraught, scientifically unwarranted and alarmist. Such is the cacophony of competing tribal values.

But for those seeking to bring Republicans more fully into the climate discussion, the efforts of ClearPath and other groups to nurture a conversation somewhere between the poles must be a welcome development. ...

I know my progressive and liberal friends don't want to hear it, and it irritates them every time I say this, but I am more convinced than ever that the more you insist on exclusively using capitalism-is-exploitation narratives to solicit support for climate change action, the narrower will be the support. Many progressives are either so insulated that they cannot see how their ideology bleeds through, or they are aware of their science/ideology linkage and climate change as a tool for promoting an ideological agenda is a higher priority than developing broad support for action. Good to see some activists trying to broaden the discussion.

Science and Political Hijacking

Wall Street Journal: Vaccines and Politicized Science

The people doing basic science should learn a well-proven truth about basic politics: Any cause taken up by politicians today by definition will be doubted or opposed by nearly half the population. When an Al Gore, John Kerry or Europe’s Green parties become spokesmen for your ideas, and are willing to accuse fellow scientists of bad faith or willful ignorance, then science has made a Faustian bargain. The price paid, inevitably, will be the institutional credibility of all scientists.

Bingo! Two groups have been central to the climate debate. Some scientists study climate, and then a portion of society views the modern economic order primarily as an exercise in exploitation and destruction. They are not one in the same group, but considerable overlap exists.

Scientific evidence that our system is destroying the planet is an irresistible tool for this political community to advance its political narrative of the future. Science has seemed willing to partner with those who embrace this narrative to address the real challenge of climate change; I suspect not in small part because many scientists already share a similar political narrative. Yet the challenge of climate change does not dictate one particular narrative. Consequently, people who do not share the political narrative do not see climate science as valid science with a problematic superimposed narrative. They see climate science as junk science manufactured by people with the political narrative.

Science will play a critical role in a host of challenges in the future. We have to find a way to tap down the political hijacking.

The Decentralized Energy Revolution

Forbes: How The Energy Revolution Will Transform How We Live and Work

Revolutions used to be few and far between. James Watt's steam engine, developed in 1781, set the stage for the first industrial revolution. But it wasn't until a century later that the widespread adoption of electricity and the internal combustion engine brought about the second industrial revolution.

The information age didn't really get going until the 1970's and that's led to what to what many are now calling the new industrial revolution, which incorporates computer aided design and advanced fabrication techniques like 3D printing. However, the next revolution, in energy, is already underway.

While the drop in price for fossil fuels has grabbed most of the headlines lately, Citibank predicts that the shale boom will merely serve as a bridge to get us to a new era of renewable energy. This revolution, if anything, will be more far reaching than the others. While the earlier revolutions empowered large enterprises, this one might very well undo them. ...

... The last century was in large part driven by scale advantages. The bigger you were, the more efficient you would become. Those efficiencies would enable enterprises to own and control more resources, which would increase bargaining power and enhance the dominance of the firm.

Initially, information technology bolstered these trends. Only large organizations were able to afford computer systems that could help them administer resources by tracking accounting, maintenance and human resources. However, with the rise of personal computing and the Internet, that began to change. ...

Most populist support for renewable energy comes from concern over climate change. I am not persuaded that apocalyptic doom is certain without a swift and radical global economic restructuring. I am convinced that increasing CO2 at present rates can create highly undesirable but imprecisely understood consequences down the road. I see CO2 as a risk management issue. All things being equal, changes that minimize risk are a good thing. But since things are not equal, other considerations must also be weighed.

Human freedom and well-being are equally important to me, if not more so. Decentralized renewable energy would create enormous opportunities around the world while simultaneously reducing much of the geopolitical strife that emerges from the energy sector. Expanded opportunity has a way of translating into greater prosperity. Prosperous people are better equipped to handle climate change adaptations that may be required. Decentralized renewable energy both reduces the amount of CO2 emitted while improving the chances of smooth adaptation to changes in climate.

Critics are prone to look at renewable energy - and I'll add new generation nuclear power - as incapable of having a significant impact for many decades. Yet I keep imagining myself in 1895, looking at expanding U.S. cities and the problem of horse transportation. A guy is welding a frame between two bicycles and motorizing the contraption so he can become auto-mobile. How many would have predicted what transportation would look like in 1920 and later?

Before the industrial revolution, economies of scale were usually marginal or nonexistent. The Industrial Revolution made centralization and the economies of scale that come with it possible. The Information revolution is decentralizing the economy in some fundamental ways, but it is a networked decentralization. That is why I am skeptical of the doomsayers about the world 50 and 100 years into the future. We overestimate how much change can happen in the near term - say five years - but radically underestimate what can happen in twenty years.

Invisible Fuel (and "Limits to Growth" Thinking)

Economist: Inivisble Fuel

THE CHEAPEST AND cleanest energy choice of all is not to waste it. Progress on this has been striking yet the potential is still vast. Improvements in energy efficiency since the 1970s in 11 IEA member countries that keep the right kind of statistics (America, Australia, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden) saved the equivalent of 1.4 billion tonnes of oil in 2011, worth $743 billion. This saving amounted to more than their total final consumption in that year from gas, coal or any other single fuel. And lots of money is being invested in doing even better: an estimated $310 billion-360 billion was put into energy efficiency measures worldwide in 2012, more than the supply-side investment in renewables or in generation from fossil fuels.

The “fifth fuel”, as energy efficiency is sometimes called, is the cheapest of all. A report by ACEEE, an American energy-efficiency group, reckons that the average cost of saving a kilowatt hour is 2.8 cents; the typical retail cost of one in America is 10 cents. In the electricity-using sector, saving a kilowatt hour can cost as little as one-sixth of a cent, says Mr Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute, so payback can be measured in months, not years.

The largest single chunk of final energy consumption, 31%, is in buildings, chiefly heating and cooling. Much of that is wasted, not least because in the past architects have paid little attention to details such as the design of pipework (long, narrow pipes with lots of right angles are far more wasteful than short, fat and straight ones). Energy efficiency has been nobody’s priority: it takes time and money that architects, builders, landlords and tenants would rather spend on other things. ...

Whether we are talking about climate change or peak resources, the tendency is to project current economic dynamics - like a ratio of energy usage per unit of GDP - indefinitely into the future and then make dire predictions of impending doom.

However, continuous innovation teaches us that such relationships are alterable. Until the early 20th century, there was a consistent linkage between the acreage in agricultural production and human population. It would have been unsustainable with the level of growth the next century would bring. One hundred years later, we now see that the global demand for agricultural land has flattened – and may even decline – even as the global population continues to grow, albeit at an ever-slowing rate.

Similarly, energy use and GDP have typically been closely related. What we see now is that energy and GDP are decoupling. Both are increasing, but energy is at a slower rate than GDP. Even as both global population and living standards rise, it does not follow that energy and resource usage will inevitably follow suit. Through innovations in engineering, nanotechnology, and recycling, nearly everything we use can eventually be made of renewable materials. We have only scratched the surface of power sources that are available to us. Dramatic innovation is underway in energy storage, transmission, and usage.

There unquestionably are challenges, but predictions of impending and inescapable collapse are not justified.

For more on decoupling and a link to an excellent video by Bjorn Lomborg on the fallacy of limited growth thinking, see my post, Limits to Growth: Still Wrong, Still Influential - Bjorn Lomborg.

Nuclear Power From Nuclear Waste

See this article for more details: Back to the Future: Can Nuclear Energy Save the World?

 

Deforestation: Brazil is a success story for conservation

Christian Science Monitor: Deforestation: Brazil is a success story for conservation

"In the 1990s, tropical deforestation claimed 40 million acres each year, according to a report released in June by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Today, about 32 million acres of forests fall each year, a drop of about 19 percent. ...

...  The report cites a number of efforts that have led to deforestation’s decline. The researchers looked primarily at political policies, incentive programs, and economic reforms, limiting the scope of their study to countries and regions that displayed clear, tangible successes.

“Ultimately, the report shows that every euro, dollar, peso, rupee, dong, and African franc invested in these programs and policies is money well spent,” said Doug Boucher, the lead author of the study, in a news release. “The rewards far outweigh the costs.”

Brazil has effectively employed a suite of conservation methods. ...

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Matt Ridley: Reasons to Be Cheerful

We are prone to fixate on problems and threats. The news concentrates on Ebola, the Middle East and Ukraine violence, and the discord in Ferguson, Missouri. But it is important to keep present challenges (and they are more decidedly real) in context. Matt Ridley offers twelve reasons to be cheerful when we look at broader trends.

So let’s tot up instead what is going, and could go, right. Actually it is a pretty long list, just not a very newsworthy one. Compared with any time in the past half century, the world as a whole is today wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, safer, more peaceful and more equal.

1. The average person on the planet earns roughly three times as much as he or she did 50 years ago, corrected for inflation. If anything, this understates the improvement in living standards ...

2. The average person lives about a third longer than 50 years ago and buries two thirds fewer of his or her children (and child mortality is the greatest measure of misery I can think of).

3. The amount of food available per head has gone up steadily on every continent, despite a doubling of the population. Famine is now very rare.

4. The death rate from malaria is down by nearly 30 per cent since the start of the century. HIV-related deaths are falling. Polio, measles, yellow fever, diphtheria, cholera, typhoid, typhus — they killed our ancestors in droves, but they are now rare diseases.

5. We tell ourselves we are miserable, but it is not true. ...

6. education is in a mess and everybody’s cross about it, but consider: far more people go to school and stay there longer than they did 50 years ago.

7. The air is much cleaner than when I was young, with smog largely banished from our cities. Rivers are cleaner and teem with otters and kingfishers. ... Forest cover is increasing in many countries and the pressure on land to grow food has begun to ease.

8. We give more of our earnings to charity than our grandparents did.

9. Violent crimes of almost all kinds are on the decline — murder, rape, theft, domestic violence.

10. Despite all the illiberal things our governments still try to do to us, freedom is on the march.

11. The weather is not getting worse. Despite what you may have read, there is no global increase in floods, cyclones, tornadoes, blizzards and wild fires — and there has been a decline in the severity of droughts. ... there has been a steep decline in deaths due to extreme weather.

12. As for inequality, the world as a whole is getting rapidly more equal in income, because people in poor countries are getting richer at a more rapid pace than people in rich countries. ...

By all means, let us address the problems at hand, but let us also tap down the tendency to see only the negative and give in to gloom and despair.

How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen

The Atlantic: How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen

Environmentalists warn us that apocalypse awaits. Economists tell us that minimal fixes will get us through. Here's how we can move beyond the impasse.

This is an exceptionally good piece by Charles Mann on how we think and talk about climate change. It is a long article. Here are a few excerpts.

"... On the one hand, the transformation of the Antarctic seems like an unfathomable disaster. On the other hand, the disaster will never affect me or anyone I know; nor, very probably, will it trouble my grandchildren. How much consideration do I owe the people it will affect, my 40-times-great-grandchildren, who, many climate researchers believe, will still be confronted by rising temperatures and seas? Americans don't even save for their own retirement! How can we worry about such distant, hypothetical beings?

Worse, confronting climate change requires swearing off something that has been an extraordinary boon to humankind: cheap energy from fossil fuels. ..."

"... Rhetorical overreach, moral miscalculation, shouting at cross-purposes: this toxic blend is particularly evident when activists, who want to scare Americans into taking action, come up against economists, with their cool calculations of acceptable costs. Eco-advocates insist that only the radical transformation of society—the old order demolished, foundation to roof—can fend off the worst consequences of climate change. Economists argue for adapting to the most-likely consequences; cheerleaders for industrial capitalism, they propose quite different, much milder policies, and are ready to let nature take a bigger hit in the short and long terms alike. Both envelop themselves in the mantle of Science, emitting a fug of charts and graphs. (Actually, every side in the debate, including the minority who deny that humans can affect the climate at all, claims the backing of Science.) Bewildered and battered by the back-and-forth, the citizenry sits, for the most part, on its hands. For all the hot air expended on the subject, we still don't know how to talk about climate change.

As an issue, climate change was unlucky: when nonspecialists first became aware of it, in the 1990s, environmental attitudes had already become tribal political markers. ..."

He does a great job of recounting the history of the politics that has led us to where we are today.

"As an issue, climate change is perfect for symbolic battle, because it is as yet mostly invisible. ..."

Yes! And my conviction is that most conversations I encounter are far more about symbolic identification with a particular reference group, an expression of personal identity, and a means for ideological warfare, than a genuine appreciation for the nuances and risks of the human impact on climate.

In concrete terms, Americans encounter climate change mainly in the form of three graphs, staples of environmental articles. The first shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing. Almost nobody disputes this. The second graph shows rising global temperatures. This measurement is trickier: ... The third graph typically shows the consequences such models predict, ranging from worrisome (mainly) to catastrophic (possibly). ...

... The only solution to our ecological woes, McKibben argues, is to live simpler, more local, less resource-intensive existences—something he believes is already occurring. ...

... At base, he says, ecologism seeks not to save nature but to purify humankind through self-flagellating asceticism.

To Bruckner, ecologism is both ethnocentric and counterproductive. Ethnocentric because eco-denunciations of capitalism simply give new, green garb to the long-standing Euro-American fear of losing dominance over the developing world (whose recent growth derives, irksomely, from fossil fuels). Counterproductive because ecologism induces indifference, or even hostility to environmental issues. In the quest to force humanity into a puritanical straitjacket of rural simplicity, ecologism employs what should be neutral, fact-based descriptions of a real-world problem (too much carbon dioxide raises temperatures) as bludgeons to compel people to accept modes of existence they would otherwise reject. Intuiting moral blackmail underlying the apparently objective charts and graphs, Bruckner argues, people react with suspicion, skepticism, and sighing apathy—the opposite of the reaction McKibbenites hope to evoke. ...

Exactly!

Does climate change, as Nordhaus claims, truly slip into the silk glove of standard economic thought? The dispute is at the center of Jamieson's Reason in a Dark Time. Parsing logic with the care of a raccoon washing a shiny stone, Jamieson maintains that economists' discussions of climate change are almost as problematic as those of environmentalists and politicians, though for different reasons. ...

... If the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises only slightly above its current 400 parts per million, most climatologists believe, there is (roughly) a 90 percent chance that global temperatures will eventually rise between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit, with the most likely jump being between 4 and 5 degrees. Nordhaus and most other economists conclude that humankind can slowly constrain this relatively modest rise in carbon without taking extraordinary, society-transforming measures, though neither decreasing the use of fossil fuels nor offsetting their emissions will be cheap or easy. But the same estimates show (again in rough terms) a 5 percent chance that letting carbon dioxide rise much above its current level would set off a domino-style reaction leading to global devastation. (No one pays much attention to the remaining 5 percent chance that the carbon rise would have very little effect on temperature.)

In our daily lives, we typically focus on the most likely result: I decide whether to jaywalk without considering the chance that I will trip in the street and get run over. But sometimes we focus on the extreme: I lock up my gun and hide the bullets in a separate place to minimize the chance that my kids will find and play with them. For climate change, should we focus on adapting to the most probable outcome or averting the most dangerous one? Cost-benefit analyses typically ignore the most-radical outcomes: they assume that society has agreed to accept the small but real risk of catastrophe—something environmentalists, to take one particularly vehement section of society, have by no means done.

On top of this, Jamieson argues, there is a second problem in the models economists use to discus climate change. Because the payoff from carbon-dioxide reduction will occur many decades from now, Nordhausian analysis suggests that we should do the bare minimum today, even if that means saddling our descendants with a warmer world. Doing the minimum is expensive enough already, economists say. Because people tomorrow will be richer than we are, as we are richer than our grandparents were, they will be better able to pay to clean up our emissions. Unfortunately, this is an ethically problematic stance. How can we weigh the interests of someone born in 2050 against those of someone born in 1950? In this kind of trade-off between generations, Jamieson argues, "there is no plausible value" for how much we owe the future.

Given their moral problems, he concludes, economic models are much less useful as guides than their proponents believe. For all their ostensible practicality—for all their attempts to skirt the paralysis-inducing specter of the apocalypse—economists, too, don't have a good way to talk about climate change. ...

Amen!

... let's assume that rising carbon-dioxide levels will become a problem of some magnitude at some time and that we will want to do something practical about it. Is there something we should do, no matter what technical arcanae underlie the cost-benefit analyses, no matter when we guess the bad effects from climate change will kick in, no matter how we value future generations, no matter what we think of global capitalism? Indeed, is there some course of action that makes sense even if we think that climate change isn't much of a problem at all? ...

Read the article to see how he answers the question. I pretty much agree. But I particularly like how he has framed our problem with the problem of climate change.

I've been saying this for years, but I still think the best response is one of risk management. Risk involves factoring in both the likelihood something will happen and the significance of the thing happening if it does. Apocalyptic ecologism or dismissive economism gets us nowhere.

This Fake Meat (made of plants) Is So Good It Fooled Whole Foods Customers For 3 Days

Business Insider: This Fake Meat Is So Good It Fooled Whole Foods Customers For 3 Days

"... And the Missouri-based company Beyond Meat thinks it has the solution to satisfy our cravings:  food that looks and tastes just like meat — but is made of plants.  It is such a good imitation, in fact, that Whole Foods customers couldn't tell the difference when a brief mix-up occurred last year."

Economic Development Links

1. Economist: March of the Middle Class

2. Chrsitianity Today: Poverty Is a Moral Problem - Interview with William Easterly

... The sad thing is that the field and practice of development have too often been on the wrong side of this debate. They've implicitly painted themselves into a corner where they're on the authoritarian side. Then they're backing the autocrats, backing the oppressors against the oppressed. ...

... Any advice for a 20-year-old reading this article who wants to "change the world"?

I love young people who want to change the world!

I think we need rebalancing. A large share of the effort has been going to direct technical solutions to poverty. But this has neglected the other option of advocacy and education for rights as an important moral goal. Rights also work to promote development. ...

3. BBC: Ending poverty needs more than growth, World Bank says

... "This is simply not enough, and we need a laser-like focus on making growth more inclusive and targeting more programmes to assist the poor directly if we're going to end extreme poverty." ...

4. Mashable: 64% of World's Extreme Poor Live in Just 5 Countries

... Using the most recent data from 2010, the report shows that nearly two-thirds of the extremely poor — that is, those who live on less than $1.25 a day — live in just five countries: India, China, Nigeria, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo. ...

5. Wired: The Hyper-Efficient, Highly Scientific Scheme to Help the World’s Poor

... How did ICS know the campaign would work? It made sense in theory—free textbooks should mean more kids read them, so more kids learn from them—but they had no evidence to back that up. On the spot, Kremer suggested a rigorous way to evaluate the program: Identify twice the number of qualifying schools as it had the money to support. Then randomly pick half of those schools to receive the textbooks, while the rest got none. By comparing outcomes between the two cohorts, they could gauge whether the textbooks were making a difference.

What Kremer was suggesting is a scientific technique that has long been considered the gold standard in medical research: the randomized controlled trial. At the time, though, such trials were used almost exclusively in medicine—and were conducted by large, well-funded institutions with the necessary infrastructure and staff to manage such an operation. A randomized controlled trial was certainly not the domain of a recent PhD, partnering with a tiny NGO, out in the chaos of the developing world. ...

6. Christianity Today: How Female Farmers Could Solve the Hunger Crisis

... This gender inequality carries desperate consequences. Lack of basic tools and training means women grow and harvest significantly lower yields than men – not because they can't farm as well, but because they don't have necessary resources. In fact, female farmers do more to increase food security in rural communities than men. Women cultivate vegetable gardens and edible crops close to home, which allows them to watch their children and cook meals. In contrast, men tend to travel further from the house to grow cash crops like tobacco, coffee, and corn – crops that do little to supplement diet. ...

7. Businessweek: Have Higher Food Prices Actually Helped the World's Poor?

... Data, however, pointed in the other direction: The number of people in developing countries who reported that there had been times in the past 12 months when they didn’t have enough money to buy the food their family needed fell by hundreds of millions (PDF) from 2005 to 2009. In 2013 improved FAO estimates backed up the earlier polling reports: The numbers suggested that 842 million people in the 2011-13 period were unable to meet their dietary energy requirements, down nearly 6 percent (PDF) from 893 million people in the 2005-07 period. ...

... Heady suggests the fundamental assumption of previous poverty prediction models—that because poor people eat more food than they grow, they’re hurt by higher prices—did not account for the impact of food prices on wages. In a lot of places, as the prices of food rose, poor people earned more money. Even though they were paying more for food, their increased incomes more than made up for that and they got a little richer. In Bangladesh, for example, rural wages adjusted for the price of food increased by about a third from the middle of 2006 to the end of 2010. (Urban wages remained essentially unchanged.) ...

8. MR University: Water and common pool problem

The general logic here applies to a large number of problems in economic development, not just water. This is one of the key ideas of the theory of property rights.

9. Atlantic: How Sanitary Pads Can Help Women Improve Their Health and Education

... That's the little formula that's fueling Arunachalam Muruganantham's thriving sanitary-pad machine business, an undertaking that's not only making Muruganantham money, but one that will improve women’s hygiene in India and throughout the developing world.

Many women living in poverty use rags, newspaper, or even mud to manage their menstrual periods. None of these work very well and can introduce infections or injuries; they also circumscribe women’s movement. Often, women fear being in public without protection from blood staining. ...

10. Business Insider: Here's Why Mexico Is Increasingly Becoming A Crucial Global Manufacturing Hub...

However, another big beneficiary of rising Chinese labor costs and U.S. economic growth has been Mexico. This has come despite concerns about crime and safety.

Mexico benefits from the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). At 44, it also has more free-trade agreements than any other country. Mexico also benefits from having its natural gas prices tied to those in the U.S. where prices are substantially lower relative to the rest of the world.

Average electricity costs are about 4% lower in Mexico than in China, and the average price of industrial natural gas is 63% lower, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group.

The same study found that by 2015, average manufacturing-labor costs in Mexico are projected to be 19% lower than in China. In 2000, Mexican labor was 58% more expensive than in China. ...

11. US AID: Full Speed Ahead on Malaria

Today, the greatest success story in global health is anchored by a continent once known mostly for famine and war. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa are making unprecedented gains in child survival and reducing the devastating burden of malaria—a disease carried by mosquitoes and a major killer of children.

According to the World Health Organization an estimated 3.3 million lives were saved as a result of the scale-up of malaria control interventions over the last decade. Over the same period, malaria mortality rates in African children were reduced by an estimated 54 percent. ...

12. Huffington Post: Africa Is Richer Than You Think

Africa suffers from another kind of poverty: lack of accurate statistical data. And it is a tragic, messy situation. Nigeria nearly doubled the size of its economy overnight -- a whopping 89 percent -- surpassing South Africa to become Africa's largest economy and the world's 26th largest. What was thought to be a $270 billion economy one day became a $510 billion economy the next day, adding some $240 billion to its economy. To put the change into perspective, it is almost like adding Israel's economy, or more than Portugal's, to Nigeria's economy. It sounds like magic but it is not. Inaccurate economic data is commonplace across much of Africa. ...

13. Atlantic: How to Make Solar Panels Affordable—for Billions

Like the installment plans of the Great Depression, Simpa Networks' "Progressive Purchase" agreements are enabling customers in rural India to get solar power for their homes. ...

14. PBS: Capitalism in Cuba? It’s closer than the U.S. may think

... As an economist who had the opportunity to observe, first-hand, the difficult transitions of China and Russia from state to largely market-based economies, I was astounded by the counter-productive actions of my government. On its own, Cuba was well into a carefully planned transition to a market-based economy. The only impact of additional U.S. meddling would be to set back this process. ...

15. Mashable: 750 Million People Still Don't Have Access to Clean Drinking Water

... Since 1990, 2.3 billion people have gained access to drinking water from improved sources. But despite this progress, 748 million people — 90% of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia — still use unimproved drinking water sources, according to an updated report the World Health Organization and UNICEF released on Thursday. ...

16. New York Times: What’s So Scary About Smart Girls?

... Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

In that sense, Boko Haram was behaving perfectly rationally — albeit barbarically — when it kidnapped some of the brightest, most ambitious girls in the region and announced plans to sell them as slaves. If you want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters. ...

 17. Businessweek: The Relentless Rise Of Global Happiness

... The rest of the world, however, is different: The average surveyed person planet-wide reports greater happiness than 10 years ago—which was happier than many reported 30 years ago. That said, it turns out that the factors that lead people to self-report as happy aren’t as obvious as you might think. And this suggests the limits of using happiness as a guide for making public policy. ...

... The World Values Survey presents an additional conundrum: While the share of the world population reporting itself happy has climbed since the 1980s, the average score on a question asking people if they are satisfied with life seems to have declined marginally. ...

 18. Atlantic: Having Kids Probably Won't Destroy the Planet

An overpopulated planet is not necessarily doomed. What matters most is how those billions of people choose to live. ...

Science and Technology Links

1.The Drinkable Book - Water is Life. An innovative approach to create more drinkable water.

2. TED: Are insects the future of food?: Megan Miller at TEDxManhattan

3. Eco-Business: In future, clothes could be made from sugar

Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have discovered a new chemical process that can convert adipic acid directly from sugar.

Adipic acid is an important chemical used to produce nylon for apparel and other everyday products like carpets, ropes and toothbrush bristles.

Commercially, adipic acid is produced from petroleum-based chemicals through the nitric acid oxidation process, which emits large amounts of nitrous oxides, a major greenhouse gas that causes global warming. ...

4. Business Insider: Want To Make $1 Billion? Just Solve One Of These Huge Tech Problems

5. Huffington Post: 11 Ways Technology Has Changed Since We Were Kids

6. Pew Internet: U.S. Views of Technology and the Future

7. Real Clear Technology: We Say We're Optimistic About the Future, But Don't Want Anything to Do With Future Innovations

... What's interesting about the Pew poll is that while the survey reported a general optimism about the trajectory of technological development over the next 50 years (59 percent said it would be positive vs. just 30 percent who felt it would be negative) very few specific technological breakthroughs seemed either possible to the general public, or desirable. In fact, just lab-grown organs and computer-generated art seemed both possible and desirable.

By contrast, here are the technologies we don't think are likely or aren't interested in if they do come to pass: ...

8. Huffington Post: Disrupting the World Now: Technology That Will Change Your Life

Can you imagine life without the Internet?

There are equally revolutionary technologies that are emerging today. When we look back 20 years from now, what things will be impossible to imagine living without?

Here are a few technologies to follow as our advancement continues to accelerate: ...

9. Business Insider: How A Chinese Company 3-D Printed 10 Houses In A Day

10. Real Clear Technology: 3D Printing Possibilities Are Beautiful but Not Limitless

... There’s no doubting that these technologies are exciting but the hype is leading us to think our future homes will all feature machines suspiciously similar to the Replicator in Star Trek, probably alongside a robotic housemaid and hoverboard.

The use of 3D printers in industry will definitely continue to grow, and will have a major (if often unnoticed) impact on our consumer choice but those of us who don’t make things for a living will not suddenly become digital artisans. ...

11. Wired: A 3-D Printing Startup’s Plan to Bring Manufacturing Back to Cities

"... But according to founder and CEO Peter Weijmarshausen, the longterm goal for the New York City-based outfit is to bring manufacturing back to America’s cities.

“We believe manufacturing should be local,” Weijmarshausen said on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York on Wednesday. “Our view is, over time, more and more Shapeway factories will appear in places all over the world, and in those places, not only will we get products to you faster and at a lower cost, but we’ll have lower impact on the environment for transportation. ...”

12. Conversable Economist: When Technology Spreads Slowly

...But in the real world, new technologies often take time to diffuse. They note that surveys of dozens of new technologies often find that it takes 15-30 years for a new technology to go from 10% to 90% of the potential market. But some major inventions take longer.

Here's how the tractor slowly displaced horses and mules in the U.S. agricultural sector from 1910 to 1960. Horses and mules, shown by the black dashed line and measured on the right-hand axis, declined from about 26 million in 1920 to about 3 million by 1960. Conversely, the number of tractors, shown by the blue solid line, rose from essentially zero in 1910 to 4.5 million by 1960. ...

Also this ...

13. Atlantic: America's Coming Manufacturing Revolution

... But the doomsayers often fail to see the ways in which America is gaining rather than losing global influence. And nowhere is this truer than the manufacturing sector. The combination of lower energy prices, innovative information technologies, and advances in robotics and materials science are powering a manufacturing revolution that will reinvigorate the U.S. economy and make many of its industrial sectors the most competitive in the world. ...

14. Mashable: Scientists Discover Clever Trick Ancient Egyptians Used to Build Pyramids

15. Huffington Post: How Innovation and Technology Are Shaping Libraries of Today

...Technology has changed the expectations of library patrons; people today expect to be able to find and access information from wherever they are. This is why so many public library systems across the country have increased both computers for use inside the library as well as mobile and online access to e-books, audio books, research databases and archives. In 2010, nearly 300 million Americans used library services including onsite computers and onsite Wi-Fi to check out books, to attend workshops, and to consult with reference librarians.

Libraries are now hubs of technology with over 85 percent offering wireless internet services, and many offering state-of-the-art computers for use. But technology available to patrons does not stop there. Surveys show that currently 12 percent of academic libraries have pre-loaded E-reading devices in circulation that patrons can check out. Another 26 percent of academic libraries are considering adding this service. New (even book-free) libraries are popping up around the country, employing technology in ways most never envisioned:

• GPS apps that help locate material inside the library
• Mobile apps that allow patrons to access library services
• Access to 3-D printers, binding services
• Book delivery robots ...

16. Slate: What Will Become of the Library?

How it will evolve as the world goes digital. ...

17. Huffington Post: Battling Psychics and Ghosts: The Need for Scientific Skepticism

... College and university students, from freshmen to seniors, have asked me similar questions, along with queries about aliens, ghosts, and a wide variety of New Age and alternative health and psychological treatments. Through countless questions on these topics, I've realized the need to teach scientific skepticism, and that using examples of pseudoscience -- claims that appear to be scientific but are not -- can be an invaluable resource for helping students become discerning consumers of real-world claims. ...

18. AP: AP Survey On Faith And Science Reveals That Science Is Often Trumped By Religious Belief

WASHINGTON (RNS) Believers don’t buy the Big Bang, God-less evolution or a human responsibility for global warming. Actually, neither do many Americans.

But a new survey by The Associated Press found that religious identity — particularly evangelical Protestant — was one of the sharpest indicators of skepticism toward key issues in science. ...

18. The Big Think: When Evidence Backfires

Don't read this blog post. Definitely don't read it to the end. Didn't I tell you not to read this blog post? You're still doing it... We can laugh at our inherent ability to be contrary, but unfortunately something similar can happen when we give a human being scientific evidence that debunks misinformation. One of the most depressing paradoxes of science communication is that not only can misinformation often spread faster and wider than the truth (just take the ubersuccessful but often not so factual "uberfacts" or the success of the paragons of science misinformation Natural News if you need examples); but even worse, combating misinformation with evidence can often have the complete and utter opposite of the desired effect. This horrifying phenomenon known as the backfire effect was demonstrated once again recently by a study of the responses of parents to various different forms of evidence that vaccines are not dangerous. ...

19. Los Angeles Times: 'Nanobionics' aims to give plants superpowers

... Researchers at MIT have been experimenting with giving plants new powers by placing tiny carbon nanotubes in their chloroplasts — the tiny engine of the plant cell where photosynthesis takes place.

After much trial and error, their efforts have succeeded. Some of the altered plants produced in their lab have increased their photosynthetic activity by 30% compared with regular plants. Others were able to detect tiny traces of pollutants in the air.

And that's just the beginning. ...

20. BBC: Doctors implant lab-grown vagina

Four women have had new vaginas grown in the laboratory and implanted by doctors in the US. ...

21. Carpe Diem: Recommended reading for Earth Day: ‘Recycling is garbage’ from the NYTimes in 1996; it broke the record for hate mail

The World's Resources Aren't Running Out - Matt Ridley

Wall Street Journal: The World's Resources Aren't Running Out

As I listen to conversations about our economic future, I hear two visions of the future being articulated, and I think both are inaccurate. First, there are what I call the Malthusians. They see a world of imminent collapse, limits to growth, exhausted resources, and such. We are warned that if we keep going the way we are, X will run out, or Y will be destroyed. And they are right ... if their "if" stays true. And that is just the point. We don't keep going the way we are presently going when challenges emerge. We innovate. We substitute better models of doing things for the old ones. We substitute more plentiful materials for ones becoming more costly or scarce. The Malthusians have sung their chorus of collapse for 200 years and have always been wrong. And we are still at the beginning, not the end, of learning how to address a multitude of problems that have continually plagued us.

I call the second group the Cornucopians. They see a world of unprecedented technological breakthroughs that will effortlessly make the world of the 2100s like a utopia compared to our day. I will confess that I lean toward the Cornucopian side of this continuum, and I believe the world will be much better. But I also look back over the last 200 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and while I see unquestionable improvement in the world's standard of living accelerating upward. I also see great wars, injustices, and waste that happened along the way. The future is likely to hold more of the same.

As someone who works continuously at integrating faith and economics, I am deeply persuaded that growth will happen, that innovation and substitution will trip up the Malthusians once again. But that doesn't mean the change process is always going to be painless and without injustice. And if the church is to have a meaningful impact on shaping our coming world, it has to live in this reality. Regrettably, most of my Mainline Protestant tribe has succumbed to Malthusian visions, and rather than working as a force to shape the new world, it equates to working against its emergence as a prophetic witness. Meanwhile, more conservative Christians seem to carry on as if implementing free markets and making America strong is all we need. Unless this changes, the Church, in America at least, will be swept along by these economic and technological changes, not shaping them.

Matt Ridley recently wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal called The World's Resources Aren't Running Out. I very much resonate with what he has written in this piece.

"Ecologists worry that the world's resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again.

"... But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this "niche construction"—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.

Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.

That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. ..."

Repackaging Climate Action

Over recent years I've posted about the messaging we typically get on climate change. (Most recently Global Warming Scare Tactics (They Usually Backfire)) The predominant approach is to hit people with dire visions of what is happening to the world, lecture on the evils of capitalism and consumerism, and then offer a few practical solutions. This resonates well with a minority of people. But effective change requires that a majority consensus be built around specific action. The lopsided attention to scare tactics over solutions tends to make many feel helpless, so they ignore the issue. Others are turned off by the not-so-subtle attacks on what they feel is a good, decent way of life, inclining them to reject solutions and the validity of the climate concerns.

Yet research shows that when the focus is solution-oriented, optimistic, and seen as a means of preserving a way of life, many more people warm to the cause. Upworthy recently posted a clip by Jason Silva about The Solutions Project. (I love Silva as the host of Nat Geo's Brain Games.) I think Silva has done his homework. Watch the video and see how he frames the message. Notice that he is much less interested in getting people to coalesce on ideologies of what is wrong and is far more interested in getting people energized about solutions. People can bring a variety of narratives to the project, but the aim is to unite them in solutions. For the sake of this conversation, I'm not interested in whether we think climate change is a threat or his solutions are realistic. I'm pointing to the messaging question.

(One caveat: At 1:14 he says "the smartest men in the world." He might want to include women in that statement. ;-) )

Global Warming Scare Tactics (They Usually Backfire)

New York Times: Global Warming Scare Tactics

This article confirms what I've been arguing for some time now:

... evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. "Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people's attention and concern," the researchers wrote, "they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial." In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use "dire messages" about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts. ...

... What works, say environmental pollsters and researchers, is focusing on popular solutions. Climate advocates often do this, arguing that solar and wind can reduce emissions while strengthening the economy. But when renewable energy technologies are offered as solutions to the exclusion of other low-carbon alternatives, they polarize rather than unite.

One recent study, published by Yale Law School's Cultural Cognition Project, found that conservatives become less skeptical about global warming if they first read articles suggesting nuclear energy or geoengineering as solutions. Another study, in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2012, concluded that "communication should focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better society" rather than "on the reality of climate change and averting its risks."...

There is going to be substantial economic growth in the coming years. Presently, the global median income is about $1,000 per year. If we were to freeze the economy as is (impossible, but work with me here), we would have two alternatives: 1) leave billions living in poverty while a minority live with much higher income,  or 2) balance out global income to about $7,000 a year, meaning the standard of living of people in advanced nations would drop to a fraction of current standards. The first is immoral, and the second, short of a global totalitarian government, isn't going to happen. Therefore, there will be growth, growth will require energy, and present forms of energy are carbon-based.

If we are serious about carbon being a problem and about the realities I just described exist, then we will pragmatically find ways to reduce carbon in ways that honor these realities, not just throw out idealistic ideas and scream "anti-science" and "denier" when people balk at them. The unwillingness of so many activists to pursue pragmatic solutions is one of the biggest indicators that this is more about ideological demagoguing in pursuit of other ends than addressing any truly imminent threat.

I think we need to work toward greater energy efficiency in production and final products. We need to ramp up the use of natural gas as an intermediate energy source. It is still a fossil fuel but produces much less CO2. That would buy us more time to build more nuclear power plants and bring renewable energy technology to a level where it can make a cost-effective contribution.

Furthermore, while there is a scientific certainty that humans impact climate, the climate's sensitivity to human influence is not so apparent. Neither are the environmental impacts clear. Buying more time allows us to improve our understanding of the climate, helping us better understand the risks and benefits involved. In essence, we are talking about prudence and risk management.

Economic Development Links

1. You Decide: Save the People or Save the Planet #StopTheMyth

2. New York Times: The End of the ‘Developing World’

BILL GATES, in his foundation’s annual letter, declared that “the terms ‘developing countries’ and ‘developed countries’ have outlived their usefulness.” He’s right. If we want to understand the modern global economy, we need a better vocabulary.

Mr. Gates was making a point about improvements in income and gross domestic product; unfortunately, these formal measures generate categories that tend to obscure obvious distinctions. Only when employing a crude “development” binary could anyone lump Mozambique and Mexico together.

It’s tough to pick a satisfying replacement. Talk of first, second and third worlds is passé, and it’s hard to bear the Dickensian awkwardness of “industrialized nations.” Forget, too, the more recent jargon about the “global south” and “global north.” It makes little sense to counterpose poor countries with “the West” when many of the biggest economic success stories in the past few decades have come from the East.

All of these antiquated terms imply that any given country is “developing” toward something, and that there is only one way to get there.

It’s time that we start describing the world as “fat” or “lean.” ...

3. Huffington Post: The Paradox of Africa's Growth

... So why is Africa's job growth so weak while its economic growth outlook is just fine, even robust? The reasons are structural in nature and three-fold.

First, much of that 'robust' economic growth in the past decade in Africa has been driven by export of commodities or natural resources. ...

... Second, while Africa needs investments in sectors such as infrastructure, technology and education, much of its finances keep leaking out to the rest of the world. ...

... Third, there is no industrialization, not even in agricultural production, taking place when it should. ...

4. The World Post: Amartya Sen: What India Can Learn From China

The implication of your most recent book is that while democracy, as in India, prevents the worst man-made famine such as we've seen in China during the Great Leap Forward, it does not do well at all in building "human capability" -- literacy, rights of women, basic health care or effective public services and infrastructure.

Both China and India are characterized by rapid GDP growth, widespread corruption, inequality and the princeling problem -- 30 percent of India's parliament members are "princelings"

Yet, as you point out, "China made enormous progress -- even before market reforms -- towards universal access to elementary education, health care and social security." After dismantling and then starting to rebuild its safety net, 95 percent of Chinese today are covered by a publicly funded health care system."

And none of this is to speak of physical infrastructure -- the energy grid, bullet trains, roads, Internet access, sewage systems, etc.

You conclude quite decisively that "Indian democratic practice has failed."

What is the key differentiating factor between India and China with respect to building "human capability?" ...

5. BBC: India's family firms modernise to stay in business

... The family is integral to Indian culture and business. Nearly 85% of all companies in the country are family businesses - and these include big conglomerates such as Tata, Reliance and the Wadia Group.

"In other businesses, what is important is competence and profit. That is the measure of success. But in family businesses it's different," says Mr Bahl.

"What is important is that you are together, that you're working together and living together.

"You care for the reputation, you care for the principles of your forefathers and success or profit or that kind of yardstick is not paramount." ...

6. NewJersey.com: Opinion: Muhammad Yunus reaveals social business as powerful weapon against poverty

Muhammad Yunus pioneered microcredit loans to the poor without requiring collateral, empowered poor women worldwide and won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition. Through his newest innovation, social business, Yunus has declared all-out war on the nefarious blight that is poverty.

The objective of social business is to augment healthcare, housing and financial services for the poor, education and nutrition for malnourished children and safe drinking water for all, and introduce renewable energy, such as solar power, to the poor.

Yunus realized that, like cancer, poverty is a multi-layered systemic malady whose cure requires a holistic approach. Microcredit loans alone are not the panacea. To obliterate poverty, microcredit must be bolstered with multi-pronged assaults against all of its components.

Existing business models focus on making a profit and have failed to mitigate poverty. Free-market capitalism is thriving worldwide, yet half of the world’s population lives on $2 a day or less. Centuries of experience have demonstrated that government alone cannot eliminate poverty. Trickle-down economics practiced by charities administered through aid agencies and non-governmental organizations fails when the money supply dries up. International agencies, such as the World Bank, set up to assist developing nations, focus solely on economic growth as the antidote for poverty.

Mixed models that conflate a non-profit model with some profit are inherently antithetical. To those who say, “Why can’t social business investors take some profit, such as a 1 percent dividend?” Yunus’ response is: This is like someone trying to quit smoking asking, ‘Can I take just one puff occasionally?’” Yunus argues that someone willing to take a small profit can be persuaded to take zero profit.

Yunus concluded that poverty cannot be eliminated through economic growth or philanthropy; it has to be targeted exclusively. ...

7. Bloomberg: The Best Way to Spread Democracy Abroad? Welcome Foreign Students

... As it turns out, soft power may be far more effective. In particular, educating future leaders here in the U.S. could be one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to spread democracy that we have. In 2008, about one in five of the 3.3 million foreign students enrolled worldwide were studying in the U.S., and while that’s still a tiny share of the planet’s 7 billion population, foreign-educated students have an outsize impact on their home countries. Not least, a lot of them end up in very important positions. As many as two-thirds of developing country leaders in the middle of the last decade had studied abroad. A few years ago, a State Department list of senior government officials worldwide who had studied in the U.S. included more than 40 presidents and about 30 prime ministers. The full total may be more than 200. ...

8. Business Insider: Two Simple Charts Show Why China Is Losing Business To Its Emerging Market Neighbors

9. Conversable Economist: Latin America: Modest Progress on Inequality

 

10. Associated Press: Mexico to Trump Japan as NO. 2 Car Exporter to US

CELAYA, Mexico (AP) — Mexico is on track to become the United States' No. 1 source of imported cars by the end of next year, overtaking Japan and Canada in a manufacturing boom that's turning the auto industry into a bigger source of dollars than money sent home by migrants. ...

11. "Immigration Myths Debunked" | LearnLiberty

12. Matt Ridley: William Easterly's new book explores the aid industry's autocratic instincts

... This book is not an attack on aid from rich to poor. It is an attack on the unthinking philosophy that guides so much of that aid from poor taxpayers in rich countries to rich leaders in poor countries, via outsiders with supposed expertise. Easterly is a distinguished economist and he insists there is another way, a path not taken, in development economics, based on liberation and the encouragement of spontaneous development through exchange. Most development economists do not even know they are taking the technocratic, planning route, just as most fish do not know they swim in a sea. ...

13. Mashable: 5 Organizations to Support on World Water Day

In honor of this year’s World Water Day, a number of organizations are working on forward-looking clean-water initiatives.

These initiatives are helping protect our planet's water supply in a variety of ways, from providing water-filtration systems to inventing dynamic clean-water technology. ...

14. Atlantic Cities: Air Pollution Now Linked to 1 out of Every 8 Deaths in the World

According to a new report by the World Health Organization, air pollution is the cause of 7 million deaths a year worldwide, and is the single largest environmental health risk in the world today.

The staggering number — one in eight of all deaths, globally — is more than double previous WHO estimates of those killed by air pollution. WHO says that there is a stronger link between pollution and cardiovascular diseases like stroke and heart disease, and between air pollution and cancer, than previously thought. ...

15. USA Today: Blindness rates plummet in developed countries

Blindness is not a thing of the past, but rates have plummeted in developed countries in the past two decades, thanks largely to the spread of cataract surgery, a new study shows.

Visual impairment that falls short of blindness also has become less common in places such as the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan, says the report published Monday by the British medical journal BMJ.

The international research review, which includes Eastern and Central

Europe, shows rates of blindness dropped 50%, and rates of moderate to severe visual impairment fell 38% overall from 1990 to 2010 in 50 countries. Declines in the USA and Canada have not been that big, but rates already were low by international standards in 1990, the analysis shows. ...

16. Huffington Post: This Invention That Uses Aquarium Pumps Could Save 178,000 Babies Each Year

A new invention uses fish tank aquarium pumps to save the lives of babies in the developing world.

In an effort to battle the high cost of medical equipment, a group of Rice University students developed an affordable machine to help premature babies breathe. Machines called bubble Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (bCPAP) devices help struggling babies born prematurely by breathing for them, but the machines cost thousands of dollars and are, therefore, too expensive for many hospitals in developing countries, according to Rice News.

The design team at Rice invented new bCPAP machines by using affordable aquarium pumps -- making them a fraction of the cost and easier to maintain than the traditional machines. The device costs about $350 to make, while the cost of traditional bCPAP machines used throughout hospitals today is about $6,000, according to CNN. ...

17. BBC: World now 80% polio free, World Health Organization says

The World Health Organization has declared its South East Asia region polio-free.

The certification is being hailed a "historic milestone" in the global fight to eradicate the deadly virus.

It comes after India officially recorded three years without a new case of polio.

The announcement means 80% of the world is now officially free of polio, although the disease is still endemic in Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. ...

18. Business Insider: Bill And Melinda Gates Think These Are The Most Important Charts In The World

 19. Applied Methodology: Thoughts About Norm Borlaug on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth

Norman Borlaug would have been 100 years old today.  He has been called "The Man Who Fed The World," and "The Father of The Green Revolution."  Norm Borlaug was the first plant pathologist to be awarded a Nobel Prize (1970) - for contributions to world peace. For all of use who are fellow plant pathologists, his work has been particularly inspiring. ...

Science and Technology Links

1. Christian Science Monitor: In Kenya, selling human waste could revolutionize sanitation

Dealing with human waste has become a health crisis in many poor communities, but residents of a Kenyan slum have found a solution that turns poop into profit. ...

... Sanergy’s toilets are low-tech and low-cost, but they have a key feature: They come with removable waste cartridges. Local entrepreneurs buy and operate the toilets, charging users a small monthly membership fee. Sanergy then collects the waste and processes it into organic, sell-able fertilizer. Soon the company plans to process the waste into biogas, biochar and several types of plastic, as well.

Creating business relationships means that toilet operators earn steady income from their investments, and waste treatment pays for itself. It benefits people you would expect like the toilet users, who now have access to a clean and private space to go to the bathroom, and people you wouldn’t, like the farmers who pay less for the processed, organic fertilizer. ...

2. Jason Kolb: 5 Technologies That Will Change the World

... Here are five technologies that seem poised to break out on the world in the next few years, and how they will change our lives. The most interesting aspect of these to me is how they interact when used together–the intersections of these disruptive technologies are where you can start really understanding how these will change the world in concrete ways. Like layer cakes, they get even more delicious when you eat them together. ...

3. Wired: The Germans Have Figured Out How to 3-D Print Cars

The assembly line isn’t going away, but 3-D printing is going to reshape how we make cars. The EDAG Genesis points the way, with an beautifully crafted frame made from a range of materials and inspired by a turtle’s skeleton. ...

4. Business Insider: New Roles For Technology: Rise Of The Robots

... Since moving from the page and screen to real life, robots have been a mild disappointment. They do some things that humans cannot do themselves, like exploring Mars, and a host of things people do not much want to do, like dealing with unexploded bombs or vacuuming floors (there are around 10m robot vacuum cleaners wandering the carpets of the world). And they are very useful in bits of manufacturing. But reliable robots--especially ones required to work beyond the safety cages of a factory floor--have proved hard to make, and robots are still pretty stupid. So although they fascinate people, they have not yet made much of a mark on the world.

That seems about to change. The exponential growth in the power of silicon chips, digital sensors and high-bandwidth communications improves robots just as it improves all sorts of other products. And, as our special report this week explains, three other factors are at play. ...

5. City Journal: The Next Age of Invention

... Certainly, it is difficult to know exactly in which direction technological change will move and how significant it will be. Much as in evolutionary biology, all we know is history. Yet something can be learned from the past, and it tells us that such pessimism is mistaken. The future of technology is likely to be bright. ...

6. The Guardian: Fracking: the surprising new proving ground for water technologies

The energy industry's growing demand for water is spurring water-treatment innovation that could spill over into other sectors. ...

7.  Scientific American: How to Profit from CO2 Emissions

Pulling CO2 from the atmosphere to lessen global warming is prohibitively expensive, unless we can find ways to profit from it. Scientists and entrepreneurs are developing some ingenious processes for turning CO2 emissions into the raw materials for a wide range of products. A Nexus Media production for Scientific American.

8. Business Insider: CITI: 'The Age Of Renewables Is Beginning'

In a new note titled "The Age of Renewables is Beginning – A Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE)," Perspective, Citi's alternative energy team led by Shar Pourreza, writes that we can expect across-the-board price decreases in solar and wind, which will continue to fuel the renewable energy generation boom. ...

9. Atlantic: The UN's New Focus: Surviving, Not Stopping, Climate Change

The United Nations' latest report on climate change contains plenty of dire warnings about the adverse impact "human interference with the climate system" is having on everything from sea levels to crop yields to violent conflicts. But the primary message of the study isn't, as John Kerry suggested on Sunday, for countries to collectively reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead, the subtext appears to be this: Climate change is happening and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. As a result, we need to adapt to a warming planet—to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits associated with increasing temperatures—rather than focusing solely on curbing warming in the first place. And it's businesses and local governments, rather than the international community, that can lead the way.

“The really big breakthrough in this report is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change,” Chris Field, the co-chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study, said this week, adding that governments, companies, and communities are already experimenting with “climate-change adaptation.” ...

10. Christian Science Monitor: Thorium: a safer nuclear power

In the same month as the Three Mile Island and Fukushima nuclear disasters, China announces it is speeding up its research into so-called molten salt reactors that can run on thorium.  If it succeeds, it would create a cheaper, more efficient, and safer form of nuclear power that produces less nuclear waste than today's uranium-based technology. ...

11. NPR: Half Of Americans Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories

Misinformation about health remains widespread and popular.

Half of Americans subscribe to medical conspiracy theories, with more than one-third of people thinking that the Food and Drug Administration is deliberately keeping natural cures for cancer off the market because of pressure from drug companies, a survey finds.

Twenty percent of people said that cellphones cause cancer — and that large corporations are keeping health officials from doing anything about it. And another 20 percent think doctors and the government want to vaccinate children despite knowing that vaccines cause autism.

"One of the things that struck us is that people who embrace these beliefs are not less health conscious," says , a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who led the study. "They're just less likely to embrace traditional medicine." ...

12. CBS: New colon cancer test could be alternative to colonoscopy

13. Forbes: Scientists Reconstruct Faces From DNA Samples

Sometime in the future, technicians will go over the scene of the crime. They’ll uncover some DNA evidence and take it to the lab. And when the cops need to get a picture of the suspect, they won’t have to ask eyewitnesses to give descriptions to a sketch artist – they’ll just ask the technicians to get a mugshot from the DNA.

That, at least, is the potential of new research being published today in PLOS Genetics. In that paper, a team of scientists describe how they were able to produce crude 3D models of faces extrapolated from a person’s DNA. ...

14. Mashable: The Cause of Earth's Largest Mass Extinction: Microbe Sex

Around 252 million years ago, 90 percent of all species on Earth were wiped out in an extinction event commonly called The Great Dying. Now, a team of MIT researchers from the U.S. and China might have the answer for the largest mass extinction our planet has ever seen.

It wasn’t asteroids or volcanoes, but methane-producing microbes called Methanosarcina having sex — or rather, passing genetic material in a strange microbial form of sex. ...

Social Science and Culture Links

1. Atlantic Cities: How Different Generations of Americans Budget Their Time

Example

2. Business Insider: How Women Spend Their Time Vs. How Men Spend Their Time

3. USA Today: Millennial doesn't mean liberal: Column

Bad news for Democrats: It seems Millennials are special little snowflakes after all.

A new report by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way highlights the political complexity of a generation raised to believe they were utterly unique. When it comes to politics, they do it their way. Which could make the cohort that turned out en masse for President Obama unpredictable as voters.

Third Way focused on how Millennials' experience as the first generation raised in an information-on-demand culture has shaped them. They are not "adaptors." They have only known a world full of endless choices, not a life where you make do with what is available. ...

4. Forbes: Why Millennials Annoy Their Elders

... Anyone who frets over the idea that millennials aren’t drinking the kool-aid should stop and ask “What good has the kool-aid done me?” We raised our kids to be smart and to pay attention to the world around them. Are we going to castigate them now for doing that so well that they end up rejecting the deal-with-the-devil “Just put your career in our hands, focus on pleasing your employer, and everything will be fine!”?

I hope we trust our kids to make good choices, since they’ll be running the world in another few years.

I think we can put our trust in millennials. They have a better sense of priorities than many of their status-and-income-drunk elders do.

5. Atlantic: Study: Millennials Deeply Confused About Their Politics, Finances, and Culture

Or at least deeply contradictory: They're always connected but distrustful. They're selfish yet accepting of minorities. They're "independents" who mostly vote Democratic and love Obama while hating Obamacare....

6. PBS: How should the U.S. improve opportunity for young men of color?

7. Slate: “Kid, I’m Sorry, but You’re Just Not College Material”

... But what if such a cautionary sermon is exactly what some teenagers need? What if encouraging students to take a shot at the college track—despite very long odds of crossing its finish line—does them more harm than good? What if our own hyper-credentialed life experiences and ideologies are blinding us to alternative pathways to the middle class? Including some that might be a lot more viable for a great many young people? What if we should be following the lead of countries like Germany, where “tracking” isn’t a dirty word but a common-sense way to prepare teenagers for respected, well-paid work? ...

8. Atlantic: The Geography of Small Talk

How you start a conversation with a stranger depends on where you live. We survey the diverse geography of American greetings—from Honolulu to Hays, Kansas, from Anchorage to Appleton, Wisconsin, from New Orleans to New York. ...

9. Forbes: 'Where Are You From?' And Other Big Networking Racial Faux Pas

... So what’s the best way to approach ethnicity? If you’re dying to figure out if someone is of Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese heritage, is it ok to ask the first time you meet them? This topic is incredibly nuanced. There’s no right way to ask, though there are plenty of wrong ways. ...

10. Conversable Economist: How Academics Learn to Write Badly

Most of my days are spent editing articles by academic economists. So when I saw a book called Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, the author Michael Billig had me at the title. The book is a careful dissection of the rhetorical habits of social scientists, and in particular their tendency to banish actual people from their writing, and instead to turn everything into a string of nouns (often ending in -icity or -ization) linked with passive verbs to other strings of nouns. (If that sentence sounded ugly to you, welcome to my work life!)

I found especially thought-provoking Billig's argument early in the book about how the necessity for continual publications is relatively recent innovation in academic life, and how it has altered the incentives for quantity and quality of academic writing. ...

11. Gallup: Americans Most Likely to Say Global Warming Is Exaggerated

12. Gallup: Americans 'Level of Worrry About National Problems

13. Atlantic Cities: The Reason Songs Have Choruses

The secret lies in how your brain processes sound: People love repetition.

It is not hard to estrange the idea of the chorus. Why should songs have some parts that are repeated and others that are not? Imagine other works of art in which a quarter or half of the work is repeated: a movie that shows the same 10-minute sequence every 20 minutes, or a book that repeats every other chapter. 

Yet, in popular music, the chorus seems necessary. It is, in many cases, the point of the song.

And now, in a wonderful essay on Aeon, Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, argues that repetition is the point of music. The chorus is merely our culture's embodiment of a deeper human desire to play it again. ...

14. Atlantic Cities: Watch Your Name Grow and Shrink in Popularity Across the U.S.

Loved this one. The Matrix effect.

15. PBS: Note-takers volunteer to help the elderly during doctor visits

... Wolozin is a volunteer for the Northwest Neighbors Village in Washington, D.C., one of the more than 200 “villages” across the United States. These neighborhood membership organizations provide volunteers and other resources to help with everything from transportation and snow shoveling to hanging curtains and solving computer glitches. ...

 16. Carpe Diem: Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years

17. NPR: With Sobering Science, Doctor Debunks 12-Step Recovery

Since its founding in the 1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous has become part of the fabric of American society. AA and the many 12-step groups it inspired have become the country's go-to solution for addiction in all of its forms. These recovery programs are mandated by drug courts, prescribed by doctors and widely praised by reformed addicts.

Dr. Lance Dodes sees a big problem with that. The psychiatrist has spent more than 20 years studying and treating addiction. His latest book on the subject is The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry.

Dodes tells NPR's Arun Rath that 12-step recovery simply doesn't work, despite anecdotes about success. ...

18. Atlantic: Americans: Republicans in General, Democrats in Particular

When Americans think about government in the big picture, they can seem like a nation of Ayn Rands. People want to lay waste to the Leviathan. But when Americans consider specific aspects of government, a curious thing happens. People rediscover their love of Washington. On issue after issue, Republicans are winning the argument in general, whereas Democrats are winning the argument in particular. ...

19. Huffington Post: Native Americans' Ancestors Got Stuck On Land Bridge On Way To Americas, New Research Suggests

Native Americans along the Pacific Coast and aboriginal Siberians may have both originated from populations living on the land bridge now submerged under the Bering Strait, a new language analysis suggests. 

The language analysis, detailed today (March 12) in the journal PLOS ONE, is consistent with the notion that ancestors to modern-day Native Americans were stuck in the region of the Bering Strait before making their way into North America.

Air Pollution Replaces Poor Diet As World's Largest Preventable Health Risk

Forbes: Air Pollution Replaces Poor Diet As World's Largest Preventable Health Risk

Dirty air killed an alarming 7 million people – or, one of every eight human lives lost – in 2012, according to new estimates released today by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The new data shows that air pollution has become the world’s largest single environmental health risk.

n 2010, air pollution ranked as the fourth leading preventable health risk, behind poor diet, high blood pressure and tobacco smoke, according to a major study funded by the Gates Foundation.

Indoor air pollution, primarily caused by burning solid fuels for heating and cooking, accounted for slightly more than half – 4.3 million – of those deaths in 2012.

Outdoor air pollution accounted for the remaining 3.7 million deaths. ...

Is the Cognitive Consonance of Climate Activists Blocking Meaningful Action?

Nick Cohen has a piece in the Guardian The climate change deniers have won. He is mourning that the "climate deniers" seem to be winning the day and explores why that might be. He writes:

... Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of "cognitive dissonance", a condition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s . They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resign from their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the earth on 21 December 1954. They would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.

When 21 December came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair. Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the last minute not to flood the planet after all. Her followers believed her. They had given up so much for their faith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.

Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel. ...

At the start, I think there is considerable truth in what he says. Many who reject climate change alarm do not do so because they have a detailed knowledge of science. It is because it poses a significant threat to their view of the world.

Now let me add that it is also true that many of those who embrace climate alarm do so not because they have a detailed knowledge of science. They do so because it gives them cognitive consonance. It reinforces their view of the world.

The marriage of climate alarm to anti-market, anti-growth, pro-state ideology is powerfully real, but it is not a conscious marriage. It is intuitive. It creates cognitive harmony. To campaign for one is to campaign for the other.

If the real issue is solving the climate problem, then the messaging must be realistic. Take anti-growth. The global median annual income is about $1,000 per person. If there is no growth, then we have one of two options. First, freeze the world as it is; billions of people continue to live indefinitely at just above subsistence levels. Second, we install a global government to equalize income worldwide, meaning that the average American or European family (median income approx. $50,000) will see a 98% drop to $1,000 a year. (And, of course, the notion that income exists independent of the economic arrangements generating the income, which would have to be disassembled to achieve this goal, is absurd, but you get my point.) The first is immoral, and the second is beyond unrealistic. Therefore, the economy must grow; any realistic attempt to meet a climate change challenge will incorporate this. Period! End of discussion.

Innovation, adaptation, substitution, and the free economies these activities need to thrive are critical to addressing challenges, but they are anathema to so many climate advocates that embracing them creates cognitive dissonance. Some studies suggest that when climate change is framed a little differently ... for instance, as a threat to future prosperity and freedom ... it gets a broader hearing among more conservative populations. Take the same-sex marriage movement. Regardless of what you think of its merits, the movement has been successful because it was able to tap into widely shared values of freedom of choice, tolerance, and equality. So, it could just as easily be argued that the cognitive consonance of advocates is blocking realistic, meaningful responses to climate change.

Economics Links

1. AEI - James Pethokoukis: What MinuteClinics and Google Fiber teach about crony capitalism

... Andy Kessler explains how established Internet service providers are trying to block Google from deploying Google Fiber, its superfast, gigabit broadband service. His solution: “The FCC can change this overnight. Instead of allowing municipalities to dictate onerous terms and laws that lock in (slow) incumbents, the FCC can mandate right-of-way rules similar to those granted Google Fiber to all credible competitors. If only the federal regulator would promote progress and focus on what’s best for the U.S. economy rather than for those it regulates.” Regulation should promote innovation and competitive churn, not protect revenue streams of existing players.

There is a big difference between being pro-business and pro-market. One does the bidding of incumbents, with the result being a static economy. The other promotes competition. Safety nets are for people, not businesses. The result is innovation and dynamism. Right now, America has too much of the former, not enough of the latter.

2. Economist: The politics of poverty. Another two cents.

... Within this miscellany [of the Ryan budget] there are some clues as to the future direction of Republican anti-poverty policies. Mr Ryan recently gave a speech in which he praised Britain’s Universal Credit, a plan to roll lots of government anti-poverty programmes into one. In some ways Britain is a strange place to seek inspiration: the British scheme is hopelessly behind schedule, a victim of the kind of IT snafu that has hobbled the Affordable Care Act. But the thinking behind it is sensible.

The other initiative that looks to have Mr Ryan’s blessing is the expansion of the Earned-Income Tax Credit (EITC) to people who do not have children (at the moment the childless are eligible for this credit but there is a low cap on the maximum payment they may receive). Marco Rubio has already spoken in favour of this. The report from the House budget committee cites plenty of evidence on the power of EITCs to boost the number of people in work. The president’s budget, published on March 4th, includes an expansion of this programme too. ...

3. Bloomberg: Free-Market Bashers Aren't Helping the Poor

... There's a more basic flaw in the thesis that markets have done nothing to help the poor while government programs have done a lot: Where does the government get the money to fund these programs? Economic growth is what enables Social Security checks to get fatter over time. Unless you're prepared to argue that the government is responsible for 100 percent of economic growth and markets for none, markets have to get some of the credit for whatever good government does. ...

... Both markets and government are necessary to improve the lot of the poor, and we ought to reform government programs so that they do a better job of helping the poor participate in markets. That's just common sense, and no study or statistic has given us a good reason to reject it.

4. AEI - James Pethokoukis: Has America finally reached peak food-stamp enrollment?

5. Carpe Diem: US household net worth increased to a new record high of $80.6T in Q4, fueled by stock market and housing gains

6. Bloomberg: Decoupling Happened: U.S. Stocks Soared, China's Shrugged

The idea that emerging markets could keep growing smartly despite the collapse of the U.S. was something romanced quite a bit in recent years. Decoupling, as it’s called, was at least numerically possible. After all, China, Brazil, India, and Russia—the planet’s four biggest emerging economies, which chipped in two-fifths of global economic growth in the year leading up to Wall Street’s 2008 collapse—stood out as the least dependent on exports to America. Upwards of 95 percent of China’s double-digit growth was attributable to domestic demand.

Turns out a decoupling did transpire in the five years since peak meltdown—only it’s the U.S. market that seems to be doing fine while China founders. It’s a divergence of fortunes few would have predicted. ...

7. Slate: The “Made in China” Fallacy

... But are iPhones really “made in China”? More than a dozen companies from at least five countries supply parts for them. Infineon Technologies, in Germany, makes the wireless chip; Toshiba, in Japan, manufactures the touch screen; Broadcom, in the U.S., makes the Bluetooth chips that let the devices connect to wireless headsets or keyboards.

Analysts differ over how much of the final price of an iPhone or an iPad should be assigned to which country, but no one disputes that the largest slice should go not to China but to the U.S., where the design and marketing of such devices take place at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The largest source of an iPhone’s value—and this goes for thousands of other high-tech products—lies not in its physical hardware but in its invention and the work of the individuals who conceived, designed, patented, packaged, and branded the device.

Taking these facts into account would leave China, the supposed country of origin, with a paltry piece of the pie. The Asian Development Bank estimates that as little as $10 of the value of every iPhone or iPad actually ends up in the Chinese economy.

Now magnify this across hundreds, even thousands of finished goods. Those Nike shoes that count as imports from China, all those flat-screen televisions, Android phones, clothing, furniture, Disney toys and figures. Almost all are the result of ideas generated in the U.S. (or Japan, or Germany, or Korea, and so on), with parts sourced globally and then assembled in China to be sold elsewhere. ...

8. Project Syndicate: The Poverty of Renewables

... Forcing everyone to buy more expensive, less reliable energy pushes up costs throughout the economy, leaving less for other public goods. The average of macroeconomic models indicates that the total cost of the EU’s climate policy will be €209 billion ($280 billion) per year from 2020 until the end of the century.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe burden of these policies falls overwhelmingly on the world’s poor, because the rich can easily pay more for their energy. I am often taken aback by well-meaning and economically comfortable environmentalists who cavalierly suggest that gasoline prices should be doubled or electricity exclusively sourced from high-cost green sources. That may go over well in affluent Hunterdon County, New Jersey, where residents reportedly spend just 2% of their income on gasoline. But the poorest 30% of the US population spend almost 17% of their after-tax income on gasoline. ...

9. New York Times - Economix: Q. and A.: A Development Expert on Narrowing Inequality

Branko Milanovic has been studying income inequality around the world for a long time. ...

... Inequality calculated among all individuals in the world, as if they were part of one single nation, has been edging slightly downward over the past 10 to 15 years, mostly thanks to very high growth rates in China and India. These relatively poor giants (particularly India) have pulled quite a lot of people out of poverty and into something that can be called “the global middle class.”

That is the key factor behind the decline of global inequality: The distance between their incomes and the rather stagnant incomes of the middle class in rich countries has diminished. Yet global inequality is still extremely high by the standards of any single country. It is, for example, significantly higher than inequality in South Africa, which is the most unequal country in the world. ...

10. Prospect: “I started off as a libertarian economist, but I’ve come full circle”—Gregory Clark on social mobility

... If you look at England, for example, what we measure is whether you were at Oxford or Cambridge; how long you live, which is another good indicator of social status; occupational status; are you a member of parliament? Now one of the interesting findings here is that it doesn’t really matter which measure you use. For the families we’re looking at, all these things are actually highly correlated. The wealthy at any time are also the educated, members of parliament, those who live long. What the book shows is that there’s an underlying physics of social mobility which all of our political efforts seem to have no effect upon. And the startling conclusion is that we may never be able to change social mobility rates. ...

11. Business Insider: Every 25-Year-Old In America Should See This Chart

12. Business Insider: 13 Money Lies You Should Stop Telling Yourself By Age 40

... By the time you hit 40, rationalizing away your bad money management habits starts to have a serious impact on your financial future (not to mention age you).

Here are some of the top money lies that you should stop telling yourself by age 40: ...

13. Huffington Post: 5 Tools to Tackle Finances in Your Twenties

Your twenties are hard enough already: matriculating from college, finding your first "real" job, moving out on your own, learning how to pay bills for the first time and learning how to navigate adult relationships without the structure of college or free flow of alcohol. It is a scary and awkward time, no one disputes that -- but mastering your finances in your twenties will reduce your stress and increase your net worth in the long run. Below are 5 tools you need to tackle finances in your twenties. ...

Science and Technology Links

1. PBS: Five Cook Stoves Used Around the World

2. Upworthy: It Used To Take Up 40% Of Their Daily Expenses. Then They Found A New Way To Cook.

3. Viral Forest: This is the Pallet Emergency Home. It Can Be Built in One Day With Only Basic Tools.

... Developed by the creative folks at i-Beam Design, this house plan makes use of commonly available materials, and is designed to be built by anyone, even without construction experience. ...

4. Upworthy: A Man Has Revolutionized Sanitary Pads For Women In India 'By Thinking Like A Woman'

5. Huffington Post: Global Food Waste Now At Shamefully High Levels

WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - The world loses or wastes a staggering 25 percent to 33 percent of the food it produces for consumption, losses that can mean the difference between an adequate diet and malnutrition in many countries, the World Bank said in a report released on Thursday. ...

6. Wired: This Gigantic 3-D Printer Can Create an Entire Table

7. Mashable: Researchers 3D Print Blood Vessels Into Tissue for Artificial Organs

... Using a custom-built four-head 3D printer and a "disappearing" ink, materials scientist Jennifer Lewis and her team created a patch of tissue containing skin cells and biological structural material interwoven with blood-vessel-like structures. Reported by the team in Advanced Materials, the tissue is the first made through 3D printing to include potentially functional blood vessels embedded among multiple, patterned cell types. ...

8. SourceFed: Man Gets New 3D Printed Face

9. Reuters: Nine-month-old baby may have been cured of HIV, U.S. scientists say

A 9-month-old baby who was born in California with the HIV virus that leads to AIDS may have been cured as a result of treatments that doctors began just four hours after her birth, medical researchers said on Wednesday.

That child is the second case, following an earlier instance in Mississippi, in which doctors may have brought HIV in a newborn into remission by administering antiretroviral drugs in the first hours of life, said Dr. Deborah Persaud, a pediatrics specialist with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, at a medical conference in Boston. ...

 10. Globe and Mail: How tiny robots could help make babies

... Microtechnology and nanotechology involve the manipulation of extremely small robots or bits of matter. To give a sense of the units of measure involved, a micrometre is one millionth of a metre, while a nanometre is a billionth.

The AMNL’s in vitro project focused on improving Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, a process used to create test tube babies. Developed in the early 1990s, the procedure allows an embryologist to gather a single sperm in a needle and inject it into an oocyte (egg cell). Given that a sperm head is about five micrometres wide, doing this procedure by hand requires a tremendous amount of precision, dexterity and accuracy.

To make this process more efficient and precise, the U of T lab developed a robotic injection system. ...

11. BBC: 30,000-year-old giant virus 'comes back to life'

An ancient virus has "come back to life" after lying dormant for at least 30,000 years, scientists say. ...

12. MIT News: Bionic plants

Nanotechnology could turn shrubbery into supercharged energy producers or sensors for explosives. ...

... Plants have many valuable functions: They provide food and fuel, release the oxygen that we breathe, and add beauty to our surroundings. Now, a team of MIT researchers wants to make plants even more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production and give them completely new functions, such as monitoring environmental pollutants.

In a new Nature Materials paper, the researchers report boosting plants’ ability to capture light energy by 30 percent by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast, the plant organelle where photosynthesis takes place. Using another type of carbon nanotube, they also modified plants to detect the gas nitric oxide.

Together, these represent the first steps in launching a scientific field the researchers have dubbed “plant nanobionics.” ...

13. Economist: Happy birthday world wide web

14. Huff Post Impact: How Can We Balance the Risks and Rewards of New Technologies?

... That said, in today's complex and interconnected world, their sustainable development and use also hinges on understanding how they might harm people and the environment, and how people's perceptions and assumptions might affect their development trajectories. This is where an increasingly sophisticated understanding of sustainable innovation is needed. While scientists and engineers are masters at demonstrating what is technologically possible, it is society that ultimately decides which technologies succeed and which do not. ...

15. Scientific American: What the 1960s Got Right—and Wrong—about Today's Tech

In 1964—exactly 50 years ago—sci-fi author Isaac Asimov wrote up his predictions about what life today would be like. He had a lot of hits and a lot of misses, as I wrote in my Scientific American column this month.

But Asimov wasn't the only person to look into the technological crystal ball. Fifty and 60 years ago gee-whiz films depicting life today were a staple—a sure way to wow audiences. Today these fanciful visions of the future live on, on YouTube. Let them be a warning to anyone today who's inclined to make a prediction about life in 2064. ...

 16. The Atlantic: This 13-Year-Old Just Became the Youngest Person Ever to Build a Nuclear-Fusion Reactor

... Edwards—a "young boffin," as the Post delightfully calls him—began construction of his makeshift nuclear reactor back in October in a science lab at Priory. He also kept a blog tracking his progress in the work of reactor-building, cataloguing his collection of a diffusion pump and a control panel and other components of the device that would eventually smash some atoms. 

This morning, all that work paid off. Edwards smashed two atoms of hydrogen together, creating helium. Yep: From a little science lab in a school in Lancashire, a 13-year-old created nuclear fusion. ...

17. Business Insider: Global Warming: Who Pressed The Pause Button?

... If so, the pause has gone from being not explained to explained twice over--once by aerosols and the solar cycle, and again by ocean winds and currents. These two accounts are not contradictory. The processes at work are understood, but their relative contributions are not. ...

... The solar cycle is already turning. And aerosol cooling is likely to be reined in by China’s anti-pollution laws. Most of the circumstances that have put the planet’s temperature rise on "pause" look temporary. Like the Terminator, global warming will be back.

18. Library of Economics and Liberty - David Henderson: 1.6%, Not 97%, Agree that Humans are the Main Cause of Global Warming

Mark Bahner, a commenter on my previous post on global warming and on David Friedman's post, has sifted through the data behind John Cook's statement that 97% of climate scientists who stated a position believe that humans are the main cause of global warming. ...

... Here are the categories that Cook et al state. I have added the numbers that Bahner found beside each. ...

1,Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+% : 64
2,Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimize: 922
3,Implicitly endorses AGW without minimizing it: 2910
4,No Position: 7970
5,Implicitly minimizes/rejects AGW: 54
6,Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW but does not quantify: 15
7,Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW as less than 50%: 9 ...

19. The Energy Collective: When Renewables Destroy Nature

... But in the first article from a forthcoming issue of Breakthrough Journal, Will Boisvert argues that bioenergy’s devastating impact on nature is typical of renewables, not exceptional. A world powered primarily by renewables, Boisvert writes, is unlikely to be environmentally friendly at all. ...

... Against the vision of renewables having a light footprint on the land, Boisvert notes, “The renewable energy paradigm requires an unprecedented industrial reengineering of the landscape: lining every horizon with forty-story wind turbines, paving deserts with concentrating solar mirrors, girdling the coasts with tidal and wave generators, and drilling for geological heat reservoirs; it sees all of nature as an integrated machine for producing energy.”

Ultimately, if we want to save more nature we must leave more of it alone, not harness it to power a human population of 7 going on 9 billion. “Stewardship of the planet requires that we continue to unshackle ourselves from ecosystems,” Boisvert writes, “and ecosystems from us.”

20. Forbes: Nuclear Energy Rising At The Expense of Renewable Power

...What now? Nuclear energy is getting off of its knees and it is perched to rebound, at least in certain parts of the world: In the United States, four reactors at two plants are under construction while the U.S. Department of Energy has been increasing funding for advanced nuclear research and development.

Meantime, China, Korea, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the UK are advancing nuclear production to address air pollution and climate concerns. China has 20 nuclear plants today and 28 more under construction — 40 percent of all projected new nuclear units, says the World Nuclear Association. A similar dynamic exists in the UK, which approved the construction of two reactors at Hinkley Point that will provide 7 percent of the UK’s electricity. ...

Economics Links

1. Quartz: Globalization really means countries just trade with their neighbors

2. Business Insider: Europe's Share Of Global Profits Is At A 28-Year Low

3. USA Today: Europe widespread corruption 'breathtaking'

... Meanwhile, the report, which was the first published by the EU to detail people's perceptions of corruption in the union, also said that 76% of Europeans think corruption is widespread, with another 56% saying they thought the level of corruption in their country had increased over the past three years.

"I think the perception is almost as important as the reality of how much corruption there is because if people feel that the national or EU institution is corrupt, it clearly is an indication of a lack of confidence, a lack of trust and a lack of respect for those governing institutions," said Ben Tonra, a professor of European foreign, security and defence policy at University College Dublin. ...

4. National Review: Welfare, Here and Abroad

How bad have things become? The British newspaper the Telegraph recently looked at the growth in welfare spending in industrialized nations and found that such spending (including health-care and pension programs) had grown faster in the United States since 2000 than in any country in Europe except Ireland, Spain, and Portugal.

Of course, European welfare states were larger to begin with, but the Telegraph’s report is reflective of an important trend. While the Obama administration presses forward with efforts to combat “income inequality” by expanding the American welfare state, the European nations and other industrialized welfare states are moving in the other direction.

A few examples: ...

5. Economist: The parable of Argentina

There are lessons for many governments from one country’s 100 years of decline ...

... Why dwell on a single national tragedy? When people consider the worst that could happen to their country, they think of totalitarianism. Given communism’s failure, that fate no longer seems likely. If Indonesia were to boil over, its citizens would hardly turn to North Korea as a model; the governments in Madrid or Athens are not citing Lenin as the answer to their euro travails. The real danger is inadvertently becoming the Argentina of the 21st century. Slipping casually into steady decline would not be hard. Extremism is not a necessary ingredient, at least not much of it: weak institutions, nativist politicians, lazy dependence on a few assets and a persistent refusal to confront reality will do the trick. ...

 6. Matt Ridley: Few people know that global inequality is falling and so is poverty

...  None of this is meant to imply that people are wrong to resent inequality in income or wealth, or be bothered about the winner-take-all features of executive pay in recent decades. Indeed, my point is rather the reverse: to try to understand why it is that people mind so much today, when in many ways inequality is so much less acute, and absolute poverty so much less prevalent, than it was in, say, 1900 or 1950. Now that starvation and squalor are mostly avoidable, so what if somebody else has a yacht?

The short answer is that surely we always have and always will care more about relative than absolute differences. This is no surprise to evolutionary biologists. The reproductive rewards went not to the peacock with a good enough tail, but to the one with the best tail. A few thousand years ago, the bloke with one more cow than the other bloke got the girl, and it would have cut little ice to try to reassure the loser by pointing out that he had more cows than his grandfather, that they were better cows, or that he had more than enough cows to feed himself anyway. What mattered was that he had fewer cows.

7. Huffington Post: A Post-GDP World? How to Measure Real Progress in America

... GDP actually tends to rise with societal problems such as crime, pollution, household debt, commuting time, and family breakdown. As a short-term measure of economic output, it increases with the depreciation of machinery and the extraction of finite resources, while failing to reflect the long-term contributions of education and entrepreneurship.

In light of these shortcomings, we seek to answer an overarching question in a report to be released in spring 2014: How should the US government institute supplemental national accounts that better reflect the well-being of the nation? The question, like the broader push for GDP reform, stems from a central premise that new comprehensive indicators would lead to better-informed policymaking, and, in turn, genuine advances in the nation's prosperity. We do not presume to replace GDP, which still serves an important although limited purpose, but to supplement it with modern measures of progress. ...

8. Business Insider: Half Of US GDP Comes From The Orange Spots On This Map

9. Legatus Magazine: Business and the option for the poor

... What does living out the option for the poor mean in practice? We must engage in works of charity — those activities that often address specific dimensions of poverty in ways that no state program ever could. And this means giving of our time, energy, and human and monetary capital in ways that bring Christ’s light into some of the darkest places on earth.

Yet this does not mean that Catholics are required to give something to everything, or even that Catholics must give away everything they own. As Fr. James Schall, SJ, writes, “If we take all the existing world wealth and simply distribute it, what would happen? It would quickly disappear; all would be poor.” Put another way, living out the option for the poor may well involve those people with a talent for creating wealth doing precisely that.

The option for the poor, however, does not rule out any form of government assistance to those in need. Yet lifting people out of poverty — and not just material poverty but also moral and spiritual poverty — does not necessarily mean that the most effective action is to implement yet another welfare program. There is no reason to assume that the preferential option for the poor is somehow a preferential option for big government. Often, being an entrepreneur and starting a business which brings jobs, wages, and opportunities to places where they did not hitherto exist is a greater exercise of love for the poor (and usually far more economically effective) than another government welfare initiative. ...

10. New York Times: Can Marriage Cure Poverty?

... “It isn’t that having a lasting and successful marriage is a cure for living in poverty,” says Kristi Williams of Ohio State University. “Living in poverty is a barrier to having a lasting and successful marriage.” ...

... In an economy that offers so little promise to those at the bottom, family planning in the name of upward mobility doesn’t make much sense. “Engaging in family formation by accident rather than by design, you get a story of low-opportunity costs,” says Kathryn Edin, the poverty researcher at Johns Hopkins. “We’ve created the situation where pregnancy is not the worst thing that can happen to you. It can be seen as a path to redemption in an otherwise violent, unpredictable, hopeless world.”

Similar forces might also spur some young couples not to get married, even if they want to. Many poor women opt not to marry the poor men in their lives, for instance, to avoid bringing more economic chaos into their homes. And the poor women who do marry tend to have unstable marriages — often to ill effect. One study, for instance, found that single mothers who married and later divorced were worse off economically than those who did not marry at all. “These women revere marriage, they want to get married,” Williams says. “They aren’t making an irrational choice not to marry.” ...

11. Atlantic Cities: How Anti-Poverty Programs Marginalize Fathers

... U.S. government programs designed to help such families, however, haven't evolved with the population. Based on decades-old stereotypes that single mothers are raising children alone and single dads are "deadbeats," the majority of United States anti-poverty programs almost exclusively serve women and children, says Jacquelyn Boggess, co-director of the Center for Family Policy and Practice,* a Wisconsin-based think tank that focuses on supporting low-income parents. The welfare system, as a result, can become a muddled mess of rearranging rather than relieving poverty. Single, non-custodial fathers bear the brunt. But dads don’t suffer alone. Because the poor pull together to support one another, everyone absorbs the pinch. ...

12. Investors: Low-Wage Hours At New Low As ObamaCare Fines Loom

... It's impossible to know how much of the drop relates to ObamaCare, but there's good reason to suspect a strong connection. The workweek has been getting shorter in many of the same industries where anecdotes have piled up about employers cutting hours to evade the law's penalties. ...

13. Business Insider: Very Few American Workers Actually Make The Minimum Wage

... "We do not know the share of individuals (or wages) who are just above the minimum wage and whose wages might also rise with an increase, but we do know that it is likely still a small proportion," they write.

"The current minimum wage is well below the economy-wide average. Even for low-paying sectors like retail trade and leisure and hospitality — where the average hourly wage in 2013 was $13.50 and $16.60, respectively — the current minimum is a fair bit lower. These data also suggest a relatively small share of total wage income that would be directly impacted by any increase in the federal (or various state) minimums."

So while the minimum wage debate may be a hot-button political issue, it is somewhat irrelevant from an economic perspective.

14. The Atlantic: Liberals Need to Think Beyond the Minimum Wage

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office says a hike would help the working class, but less than many might hope.  ...

15. New York Times: Evaporating Unemployment

Before the recession, in December 2007, about 63 percent of American adults had jobs. Six years later, in December 2013, less than 59 percent of adults had jobs.

And a new analysis says that the recession has very little to do with it.

The study, by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, asserts that workforce participation is in long-term decline. If the recession had never happened, or the economy had since returned to complete health, the authors estimate 59.3 percent of adults would have jobs, instead of 58.6 percent. ...

 

16. Business Insider: Why 12.7 Million Americans Dropped Out Of The Workforce

17. Conversable Economist: Halfway to Full Economic Recovery

... In short, although the prediction is that the U.S. economy is roughly halfway from the end of the recession to a full economic recovery, this is a case where the glass is actually half-full, rather than half-empty, because the heartier period of economic growth is coming. Here are a few of the details. ...

 18. Carpe Diem: When it comes to spending on food as share of total consumer expenditures, Americans have the most affordable food on the planet, and it’s gotten better over time.

19. Forbes: Charitable Giving Grew 4.9% In 2013 As Online Donations Picked Up

... Charitable giving revenue grew 4.9% in 2013, the largest gain since the 2008 recession. U.S. based organizations with annual fundraising over $10 million saw 5% growth. Those that receive $1 million to $10 million in gifts gained 3.8% and the smallest nonprofits – less than $1 million raised annually – grew 3.6%. ...

... The tables, however, turn with online giving revenue which, at 13.5% growth overall, had its second consecutive year of double-digit gains. ...

 20. NPR: Economist Says Best Climate Fix A Tough Sell, But Worth It

... "When we did our first calculations, they actually spun out these 'shadow prices,' " he says. "And I remember looking at them and trying to think ... what in the world does that mean?"

The shadow prices, he realized, actually represented the cost of putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And with that, climate change suddenly became a problem that could be attacked with the tools of economics.

"Actually from an economic point of view, it's a pretty simple problem," he says.

If people would simply pay the cost of using the atmosphere as a dump for carbon dioxide, that would create a powerful incentive to dump less and invest in cleaner ways to generate energy. But how do you do that?

"We need to put a price on carbon, so that when anyone, anywhere, anytime does something that puts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there's a price tag on that," he says.

His colleagues say that inspiration — now taken for granted — makes Nordhaus a prime candidate for a Nobel Prize. A lot of his work has been figuring out how big a price we should pay, and what form it should take. ...

21. New York Times: Your Ancestors, Your Fate

Inequality of income and wealth has risen in America since the 1970s, yet a large-scale research study recently found that social mobility hadn’t changed much during that time. How can that be?

The study, by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley, tells only part of the story. It may be true that mobility hasn’t slowed — but, more to the point, mobility has always been slow.

When you look across centuries, and at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution.

To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents’. The recent study suggests that 10 percent of variation in income can be predicted based on your parents’ earnings. In contrast, my colleagues and I estimate that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage. The fortunes of high-status families inexorably fall, and those of low-status families rise, toward the average — what social scientists call “regression to the mean” — but the process can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past. ...

50 Reasons We're Living Through the Greatest Period in World History

Huff Post Business (The Motley Fool): 50 Reasons We're Living Through the Greatest Period in World History

I recently talked to a doctor who retired after a 30-year career. I asked him how much medicine had changed during the three decades he practiced. "Oh, tremendously," he said. He listed off a dozen examples. Deaths from heart disease and stroke are way down. Cancer survival rates are way up. We're better at diagnosing, treating, preventing and curing disease than ever before.

Consider this: In 1900, one percent of American women giving birth died in labor. Today, the five-year mortality rate for localized breast cancer is 1.2 percent. Being pregnant 100 years ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer is today.

The problem, the doctor said, is that these advances happen slowly over time, so you probably don't hear about them. If cancer survival rates improve, say, one percent per year, any given year's progress looks low, but over three decades, extraordinary progress is made.

Compare health-care improvements with the stuff that gets talked about in the news -- NBC anchor Andrea Mitchell interrupted a Congresswoman last week to announce Justin Bieber's arrest -- and you can understand why Americans aren't optimistic about the country's direction. We ignore the really important news because it happens slowly, but we obsess over trivial news because it happens all day long.

Expanding on my belief that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, here are 50 facts that show we're actually living through the greatest period in world history.

1. U.S. life expectancy at birth was 39 years in 1800, 49 years in 1900, 68 years in 1950 and 79 years today. The average newborn today can expect to live an entire generation longer than his great-grandparents could.

2. A flu pandemic in 1918 infected 500 million people and killed as many as 100 million. In his book The Great Influenza, John Barry describes the illness as if "someone were hammering a wedge into your skull just behind the eyes, and body aches so intense they felt like bones breaking." Today, you can go to Safeway and get a flu shot. It costs 15 bucks. You might feel a little poke.

3. In 1950, 23 people per 100,000 Americans died each year in traffic accidents, according to the Census Bureau. That fell to 11 per 100,000 by 2009. If the traffic mortality rate had not declined, 37,800 more Americans would have died last year than actually did. In the time it will take you to read this article, one American is alive who would have died in a car accident 60 years ago. ...

Hans Rosling: Don't Panic — The Facts About Population

This is just fantastic! Hans Rosling pulls together many of his various presentations over recent years and melds them into a one-hour-long presentation about the astonishing way our world is improving while pointing to the challenges ahead. I know this is long, but if you watch this closely and learn, you will be well-positioned to accurately reflect on the alarmist claims of environmentalists, neo-cons, and other ideologies. If I were teaching a demography or economic development class, this video would be the first hour of the first class of the semester.

Economic Development Links

1. EconLog: On Sweatshops: They're Better Than the Alternative - Art Carden

... Here's some of what I wrote them specifically:

Sweatshops are an important exercise in appreciating the difference between what we see (people in sweatshops) and what we don't see (the jobs they would have if they didn't have sweatshop opportunities). Sweatshops employ children because the children are available for work and because their next-best opportunities (agriculture or, in some cases, prostitution) are usually worse than sweatshop labor. It is definitely good that the workers at least have opportunities to work in sweatshops because, as research by Powell and others has shown, their other alternatives are even worse. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but sweatshop earnings are better than they are in other lines of employment.

Perhaps I'm reading uncharitably, but I think a lot of sweatshop critics misunderstand the economist's argument. The argument isn't that sweatshop conditions and wages are good in some cosmic sense. Rather, they are better than the available alternatives. ...

2. Business Insider: Child Labor Bans Actually Make Things Worse For The Poorest Children

This is straight from the "good intentions gone bad" file.

... But banning child labor outright may not work in countries with systemic, widespread poverty and no social security programs to help out poor families in dire straits. 

This is according to a new NBER study by Prashant Bharadwaj of UCSD, Leah Lakdawal of Michigan State University and Nicholas Li of the University of Toronto. 

The study uses data from India, a country where the problem of child labor is particularly egregious. According to official estimates, the number of child laborers between the ages of 5 and 14 lay at nearly 5 million in 2010.  In 1986, India instituted a ban on child labor through the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, which sought to ban children under the age of 14 being employed in "hazardous" occupations, which included construction work, some factory work and work in automobile garages. It also restricted the number of hours children could work in "non-hazardous" occupations, such as food service. 

The ban's intended effect was to make it riskier, and hence more costly for employers to employ child labor.

But the only people sending their children out to work were the poorest and most desperate families who had no other means of reaching a minimum level of subsistence. Employers took advantage of this desperation and responded by cutting the wages they would pay a child laborer as a means of passing on the higher cost of the risk of employing them.  Families that would earlier have sent only one of their children to work, were now forced to send more of their young children into the workforce. The fall in child wages due to the ban actually led to an increase in child labor.

The research found that child labor increased 12.5% over the pre-ban average, and the likelihood of a business employing a child versus employing an older person increased by 1.7 to 1.9 percentage points.  ...

3. BBC: Maid to entrepreneur: Rising out of poverty in Brazil

... The changes have been particularly marked for Brazilian women. Falling birth rates mean mothers have smaller families to care for and often do better in their chosen professions.

According to Sebrae, a body that promotes entrepreneurship, the number of Brazilian women who became business owners grew by 21% in the past decade, at twice the rate of men. ...

4. New York Times: In Middle of Mexico, a Middle Class Rises

... Education. More sophisticated work. Higher pay. This is the development formula Mexico has been seeking for decades. But after the free-market wave of the 1990s failed to produce much more than low-skilled factory work, Mexico is finally attracting the higher-end industries that experts say could lead to lasting prosperity. Here, in a mostly poor state long known as one of the country’s main sources of illegal immigrants to the United States, a new Mexico has begun to emerge.

Dozens of foreign companies are investing, filling in new industrial parks along the highways. Middle-class housing is popping up in former watermelon fields, and new universities are waving in classes of students eager to study engineering, aeronautics and biotechnology, signaling a growing confidence in Mexico’s economic future and what many see as the imported meritocracy of international business. In a country where connections and corruption are still common tools of enrichment, many people here are beginning to believe they can get ahead through study and hard work. ...

5. Forbes: Three Young Entrepreneurs Fighting Poverty Have Big Impact

Jake Harriman says that if the company he’s founded still exists in 30 years, “we’ve failed.” You see, Harriman believes Nuru International can end extreme poverty in that time.

Harriman and I met at the Social Innovation Summit at Stanford this week, where I found a number of young entrepreneurs who are working to end poverty.

Beth Schmidt created a crowdfunding site called Wishbone to help poor high school students to raise funding to attend special university programs that help them prepare for college.

Leila Janah created Samasource to help U.S. companies crowdsource affordable staff from the developing world, providing women and young people with quality jobs that lift them out of poverty. Janah notes, “There are 1.4 billion people living on $1.25 per day or less. This is not acceptable.”...

6. Businessweek: Want to Fight Poverty? Just Give the Poor Cash

A new study by economists at Harvard and from MIT suggests that the best way to fight global poverty (PDF) is simply to give people cash and let them spend it however they want. The study was conducted with Innovations for Poverty Action, with funding from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund. ...

7. Businessweek: Is Land Reform Finally Coming to China?

China’s leaders raised a multitude of reforms as priorities at the plenum that closed a week ago. A key one, a change in land ownership so that farmers can more freely rent, sell, and mortgage their land, is hoped to boost China’s still laggard household consumption.

“The Party leadership has given its blessing to land reforms that should shift more income to rural households. Change will happen slowly but the result should be a boost to consumer spending,” wrote Mark Williams and Julian Evans-Pritchard, economists at London-based Capital Economics in a Nov. 20 note. ...

8. Atlantic: One of the World's Tiniest, Poorest Countries Is Redefining HIV Care

In Rwanda, success is measured not by how many people live and die, but by how many take their medication and lead normal lives.

... Yet in Rwanda, where just 20 years ago a genocide claimed approximately 1 million lives, the government has transformed HIV care for the poor by redefining the standards for successful treatment. More than three decades into the epidemic, many national and international agencies are still counting the basics—how many people get infected, how many people receive medication, how many patients die. Success in Rwanda, meanwhile, is measured not in the number remaining alive, but rather in how many are actually able to take their medications as directed and suppress the virus in their bodies to a level where it is essentially non-existent. In Rwanda, success is achieved when people living with HIV can earn a living, support their family, raise their children, and care for their community no differently than their peers. ...

9. Slate: We're Not Sending Poor Countries the Stuff They Want

The paper looked what people identified as the most pressing problems facing their countries on public attitude surveys from 42 African and Latin American countries. In the case of Africa, Leo found that the overwhelming priorities as “(1) jobs and income; (2) infrastructure; (3) enabling economic and financial policies; and (4) inequality. Since 2002, these issues have steadily accounted for roughly 70 percent of survey responses.” (Notice that health, education, and political instability are not on that list.)

So is this what U.S. aid to Africa has focused on? Not even close. According to Leo, “percentage of US development commitments aligned with what Africans have cited as the three biggest problems has exceeded 50 percent in only two African countries over the last decade.” Those would be Botswana, where PEPFAR programs addressed AIDS, and Burkina Faso, where a Millennium Challenge Corp. grant focused on infrastructure.

Most countries are more like Kenya, where only 6 percent of the $5 billion in U.S. development commitments over the last decade has gone toward the three problems Kenyans consistently identify as the country’s biggest: unemployment, bad infrastructure, and unfriendly economic conditions. ...

10. Wired: The Hyper-Efficient, Highly Scientific Scheme to Help the World’s Poor

...At the time, there was a campaign, spearheaded by the World Bank, to provide free textbooks throughout sub-Saharan Africa, on the assumption that this would boost test scores and keep children in school longer. ICS had tasked Kremer’s friend with identifying target schools for such a giveaway.

While chatting with his friend about this, Kremer began to wonder: How did ICS know the campaign would work? It made sense in theory—free textbooks should mean more kids read them, so more kids learn from them—but they had no evidence to back that up. On the spot, Kremer suggested a rigorous way to evaluate the program: Identify twice the number of qualifying schools as it had the money to support. Then randomly pick half of those schools to receive the textbooks, while the rest got none. By comparing outcomes between the two cohorts, they could gauge whether the textbooks were making a difference. ...

... But soon after Kremer returned to the US, he was startled to get a call from his friend. ICS was interested in pursuing his idea. Sensing a rare research opportunity, Kremer flew back to Kenya and set to work. By any measure it was a quixotic project. ...

11. Businessweek: Poor Countries Need Relief From Climate Change. They Need Electricity More

... Campaigners pointed out that those with the most to lose from the failure of the climate talks are the world’s poorest people—certain to suffer the greatest impact of the floods, droughts, and rising temperatures that climate change is bringing. At the same time, the world’s poorest people are also those with the lowest access to modern sources of energy such as electricity and natural gas. In order to foster economic growth and improvements in health, developing countries will need to generate huge amounts of additional power. How to achieve considerable reductions in carbon dioxide at a time of massive increases in global energy consumption is of the most complex—and urgent—challenges facing policymakers in the developed world. ...

12. Atlantic: Here's Why Developing Countries Will Consume 65% of the World's Energy by 2040

One bit of good news: Energy consumption per gross domestic product is expected to decline worldwide in the coming decade, with developed and developing nations reaching parity by 2040.

13. Huff Post Impact: How Is Technology Driving Job Creation In Poor Countries? - Jessica Long

... In the developing world, the pace of change may be slower than many would like but, nonetheless, there are marked examples of technology's role in raising incomes and driving employment opportunities.

It's not just the supply chain and information-based jobs spawned by technological innovation that create jobs in less developed countries. In many cases, it's the technology firms themselves that need trained IT programmers and other professionals to fill knowledge gaps and keep up with the demands of the rapidly growing economy. ...

14. Forbes: Why Gates Is Wrong About Poverty And Development And Zuckerberg Is Right

... For the main problem in the world is not disease, nor malnutrition, nor education: it’s poverty. Solve the poverty and all of the other problems become infinitely more malleable, hugely easier to solve. We also need to recall that it is not poverty that is made: no one has caused the poor of the world to be destitute. This is in fact the natural condition of mankind. This is how our own ancestors lived for millennia. ...

Just to give you an idea Mozambique, Guinea, Togo, the sort of places that we regard as the poorest of the poor these days. GDP per capita of around $1,000 a year. These places are richer than the Roman Empire. As rich as England was in 1600 AD and richer than Scotland or Wales were at that time.

What is made is the wealth to lift people up out of that destitution. Thus the great need of our time is to bring the tools of wealth creation to those places that don’t have it. ...

15. Huffington Post: Capitalism for Human Rights? - Carol Te

... There seems to be this justification that promoting civil and political freedoms are sufficient because they are necessary vehicles for procuring social and economic security -- but what if it is the other way around?

It is not a coincidence that many non-profits right now take care of the economically and socially disadvantaged -- economic and social rights are not recognized as important human rights as is evidenced by their absence in international law. So instead the international community pushes aid to both non-profits and the government to even out the structural inequality between civil and political rights and economic and social rights. But it is not enough. Basic economics stipulates that incentives are required for innovation. When organizations or governments are given aid, they aren't going to increase levels of productivity. They are simply not given the incentives to work hard to invest in the future. In fact, economist William Easterly finds that the larger the aid, the lower the savings on the recipient's part -- in effect, aid creates disincentives for the recipient in gathering his or her own resources for development. So, if we cannot count on traditional human rights organizations to make a leap forward, then what should we count on? The answer is trade.

Economic growth requires a free global market. Trade is good for poor countries -- it gives them access to markets in the developed world, it creates more competition for workers, which increases wages, and foreign investment introduces new capital, technology and skills. As economist Dambisa Moyo argues, once there is economic growth, then a middle class can be created to hold the government accountable -- robust institutions can form to create stability. New market potential can reap extraordinary benefits for both natives of the country and the investor. And most important of all, it is sustainable. That is, the infrastructure will not fall apart simply because a donor decides to pull out of a project -- a fate that many NGOs fall prey to. ...

16. Jeffery Sachs: Development, Structure, and Transformation: Some Evidence on Comparative Economic Growth

ABSTRACT:

We suggest that the geographical patterns of income differences across the world have deep underpinnings. We emphasize that economic development is a complex process driven by economic, political, social, and biophysical forces. Some economists have argued that the patterns reflect mainly the historical footprint of colonial rule and political evolution, and that geography’s effects on development occurred exclusively through its effects on this historical institutional development.

We believe that economic development has also been shaped very importantly by the biophysical and geophysical characteristics of economies. Per capita incomes differ around the world in no small part because of sharp differences across regions in the natural resource base and physical geography (e.g. distance to coast), and by the amplification of those differences through the dynamics of saving and investment. We posit that the drivers of economic development include institutions, technology, and geography, and that none of these alone is sufficient to account for the diverse patterns of global growth. We survey the relevant literature, and empirically show that a multi-causal framework helps to explain when countries achieve middle income; the distribution of economic activity around the world today; the patterns of growth between 1960 and 2010; the patterns of income per person within large economies; and the structural characteristics of the remaining countries still stuck in poverty today.

17. Real Clear World: Elections Don't Matter, Institutions Do - Robert Kaplan

... And yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one state to the other.

Well, of course that's true, they're only states, not countries, you might say. But the fact that my observation is a dull commonplace doesn't make it any less amazing. To be sure, it makes it more amazing. For as the late Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington once remarked, the genius of the American system lies less in its democracy per se than in its institutions. The federal and state system featuring 50 separate identities and bureaucracies, each with definitive land borders -- that nevertheless do not conflict with each other -- is unique in political history. And this is not to mention the thousands of counties and municipalities in America with their own sovereign jurisdictions. Many of the countries I have covered as a reporter in the troubled and war-torn developing world would be envious of such an original institutional arrangement for governing an entire continent.

In fact, Huntington's observation can be expanded further: The genius of Western civilization in general is that of institutions. Sure, democracy is a basis for this; but democracy is, nevertheless, a separate factor. For enlightened dictatorships in Asia have built robust, meritocratic institutions whereas weak democracies in Africa have not.

Institutions are such a mundane element of Western civilization that we tend to take them for granted. ...

18. Huffington Post: Why Can't We Innovate Our Way Out of Poverty?

It is one of those unproven-but-probably-true facts that developing countries have an easier time getting out of poverty than getting into prosperity. They go from "low-" to "middle-income" level relatively fast, but rarely make it to "high-income" status. [A country is considered middle-income if its average citizen makes between $1,200 and $12,000 a year, give or take a few dollars]. Somehow, they get stuck in a dreaded middle-income "trap". For them, the typical development story goes like this. They get an initial boost by reforming their agriculture or exploiting their oil and minerals. This releases the labor and the money needed to build industries that can use basic technology to produce cheaply the kind of goods that consumers in rich countries want to buy. Think of Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, or Turkey -- chances are that your T-shirt, tool-box, tea-pot, and TV set were manufactured or assembled in a middle-income country like these. But when those countries try to climb up the technological ladder, sell more valuable stuff, be more productive, and create better-paying jobs, things get complicated. Then the game is no longer to sell cheap but to sell new, not just to be efficient but to be innovative. ...

... How on earth can governments promote that!?

A new book called Mass Flourishing, written by Edmund Phelps, says they can't. Or, rather, it says that they need cultural change. ...

19. Businessweek: Farewell to the Age of Free Trade - Joshua Kurlantzick

Since the end of World War II and the birth of the modern global economy, business leaders have come to accept an iron law: International trade always expands faster than economic growth. Between the late 1940s and 2013, that assumption held true. Trade grew roughly twice as fast as the world economy annually, as fresh markets opened up, governments signed free-trade pacts, new industries and consumers emerged, and technological advances made international trade cheaper and faster.

Now this iron law may be crumbling. Over the past two years, international trade has grown so slowly that it has fallen behind the growth of the world economy, which itself is hardly humming. ...

Not sure I agree, but some interesting thoughts.

20. New York Times: Inequality and Good Intentions - Casey Mulligan

... Progress begets inequality, and the resulting inequality can either encourage more progress or impede it, or both. Professor Deaton suggests that inequality in the modern United States has had both of these effects.

He points to a third influence of progress and inequality on outcomes for those left behind: good intentions. As part of the world becomes rich and no longer worries about day-to-day survival, it can look outward. Many residents of developed countries have a “need to help” those less fortunate.

But the attempts to help often – perhaps even usually – go awry. ...

21. The Telegraph: The world has never had it so good - thanks partly to capitalism

We live in largely peaceful times, with better access to medicine and education - the world is easily in the best place it’s ever been. 

Science and Technology Links (Environment Edition)

I'm playing catchup with a backlog of links to be posted. This list pulls together a subsection of science and technology links dealing with the environment.

1. Bloomberg: Warring Dogmas Block Climate-Change Progress

... In 1981, [Julian] Simon proposed a bet. [Paul] Ehrlich could name any five metals, and by the end of the decade, Simon wagered, their prices would decrease, thus disproving Ehrlich's claim that population growth would produce an increase in scarcity.

Ehrlich eagerly accepted. Working with like-minded scientists, he selected chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. In the 1970s, the market prices of all five had increased significantly (at least in nominal terms). Ehrlich was confident that as a result of population growth, the trend would continue.

But Simon won the bet, and it wasn't even close. By 1990, the prices of each metal had decreased by an average of 50 percent, even though the decade had seen the largest global population growth in history (with 800 million additional people). To all appearances, Simon had been vindicated. ...

... As Sabin explains, it turns out that Simon was a lucky winner. Not long ago, economists ran a series of simulations for every 10-year period from 1900 to 2008. They found that with respect to the prices of the five metals on which Ehrlich and Simon bet, Ehrlich would have won 63 percent of the time.

But this doesn't mean that Ehrlich was right. Because of macroeconomic factors, commodity prices are volatile, and they are a poor proxy for the effects of population increases. ...

... These decisions raise diverse questions, and each of them must be investigated on its own merits. For such problems, the noisy, headline-grabbing dogmas of Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon are a serious impediment to progress. The coming decisions will require careful exploration of costs and benefits, not abstract narratives about the supposed arc of history.

2. Nature: Climate change: The case of the missing heat

Sixteen years into the mysterious 'global-warming hiatus', scientists are piecing together an explanation.

The biggest mystery in climate science today may have begun, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, with a subtle weakening of the tropical trade winds blowing across the Pacific Ocean in late 1997. These winds normally push sun-baked water towards Indonesia. When they slackened, the warm water sloshed back towards South America, resulting in a spectacular example of a phenomenon known as El Niño. Average global temperatures hit a record high in 1998 — and then the warming stalled. ...

3. L. A. Times: A climate change of heart by the European Union?

Confronted by rising energy costs and international competition, the European Union's executive body has recommended relaxing rules on renewable energy with a plan that doesn't hold specific nations responsible for specific targets. The EU's member states and Parliament should reject it. The EU has been the leader on fighting climate change; if it shies away from its commitment now, similar efforts in the U.S. and around the world will almost surely suffer.

On a positive note, the recommendations call for creating an overall target of a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared with what they were in 1990. It's a worthy target, though environmentalists would like it to be even higher; the 28-nation bloc has reduced such emissions by 12% so far. By 2030, the EU is supposed to get more than a quarter of its energy from renewable sources. But the plan would eliminate binding agreements under which each member nation would have to meet certain targets. So which nations would be responsible for attaining the 2030 goal and how would they be held to it? That's unclear. In addition, the plan would loosen environmental regulations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas.

Driving the changes are concerns about the struggling European economy. With energy costs higher because of reduced reliance on cheaper fossil fuels, European businesses are in a weak position to compete with those in nations without strong environmental rules. ...

4. The American Interest: End Result of Germany's Green Energy Policy: More Coal

Germany produced more energy by coal last year than it has in nearly a quarter century. King Coal's return comes courtesy of the energiewende—the policy put in place following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The plan was to phase out the country's numerous nuclear reactors and jumpstart its fledgling renewable energy industry, but coal has been forced to fill the gap. ...

5. The American Interest: Why Europe's Greens Are Wrong, in Two Charts

Europe has so far snubbed shale gas and has been rewarded with rising electricity prices and a greater reliance on coal. The end result: America is reducing emissions faster than Europe:

If you go anti-science on nuclear safety, this is what you get. ;-)

6. Scientific American: New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions Drop 19% Since 2005

New York City's greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by 19 percent since 2005, outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday, putting the city nearly two-thirds of the way to meeting the goal that Bloomberg set five years ago.

7. BBC: Ethiopia's renewable energy revolution (Video)

In Ethiopia the government has recently announced major deals that should massively increase the amount of electricity generated from renewable resources.

The BBC's Emmanuel Igunza has been finding out how Ethiopia is leading Africa in the drive to exploit sustainable energy supplies.

8. USA Today: How fast is the Earth's climate actually changing?

How quickly parts of the Earth's climate are changing in response to added greenhouse gases and what's forecast for decades ahead is a mixed bag, a federal advisory council says in a report out Tuesday. ...

... "Research has helped us begin to distinguish more imminent threats from those that are less likely to happen this century," said James W.C. White, professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and chairman of the committee that wrote the report.

"Evaluating climate changes and impacts in terms of their potential magnitude and the likelihood they will occur will help policymakers and communities make informed decisions about how to prepare for or adapt to them," he added. ...

9. Forbes: Can Coal Feed The Global Energy Appetite In A Healthy Way?

It's the ultimate paradox: How to feed the world's energy appetite while ensuring the planet's endless survival. Reducing the use of coal and using more sustainable energy forms is the ultimate answer, the International Energy Agency says. But until then, the global community must strive to make coal cleaner.

10. BBC: Has the Sun Gone to Sleep (Video)

Scientists are saying that the Sun is in a phase of "solar lull" - meaning that it has fallen asleep - and it is baffling them.

History suggests that periods of unusual "solar lull" coincide with bitterly cold winters.

Rebecca Morelle reports for BBC Newsnight on the effect this inactivity could have on our current climate, and what the implications might be for global warming.

11. Christian Science Monitor: Antarctica warming tied to natural cycle in tropical Atlantic, study says (+video)

Rapid warming along the Antarctic Peninsula and puzzling shifts in the distribution and extent of winter sea ice at the bottom of the world appear to have their roots in a natural climate swing centered in the tropical Atlantic, according to a new study by researchers at New York University.

The warming of the region is of concern because of its implications for sea-level rise, while the shifting and slight increase in winter sea ice has become a favorite talking-point among many of global warming's political skeptics. ...

12. It has become gospel, based on the Cook study, that 97% of scientists agree with the theory of human-caused global warming. Two stories:

Forbes: Global Warming Alarmist Trashes His Own Poll Of Meteorologists Showing No Climate Crisis

... Stenhouse, a psychologist and doctoral student in communications at George Mason University, emailed all full members of the American Meteorological Society for whom he could find an email address and asked them to fill out an online survey on global warming. More than 1,800 AMS meteorologists filled out the survey.

Only 52 percent said global warming is occurring and is caused mostly by humans – which is itself a far cry from having 52 percent say humans are causing a global warming crisis. The results were a huge blow to the mythical notion that all or nearly all scientists agree that humans are causing a global warming crisis. This is especially the case considering the AMS survey reflected the views of scientists with atmospheric science expertise. This wasn't a survey of engineers or other non-atmospheric scientists with little if any atmospheric science expertise. ...

And Popular Technology.net, 97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists' Papers, according to the scientists that published them

The paper, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' searched the Web of Science for the phrases "global warming" and "global climate change" then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.

To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists' papers as "endorsing AGW", apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors. ...

Plastic made from pollution hits U.S. market

USA Today: Plastic made from pollution hits U.S. market

This is pretty amazing!

... Industry experts told them it was a fool's errand. For good reason. Scientists had spent decades trying to capture carbon and use it to make plastic but couldn't do it cheaply enough. The two friends cracked the code by developing a ten-times more efficient bio-catalyst, which strips the carbon from a liquefied gas and rearranges it into a long chain plastic molecule.

The result? Today, the 31-year-old co-founders of California-based Newlight Technologies have two factories that take methane captured from dairy farms and use it to make AirCarbon — plastic that will soon appear in the form of chairs, food containers and automotive parts. Coming next year: cellphone cases for Virgin Mobile. ...

Video at 1:56:

"... The idea is these products are actually able to match on the performance of oil based plastics but in fact out compete on price, so what we have is a market driven carbon capture process, which is really exciting for us....

... We recently had a third party independent analysis done that verified that each on of our grades of plasctic actually sequester more carbon in the production process than they emit. So every single grade that we make is a carbon sink. So this product here, and this product here ... this is all actually pulling carbon on a net basis, including the energy, out of the air."

The Alternative to Climate Alarmists & Deniers

Daily Tech: Climate Alarmists & Deniers: Please, Just Shut Up

Researchers at George Mason University and Yale University bring the grave news that "belief in global warming" is at a "six year low". 
 
I. Do You Believe?
 
The study [PDF] comes courtesy of principle investigator Professor Anthony Leiserowitz, an environmental scientist at Yale. Other principle investigators include Professors Edward Maibach and Connie Roser-Renouf (GMU communications professors, specializing in climate). Geoff Feinberg, a Yale university employee who lacks a Ph.D but was a private sector polling specialist on environmental issues also contributed to the work. 
 
Another odd addition was psychopathology researcher turned climatology investigator Professor Seth Rosenthal, a member of Yale's climatology team. Rounding out the team was Professor Jennifer Marlon, a PhD expert in geography who currently teaches climate science at Yale.
 
The first oddity -- which you may notice -- is that there's nary a Ph.D credentialed climatologist in the field. I think this is worth noting as critics of the more alarmist brands of "global warming" rhetoric are often attacked for not holding climatology degrees, despite the fact that many of them hold master's degrees or doctorates in related fields, such as physics or civil engineering. ...

This is a rather lengthy article but it is the conclusion that caught my eye.

IV. More Science, More Debate, Less Politics
 
There's a need for research. But surveys on public opinion asked in shrill black and white terms offer little help to a legitimate debate.
 
And as much as there's a need for research, there's an equal age to push to remove this issue from a political debate. Until someone can come up with a financially sound approach to emissions control, the government needs to step back and let the private sector handle its own affairs.
 
Mankind is changing the climate in numerous ways, many of which surpass even strong warming on a local basis. From desertification to water cycle changes due to deforestation, many serious manmade climate changes are overlooked due to global warming's chokehold on media attention.

Instead of focusing on querying public beliefs and condemning (or praising) "nonbelievers", let us instead focus the dialogue on constructive solutions to both adopt a sensible path to alternative energy (e.g. algae, nuclear power, solar), so that when fossil fuel supplies do near exhaustion, we're prepared. And let's acknowledge that climate change -- manmade or not -- has always been occurring on planet Earth.

Last, but not least, let's not blame the media for putting things in alarmist or overly skeptical terms, when researchers themselves often resort to the same extremes for funding. After all, most members of the media have at least a bachelor's degree in a technical subject. Like many who publish climate research, we lack a Ph.D in climatology. But so long as we express our opinions respectfully, keeping an open and questioning mind, I see no reason why the media's opinions are more or less valid than non-climatologist thinking heads in academia. To suggest otherwise is simply elitist "ivory tower" type thinking.

I have no doubt the climate is changing. I don't doubt that human activity plays a role. I am not sure how big that role is. Based on significantly errant predictions about climate (temps have remained stable for 15 years and are now outside the 95% confidence level of modeled scientific predictions), I don't have confidence that scientists have a good grasp on the climate yet. Some are suggesting the 15-year hiatus in warming could last another 15 years.

Furthermore, calculations about CO2 emissions all assume GDP growth and energy use are perfectly coupled. Yet, evidence is emerging that the two are decoupling and that GDP is taking less energy per dollar of GDP. That means less than predicted CO2. As with the temperature predictions, my confidence level in scientists' ability to predict specific impacts is not high, but it is not zero. In short, I'm not greatly worried ... yet.

With all that said, there is a lot in there I could be wrong about. Maybe by a little. Maybe by a lot. There are significant unknowns. And that means we are looking at a risk management question. Rather than feeling the need to cling exclusively to one pole or another ... alarm or denial ... I'm hedging my actions against the idea that the challenges are not threatening. It doesn't hurt that there are some significant advantages to nuclear and renewable energy beyond climate concerns. That makes me willing to hedge even more in that direction. What I find most disappointing is those who think total alarm or total denial is the only strategic options that may be considered. For them, it is most often about making ideology prevail versus dealing prudently with challenges.

I am articulating not a "moderate" position between two extremes or some attempt to find a "third way." I see it as realism ... decision-making in the face of uncertainty and recognizing climate change remediation is more than a one-dimensional challenge. I see what I'm advocating as an alternative way to today's default option, unwavering allegiance to exaggerated claims of certainty by alarmists and deniers.

 

Are Economic Output and Energy Consumption Decoupling?

Washington Post: Can we sever the link between energy and economic growth?

This is a very important story that is easily overlooked. Why?

People genuinely concerned about global economic growth frequently default into a Malthusian thought process. It goes something like this. We have X amount of economic activity today, and that economic activity requires Y amount of energy and resources. If the whole world grows to our level of economic activity, then there must also be proportional growth in the amount of energy and resources consumed. (Economic growth and resource use are perfectly coupled.) It will exhaust the earth's reserves of energy and resources. The global economy will collapse. We must stop growth and embrace natural limits. Now this is true only given one very huge assumption that most people make without thought. The assumption? GDP (economic output) and the energy/resource consumption rate are inextricably linked. Is this true?

Economic records for the United States show that food production and acreage of land devoted to food production were strongly linked before 1910. There were 310 million acres in production in that year. The United States population would triple over the next century. If you took Dr. Who's Tardis back to 1910 and told them this tripling was coming, they could easily tell you how much land would be needed to feed the extra mouths: 300 million multiplied by 3 equals 900 million acres … equivalent to all the land area east of the Mississippi. How many acres were in production in 2010? There were 310 acres, just as in 1910. Food production and acreage usage decoupled. Improvements in farming techniques and technology fed the extra mouths with the same amount of land and created surpluses that could be shipped abroad.

This chart suggests that the same thing is happening with energy usage. The things we use are becoming more energy efficient. For instance, appliances use half the electricity of their counterparts from thirty years ago. Energy used in manufacturing and distribution keeps getting more energy efficient. The graph shows that GDP and energy use were coupled until about the 1980s. Since that time, it appears they are decoupling. It is conceivable that in the next century or so, we could have a growing economy while actually stabilizing or declining energy usage. (I don't totally dismiss the objections by environmental economists like those mentioned in the article, but I am skeptical that the limitations are as severe as they claim.)

I suspect we will see a similar decoupling of GDP from natural resources before very long. Technology like 3-D printing, still in its infancy, promises to reduce waste in manufacturing and construction processes. Nanotechnology, using robots about 15 times bigger than an atom, can break down substances and recombine the pieces into new substances at the molecular level. It is possible to imagine a day when almost everything we use comes from renewable substances or from nonrenewable substances that are endlessly reconfigured. Furthermore, more of the global economy will likely be about services and digital products instead of physical products.

Now, the growth opponents will raise concerns about the impact these changes will have on the nature of work and our communities. There are questions about endless consumerism, attempting to fill our lives with stuff and evermore exhilarating experiences. These are important questions, but they are questions apart from the question of unsustainability, the idea that accelerated growth will, of necessity, lead to the exhaustion of energy and material resources and the destruction of the environment. The latter is true only if you assume no innovation and creativity, the very traits that have been the hallmark of the global economy in recent generations. Moralists may be right that we should reign in our desires and change our relationship to possessions, but we need not do so because of inevitable collapse. Appreciating this is critical to useful reflection on what it means to be the church in the twenty-first century.

The (Mostly) Improving State of the World

Washington Post: 40 charts that explain the world

Our friend and colleague Max Fisher over at Worldviews has posted another 40 maps that explain the world, building on his original classic of the genre. But this is Wonkblog. We're about charts. And one of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are -- but how they're changing.

So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is -- but where it's going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome -- wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that's changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history. ...

As the author notes, we have challenges but hardly descend into a global dystopia. I think these charts give a pretty holistic view. Here are three examples.
It was commonly believed that primitive societies were more peaceful and that modern civilization gave rise to unprecedented violence. This chart compares death rates by war in primitive societies as calculated by anthropologists to those for Europe/USA in the 20th century.
And then there is this:

The graphs point to environmental protection and adaptation as the biggest problems in the days ahead. Those challenges are not insurmountable. Energy sources like natural gas and nuclear power can be used in the interim on the way to practical renewable technologies. Genetically modified crops can help to reduce water consumption, increase yield, and improve hardiness. Innovations in fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing promise to revolutionize the world economy into a less wasteful and more affordable human existence for everyone. There is work to do, but there is also much reason for hope of a better world.

 

Economics Links

1. Carpe Diem: 5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History

1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living longer. ...
2. Global economic growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. ...
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly. ...
4. Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall. ...
5. 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.” ...

How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming

Scientific American: How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming

Nuclear power is one of the few technologies that can quickly combat climate change, experts argue.

...  Indeed, he has evidence: the speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and '80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid "dangerous" climate change in the estimation of Hansen and his co-authors in a recent paper in PLoS One. "On a global scale, it's hard to see how we could conceivably accomplish this without nuclear," added economist and co-author Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where Hansen works.

The only problem: the world is not building so many nuclear reactors. ...

... nuclear reactors are beginning to get the kind of scientific attention not seen since at least the end of the cold war. Novel designs with alternative cooling fluids other than water, such as Transatomic Power's molten salt–cooled reactor or the liquid lead–bismuth design from Hyperion Power, are in development. Alternative concepts have attracted funding from billionaires like Bill Gates. Transatomic Power even won the top prize from energy investors at the 2013 summit of the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA–E, in 2013. "The intellectual power of what's been done in the nuclear space should allow for radical designs that meet tough requirements," Gates told ARPA–E's 2012 summit, noting that the modeling power of today's supercomputers should allow even more innovation. "When you have fission, you have a million times more energy than when you burn hydrocarbons. That's a nice advantage to have."...

... With more money for development of novel designs and public financial support for construction—perhaps as part of a clean energy portfolio standard that lumps in all low-carbon energy sources, not just renewables or a carbon tax—nuclear could be one of the pillars of a three-pronged approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions: using less energy to do more (or energy efficiency), low-carbon power, and electric cars (as long as they are charged with electricity from clean sources, not coal burning). "The options for large-scale clean electricity are few in number," Sachs noted, including geothermal, hydropower, nuclear, solar and wind. "Each part of the world will have different choices about how to get on a trajectory with most of the energy coming from that list rather than coal."...

... But, as Hansen wrote in an additional assessment of his new analysis, "Environmentalists need to recognize that attempts to force all-renewable policies on all of the world will only assure that fossil fuels continue to reign for base-load electric power, making it unlikely that abundant affordable power will exist and implausible that fossil fuels will be phased out."

I'm not as convinced about the dangers as Hansen is, but if you are going to wipe out carbon, I think Hansen is right. It has to be a combination of energy efficiency, nuclear power, and converting to intermediate energy sources like natural gas that, while still a fossil fuel, are less of a problem than coal, and give time for renewable energy to mature.

 

Fields of beaten gold (GMOs)

Economist: Fields of beaten gold

Greens say climate-change deniers are unscientific and dangerous. So are greens who oppose GM crops. ...

... There is plenty of evidence, though, that they benefit the health of the planet. One of the biggest challenges facing mankind is to feed the 9 billion-10 billion people who will be alive and (hopefully) richer in 2050. This will require doubling food production on roughly the same area of land, using less water and fewer chemicals. It will also mean making food crops more resistant to the droughts and floods that seem likely if climate change is a bad as scientists fear.

Organic farming—the kind beloved of greens—cannot meet this challenge. It uses far too much land. If the Green revolution had never happened, and yields had stayed at 1960 levels, the world could not produce its current food output even if it ploughed up every last acre of cultivable land.

In contrast, GM crops boost yields, protecting wild habitat from the plough. They are more resistant to the vagaries of climate change, and to diseases and pests, reducing the need for agrochemicals. Genetic research holds out the possibility of breakthroughs that could vastly increase the productivity of farming, such as grains that fix their own nitrogen. Vandalising GM field trials is a bit like the campaign of some religious leaders to prevent smallpox inoculations: it causes misery, even death, in the name of obscurantism and unscientific belief. ...

Science and Technology Links

1. The Cultural Cognition Project

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities. Project members are using the methods of various disciplines -- including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science -- to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking.

Below are examples of CCP studies and research projects. ...

2. The Myth of Organic Agriculture

STANFORD – Organic products – from food to skin-care nostrums to cigarettes – are very much in vogue, with the global market for organic food alone now reportedly exceeding $60 billion annually. The views of organic devotees seem to be shared by the European Commission, whose official view of organic farming and foods is, “Good for nature, good for you.” But there is no persuasive evidence of either.

A 2012 meta-analysis of data from 240 studies concluded that organic fruits and vegetables were, on average, no more nutritious than their cheaper conventional counterparts; nor were they less likely to be contaminated by pathogenic bacteria like E. coli or salmonella – a finding that surprised even the researchers. “When we began this project,” said Dena Bravata, one of the researchers, “we thought that there would likely be some findings that would support the superiority of organics over conventional food.”

Many people purchase organic foods in order to avoid exposure to harmful levels of pesticides. But that is a poor rationale. While non-organic fruits and vegetables had more pesticide residue, the levels in more than 99% of cases did not cross the conservative safety thresholds set by regulators.

Moreover, the vast majority of the pesticidal substances found on produce occur “naturally” in people’s diets, through organic and conventional foods. ...

3. The Safety of Bioengineered Crops - Timothy Taylor

... I support all sorts of rules and regulations and follow-up studies to make sure that genetically engineered crops continue to be safe for the environment and for consumers. After all, the first-generation genetically engineered field crops were all about pest resistance and herbicide-tolerance, and as new types of genetic engineering are proposed, they should be scrutinized. But for me, the purpose of these regulations is to create a clear pathway so that the technology can be more widely used in a safe way, not to create a set of paperwork hurdles to block the future use of the technology.

Farmers have been breeding plants and animals for desired characteristics for centuries. Genetic engineering holds the possibility of speeding up that process of agricultural innovation, so that agriculture can better meet a variety of human needs. Most obviously, genetically engineered crops are likely to be important as world population expands and world incomes continue to rise (so that meat consumption rises as well). In addition, remember that plants serve functions other than calorie consumption. Plant that were more effective at fixing carbon in place might be a useful tool in limiting the rise of carbon in the atmosphere. Genetically modified plants are one of the possible paths to making plant-based ethanol economically viable. Plants that can thrive with less water or fewer chemicals can be hugely helpful to the environment, and to the health of farmworkers around the world. The opportunity cost of slowing the progress of agricultural biotechnology is potentially very high.

 4. How nanotechnology could revolutionise food storage

... According to a 2013 report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 30-50% of food is lost to spoilage before it is eaten. In developed nations, most of the waste comes from two sources: consumers who buy too much and let it rot in their fridges, and farmers, who leave less-than-beautiful food to rot in their fields.

In the developing world, consumers are less picky about the appearance of their food, and are less likely to let it rot in their homes. But inadequate storage means that up to half of the food that gets harvested spoils before it gets to the market. Ghana, for example, loses up to half of its maize crop to spoilage. Consumers in the developed world have been understandably wary of nanotechnology products in their food, but nanoparticles can be used in food packaging in a number of ways to prevent food from spoiling. That could change the amount of useable food for billions of people. ...

5.  Israeli Startup Is Finding a Way to Speed Crop Growth by Thousands of Years

Doron Gal has an ambitious goal: to help feed the world and to make money in the process.

Located in Moshav Sharona in Israel's Galilee, his startup Kaiima Bio-Agritech's goal is to use genome multiplication to increase yield potential, improve water-use efficiency and fortify plants against harsh environments. ...

6. Metastisizing Misinformation About GMOs And RNA: Ugly Glare On Union Of Concerned Scientists, Consumers Union

Can science self-correct, in effect protect against sloppy or politicized research? Scientists can try—but the success of those efforts depends in large measure upon the integrity of journalists and advocates to address their own reporting mistakes.

A great illustration of the challenge of controlling ‘metastasizing misinformation’ has emerged with the publication of a fascinating and important article in Nature Biotechnologythat sharply challenges a study that had made controversial claims that dramatically raised the fear factor about GMOs.

The backstory provides an intriguing look at how the anti-GMO industry and sycophant journalists work—and the consequences of flogging single studies to score ideological points. ...

7. The Future of Water Sustainability

... In 2014 the world will see even more companies increase water-related investments. This is not only for immediate business purposes, but because water sustains life and is intimately connected to all aspects of economic development. Business leaders understand this and will increase their focus on their own use of water as well as on water and sanitation access in the communities where they operate. In the year ahead cross-sector collaboration will also grow as the economic value of water climbs steeply.

Traditional charity models are becoming outmoded. What began as investments in digging wells have evolved into far more dynamic, market-oriented approaches like targeted grants intended to optimise social returns per philanthropic dollar. ...

The PepsiCo Foundation has pledged $35m to water programs in developing countries (including $12.1m to Water.org). Most of this has gone to Water.org's WaterCredit model, a microfinance initiative which links access to finance with access to water and sanitation. The Caterpillar Foundation is investing $11.3m in this market-based approach over the next five years. The IKEA Foundation has stepped in with a $5m grant and companies such as Levi Strauss & Co, and organizations like the Swiss Re Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation and Bank of America Foundation have also joined the effort. Their thinking and action have evolved because they recognize that straight charity is extremely limited as a means to long-term impact. ...

8. Main Street, Not Wall Street, is Growing Solar Energy

In a report from the Center for American Progress, data was analyzed from the three states with the most solar systems: Arizona, California, and New Jersey.  It was found that installations are overwhelmingly occurring in middle-class neighborhoods that have median incomes ranging from $40,000 to $90,000. According to the report, “the areas that experienced the most growth from 2011 to 2012 had median incomes ranging from $40,000 to $50,000 in both Arizona and California and $30,000 to $40,000 in New Jersey.”

9. Nuke Huggers? Why Some Climate Scientists Are Warming To Nuclear Power

Some of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists are becoming nuclear reactor huggers? They say that we should embrace nuclear power—if we serious about slowing global warming, that is. ...

... The flip side of Fukushima [and consequent retreat from nuclear], though, is Japan’s recent announcement that it is backing off its previous commitments to reduce carbon emissions—a decision that has made many environmentalists unhappy. ...

... The scientists hail from the Carnegie Institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Columbia University Earth Institute, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They acknowledge that nuclear power is not perfect, in that “no energy source is without downsides,” but that “quantitative analyses show that the risks associated with the expanded use of nuclear energy are order of magnitude smaller than the risks associated with fossil fuels.” Click here to see my Energy Trends Watch blog post about the climate scientists’ letter.

What gives? These climate scientists have studied the numbers—as did I, when I ran Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection and thereafter. The more scientists, environmentalists, business people and policymakers look at the numbers, the more senseless nuclear plant shutdowns seem, and the more losses we will incur in the efforts to curb climate change. ...

Related: Unavoidable Answer for the Problem of Climate Change

10. The World in 50 Years - An Energy Perspective

... Energy supply and use is determined by three primary factors: demographics, economics and technology. A few basic features of the future of these three factors are fairly likely, and we can therefore pragmatically use these to set a bedrock for the trajectory our energy system is likely to take. ...

...  History demonstrates that people generally choose economic growth and improvements in living standards over other factors. Therefore energy sources must win on a balance of economic as well as environmental considerations. Shell's "Mountains" primary energy scenario for 2060 suggest the fossil fuels will account for about 62% of demand, down from current level of 80%. The estimated energy mix pie in 50 years under these forecasts is therefore likely to consist of coal (25%), natural gas (24%), oil (13%), nuclear (11%) and renewables and others constituting the remainder. Evidently, the lack of economic alternatives unfortunately leaves cheap fuels such as coal still contributing to a significant part of the energy mix.

If we are to succeed in seeing a less polluted, yet still prosperous, future, governments and societies alike must focus policy on promoting the fuels which strike the right balance between cost, scalability, efficiency, and environmental impact. Today, and for the next 50 years, the fuel that evidently satisfies these parameters is natural gas. ...

11. The trend in violent tornadoes? (Source)

12. The Average Driver Travels 1,200 Fewer Miles Each Year

13. Smithsonian makes push in 3D imaging of artifacts

WASHINGTON (AP) -- With most of its 137 million objects kept behind the scenes or in a faraway museum, the Smithsonian Institution is launching a new 3D scanning and printing initiative to make more of its massive collection accessible to schools, researchers and the public worldwide.

A small team has begun creating 3D models of some key objects representing the breadth of the collection at the world's largest museum complex. Some of the first 3D scans include the Wright brothers' first airplane, Amelia Earhart's flight suit, casts of President Abraham Lincoln's face during the Civil War and a Revolutionary War gunboat. Less familiar objects include a former slave's horn, a missionary's gun from the 1800s and a woolly mammoth fossil from the Ice Age. They are pieces of history some people may hear about but rarely see or touch.

Now the Smithsonian is launching a new 3D viewer online Wednesday with technology from 3D design firm AutoDesk to give people a closer look at artifacts in their own homes. The data can also be downloaded, recreated with a 3D printer and used to help illustrate lessons in history, art and science in schools. While some schools might acquire 3D printers for about $1,000, other users may examine the models on their computers. ...

14. Robots Allow Doctors To Remotely Advise, Diagnose Patients

Remote presence robots are allowing physicians to "beam" themselves into hospitals to diagnose patients and offer medical advice during emergencies. ...

 15. 'I'm Not A Math Person' Is No Longer A Valid Excuse

 Contrary to popular opinion, a natural ability in math will only get you so far in studies of the subject.

Research published in Child Development found that hard work and good study habits were the most important factor in improving math ability over time.

But bad attitudes about math are holding us back. ...

Science and Technology Links

1. 10 common scientific misconceptions

Did you grow up believing in any of these science myths? From baby birds to flushing toilets, we debunk common 'facts' that are often just a form of misconstrued science.

2. Inventions that were going to change the world – but didn’t

Every new invention is supposed to be the "next big thing" – and some are. The cellphone, the PC, the plane: all inventions that revolutionized the way we live our lives and far surpassed their initial hype. But some inventions don't quite measure up to the fanfare that precedes their release. These end up in the scrap bin of history. Check out what inventions we all thought would revolutionize our world... but only ended up on this website list. ...

3. The Top 7 Technology Trends That Will Dominate 2014

4. What is 4-D Printing?

An M.I.T. lab is tweaking the idea of 3-D printing with the help of smart materials that continue to change even after they leave the printer.

 5. Nano Energy Storage Could Make Conventional Batteries Obsolete

 ...Components are molded from a material consisting of carbon fiber in a polymer resin, nano-structured batteries and super capacitors. The result, says Volvo, is an eco-friendly and cost-effective structure that stands to substantially cut vehicle weight and volume.

Volvo is already at work with an S80 that uses components made form the material that serve structural functions and replace a conventional battery at the same time. The company says that by completely substituting an electric car’s existing components with the new material, overall vehicle weight could be reduced by more than 15 percent.

“The way it works is reinforced carbon fibers sandwich the new battery and are molded and formed to fit around the car’s frame such as door panels, the trunk lid and wheel bowl,” said the company in a statement. ...

6. This Radioactive Element Could Power the Planet

7. Green energy rethink: 'Paying huge amounts of money to do nothing'

Bjorn Lomborg: Very clearly we do want to fix global warming, but you aren’t fixing it if you end up paying an enormous amount of money to do very, very little good.  Now let’s remember that most of the subsidies that Europe gets go to wind and solar panels, but we already control that because we have an ETS (European Trading System) already in place. So whenever you buy an extra solar panel or whenever you subsidize an extra wind turbine you don’t actually cut carbon emissions, you simply make it cheaper for someone else to use more coal fire power. So the reality is that we just pay huge amounts of money to do virtually nothing.

8. New Scientist: First sign that humanity is slowing its carbon surge

2012 may go down in history as a remarkable year. For the first time, the maddening pace of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions showed signs of a global slowdown.

Importantly – and unlike the drop in emissions triggered by the 2008 recession – the let-off is happening at the same time as global wealth continues to swell. ...

9. The Grid: Wal-Mart Now Draws More Solar Power Than 38 U.S. States

Solar power and keg stands have one thing in common: Wal-Mart wants to profit from them.

In the race for commercial solar power, Wal-Mart is killing it. The company now has almost twice as much capacity as second-place Costco. A better comparison: Wal-Mart is converting more sun into energy than 38 U.S. states. ...

And a related story: Walmart, Safeway, Others Unplugging From Unreliable Power Grid

More large corporations have decided that the electric power grid is unreliable and are planning to unplug from it and generate their own electricity.

The Wall Street Journal has confirmed a story that Off the Grid News previously reported – and the newspaper found the practice is even more widespread than previously thought.

Off The Grid News had reported that several large corporations, including Walmart, Safeway, Google, Bank of America and Coca-Cola, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on systems to generate their own electricity. A Journal article indicates that many other large companies, too, are taking steps to generate their own electricity. ...

10. Nuclear Power Needed To Slow Climate Change, Experts Say

... Some of the world's top climate scientists say wind and solar energy won't be enough to head off extreme global warming, and they're asking environmentalists to support the development of safer nuclear power as one way to cut fossil fuel pollution. ...

11. UN highlights role of farming in closing emissions gap

Changing the way farmers plough their lands could have a big impact on global emissions of greenhouse gases. ...

12. Can LED Bulbs Make Nuclear Plants Obsolete?

... By a sheer coincidence, LED lights and nuclear power provide an intriguing way to study the issue. Nuclear power plants generate approximately 19% of the electric power in the U.S. Lighting accounts for approximately 19% of the power used.  Thus, you can argue the fleet of 104 commercial nuclear reactors exists to keep the lights on. If you want to increase functional capacity by 20 percent, you can build 21 nuclear reactors or reduce light power by 20 percent. ...

... So what’s the logical thing to do? Spoiler alert—bulbs win hands down. The Department of Energy estimates that solid-state lighting is already on track to cut lighting power by 46%. ...

13. WAPO: Israel knows water technology, and it wants to cash in

... Israel recycles more than 80 percent of its effluents, compared with about 1 percent in the United States, the governor said. ...

... Israel is a world leader in desalination of seawater. By next year, more than a third of Israel’s tap water will come from the Mediterranean Sea and a few briny wells. Israel’s total water consumption remains nearly at 1964 levels — even though its population has quadrupled to 8 million people, according to the economic ministry. ...

... Distel said that water used to be a kind of “dumb industry” dominated by low-tech and cheap water, distributed by centuries-old pipes and canals, employing irrigation technologies that dated to the ancient Egyptians. Municipal water systems such as those in Los Angles, London and New Delhi traditionally lost 20 percent or more of their water to leaks and evaporation.

But in a world dominated by scarcity, climate change and population growth, water is no longer being taken for granted. ...

14. Scientific American: Forget What You've Heard: Humans Are Not Using More Than 1 Planet

On a global level, the popular "footprint" metric used to measure people’s ecological impact may not be very a useful after all. ...

15. This 'Genome Hacker' Is Building Family Trees With Millions of Branches

Thanks to computer-aided genealogical analysis, your family may have 43,000,000 members. ...

16. A Cure for the Allergy Epidemic?

... My guide was Mark Holbreich, an allergist in Indianapolis. He’d recently discovered that the Amish people who lived in the northern part of the state were remarkably free of allergies and asthma. ...

... That yawning difference positions the Indiana Amish among the least allergic populations ever described in the developed world. This invulnerability isn’t likely to be genetic. ...

... Farming, Dr. Holbreich thinks, is the Amish secret. This idea has some history. Since the late 1990s, European scientists have investigated what they call the “farm effect.” The working hypothesis is that innocuous cowshed microbes, plant material and raw milk protect farming children by favorably stimulating their immune systems throughout life, particularly early on. ...

17. Economist: Trouble at the lab

Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not.

18. Zeer Pots: A Simple Way to Reduce Post-Harvest Food Waste

... In Zambia, storage containers are commonly built out of twigs, poles, or plastic bags. Unsealed, unrefrigerated containers such as these can allow contamination from pests, rodents, and fungi. In hot climates, perishable foods such as berries and tomatoes typically do not last longer than two days without refrigeration. Without proper storage facilities, rural farmers have to watch their ripened crops succumb to rot, infestation, and mold.

Practical Action, a nongovernmental organization that works with farmers in Southern Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, encourages the use of earthenware refrigerators called zeer pots to help prevent post-harvest food waste. The pot-in-pot refrigerator design keeps fruits and vegetables cool by harnessing the principle of evaporative cooling. These pots can extend the shelf life of harvested crops by up to 20 days by reducing storage temperature. ...

19. How Did English Get To Be The International Language Of Science?

More than 98 percent of all scientific articles published today are in English, but that hasn’t always been the case. ...

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/17/4560193/science-fiction-is-becoming-science.html#storylink=cpy

Economics Links

1. Your personality type determines your paycheck

2. New York Times editorial: Yes, Economics Is a Science

... But the headline-grabbing differences between the findings of these Nobel laureates are less significant than the profound agreement in their scientific approach to economic questions, which is characterized by formulating and testing precise hypotheses. I’m troubled by the sense among skeptics that disagreements about the answers to certain questions suggest that economics is a confused discipline, a fake science whose findings cannot be a useful basis for making policy decisions.

That view is unfair and uninformed. It makes demands on economics that are not made of other empirical disciplines, like medicine, and it ignores an emerging body of work, building on the scientific approach of last week’s winners, that is transforming economics into a field firmly grounded in fact.

It is true that the answers to many “big picture” macroeconomic questions — like the causes of recessions or the determinants of growth — remain elusive. But in this respect, the challenges faced by economists are no different from those encountered in medicine and public health. Health researchers have worked for more than a century to understand the “big picture” questions of how diet and lifestyle affect health and aging, yet they still do not have a full scientific understanding of these connections. Some studies tell us to consume more coffee, wine and chocolate; others recommend the opposite. But few people would argue that medicine should not be approached as a science or that doctors should not make decisions based on the best available evidence.

As is the case with epidemiologists, the fundamental challenge faced by economists — and a root cause of many disagreements in the field — is our limited ability to run experiments. ...

For a related post: People Are Wondering If Economics Is Really A 'Science'

3. The Guardian: Economics students need to be taught more than neoclassical theory

... Despite this dominance, the few who did predict the financial crisis were economists from non-mainstream backgrounds. This clearly shows that alternatives have much to contribute to the discipline of economics. Neoclassical economics is the mainstream and it is vital for economics students to understand it, and there are reasons it has proved so alluring to so many great minds. While in recent decades it has often been used to advocate free markets, it can be used to argue for a socialist economy, and indeed was in the 1930s. So it doesn't necessarily restrict us to a single political viewpoint. However, it does not comprise the whole of economics – and nor should it. This is not about ideology, it is about improving economics education. ...

4. Does Studying Economics Breed Greed?

... Consider these data points: 

Less charitable giving: In the US, economics professors gave less money to charity than professors in other fields—including history, philosophy, education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, physics, chemistry, and biology. More than twice as many economics professors gave zero dollars to charity than professors from the other fields.

More deception for personal gain: Economics students in Germany were more likely than students from other majors to recommend an overpriced plumber when they were paid to do it.

Greater acceptance of greed: Economics majors and students who had taken at least three economics courses were more likely than their peers to rate greed as “generally good,” “correct,” and “moral.”

Less concern for fairness: Students were given $10 and had to make a proposal about how to divide the money with a peer. If the peer accepted, they had a deal, but if the peer declined, both sides got nothing. On average, economics students proposed to keep 13% more money for themselves than students from other majors. ...

The author offers some remedies.

6. Six signs you’re reading good criticism of economics

1. The criticism is by an economist ...

2. They know the difference between academic economists, economic consultants, business, bureaucrats and politicians ...

3. They distinguish “good for business” and “good economics” ...

4. They criticise a particular, clearly defined area or use of economics ...

5. They criticise a specific economist ...

6. They recognise that economics and values cannot be untangled, no matter who is doing the analysis ...

5. We Don’t Need a ‘Third Way’, We Need More Non-Profits

The problem with advocating for third way economic system between capitalism and socialism is, as Matt Perman notes, there is no realistic third way. Fortunately, a third way isn’t needed since capitalism can do everything that so-called “third alternative” (e.g., distributism) want their system to do. For instance, one aspect of how capitalism can create a more “people-centered economy” is to increase the amount of capital that is dedicated to non-profits. ...

6. Deficits have fallen to 4% of GDP: Source

7. So why, exactly, is labor’s share of income on the decline?

... But e21′s Scot Winship trots out a differently theory (as seen below in a reverse-order Twitter exchange). He theorizes that the labor share of income used to be artificially high, reflecting overpayment to workers during the strong union era so wives could stay at home and raise the kids. Then as women entered the workforce, there was a “Great Correction” where male compensation stagnated, female compensation rose, and the labor share fell. Looking forward to Winship’s extended essay and research on the topic.

8. 1 In 8 Suffers From Chronic Hunger Globally, U.N. Report Says

Worldwide, roughly 1 in 8 people suffered from chronic hunger from 2011 to 2013, according to a new report from three U.N. food agencies.

They concluded that 842 million people didn't get enough food to lead healthy lives in that period, a slight drop from the 868 million in the previous report. ...

 9. BBC: Economy woes pile up for Latin America's leftists

Since the start of the global economic crisis, left-leaning Latin American politicians and pundits have been foretelling the end of economic "neo-liberalism" in their part of the world.

But now, five years after the collapse of US bank Lehman Brothers, we may instead be witnessing the twilight of economic "neo-leftism" in Latin America. ...

10. Why China’s middle class supports the Communist Party

... The common belief of the last 20 years outside China is that economic growth, a growing middle class, and the rise of entrepreneurs inevitably lead to democracy. Everyone knows democratic countries do not go to war with each other, and that a democratic China means thereby less of a "China threat."

The China threat may indeed disappear, but this is unlikely to be because of a rising middle class. The problems with these various equations are that different meanings of the middle class have been elided, even though they may have nothing in common. However it is conceptualized, the middle class in China is actually small despite the current rhetoric. And last but by no means least, China’s socio-political experience is not that of Europe or North America. The middle class in China remains an essential part of the state from which it has emerged and is not very likely to be the Chinese equivalent of the European or North American bourgeoisie with whom it is often equated. ...

11. How to Cut the Poverty Rate in Half (It's Easy)

... Using the dataset from the latest Census poverty report, I determined that if we cut a $2,920 check to every single American—adults, children, and retirees—we could cut official poverty in half. Economists consider this sort of across-the-board payment a “universal basic income.” You can think of it as Social Security for all, not just the elderly. 

The upside of giving everybody about $3,000 is that it’s a very easy policy to run and a surefire way to cut poverty in half. But it's a large program: it would require about $907 billion in 2012, or 5.6 percent of the nation’s GDP. (In a real implementation, we might exclude the more than 45 million Americans receiving OASI Social Security benefits from a basic income, bringing the cost down substantially.) ...

A challenge with this model is that as someone's income rises to the top of the poverty line, they will lose the $3,000 payment as they move past that line. They need a jump of $3,000 over the line to break-even. Some method is needed for the transition out of poverty if people are not to be trapped there.

12. NPR: Debate: For A Better Future, Live In A Red State?

13. Adam Smith on Self-Interests, Not Greed

... Smith’s views were clear: we are in “almost constant occasion for the help of[(our]brethren, and it is in vain for [us] to expect it from their benevolence only. [We] will be more likely to prevail if [we] can interest their self–love in [our] favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for [us] what [we] require of them”. 

Of course the same is true for solely self-interested greedy “butchers, brewers, and bakers”!  They will prevail only if they “lower their” price demands to what their customers “can go along with”.  For both self-interested buyers and for self-interested sellers they must mediate their self-interests to arrive at successful transactions.

The process by which they mediate their self-interests is by persuasion, as outlined by Adam Smith in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” and how that is best achieved in negotiations or bargaining exchanges is explained in the sentence immediately before the “butcher, beer, baker” example: “Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.” (Wealth Of Nations, above).

I hope this is made clear by tutors at Harvard University and that you also make it clear in your classes too.

Greed is not good!  That is the opposite of what Adam Smith taught.

 14. PBS: The Three Reasons Countries Get Rich: Location, Location and Location (I'm not endorsing this view. It is much too deterministic. But it makes for interesting discussion.)

 15. Emerging Economies Nearing Half of Global Warming Emissions

... Developing nations' emissions are rising fast and the report predicted that their share of cumulative emissions would reach 51 percent by 2020. ...

Explaining the steep decline in the frequency of fires

Matt Ridley: Explaining the steep decline in the frequency of fires

... In my case, as somebody always on the look-out for under-reported good news stories, it also served to alert me to just how dramatic the fall in “demand” for firefighters has been. Intrigued by the strike, I looked up the numbers and found to my amazement that in 2011, compared with just a decade before, firefighters attended 48 per cent fewer fires overall; 39 per cent fewer building fires; 44 per cent fewer minor outdoor fires; 24 per cent fewer road-traffic collisions; 8 per cent fewer floods — and 40 per cent fewer incidents overall. The decline has if anything accelerated since 2011.

That is to say, during a period when the population and the number of buildings grew, we needed to call the fire brigade much, much less. Most important of all, the number of people dying in fires in the home has fallen by 60 per cent compared with the 1980s. The credit for these benign changes goes at least partly to technology — fire-retardant materials, self-extinguishing cigarettes, smoke alarms, sprinklers, alarms on cookers — much of which was driven by sensible regulation. Fewer open fires and fewer people smoking, especially indoors, must have helped too. There is little doubt that rules about such things have saved lives, as even most libertarians must concede.

But this is not the whole story. I was stunned to find that the number of deliberate fires has been falling much faster than the number of accidental fires. The steepest fall has been in car fires, down from 77,000 in 2001-2 to 17,000 in 2010-11. This echoes the 60 per cent collapse in car thefts in G7 countries since 1995. Deliberate fires in buildings have more than halved in number; I assume this is also something to do with crime detection — CCTV, DNA testing and so forth, which make it much less easy to get away with arson. Only deliberate outdoor fires show little trend: perhaps because not until he is deep in the woods does an arsonist feel safe from detection.

Behind the firefighters’ strike, therefore, lies a most unusual policy dilemma: how to manage declining demand for a free public service. NHS planners would give their eye teeth for such a problem, since healthcare demand seems to expand infinitely, whatever the policy. ...

... Fire was an abiding terror to our ancestors, consuming not just many of their lives, but much of their property. Almost all of us have family stories of devastating fires. Although we will always need this essential service , thankfully, that experience is becoming steadily rarer. Sir Ken Knight found it likely that this decline would continue, remarking: “I wonder if anyone a decade ago would have predicted the need for fire and rescue services to attend 40 per cent fewer emergency incidents.” The fire service will undoubtedly have to shrink. ...

Fewer people won’t save the planet, behaving better will

Conversation: Fewer people won’t save the planet, behaving better will

"... Does the earth have too many people for its own good? Can another three or four billion be added (the current United Nations projection for 2100) without fatally harming the planet?

The issue is not one of how many people the planet can support, but how wastefully and aggressively those people act.

Ten thousand years ago, with less than five million people on the Earth, large animals were already being hunted to extinction by aggressive humans. It was the domestication of plants and animals that filled the world with both humans and large herbivores. Today, with seven billion people, these herds of pigs and cattle satisfy our ever-growing demand for meat.

Untouched wilderness seems scarcer (although national parks in the US remain much as they were a century ago, once you leave the concession stands and roadside attractions). But true wilderness, untouched by humans, on Amazon rainforest and American plains ceased to exist thousands of years ago when human populations were a tiny fraction of what they are today. Native Americans burned, dug, and reshaped the forests and plains to suit their needslong before Columbus brought guns and horses to the New World.

Won’t too many people drain food supplies, produce poverty and damage the climate? Again, it is not the number of people but how they act that matters. Food supplies are fine – it is food distribution that is the problem. ...

... Fears of climate change now reverberate widely. But again, the problem is not too many people. ...

... People who fear overpopulation commit the fallacy of simply multiplying faults – they take the most harmful and wasteful actions of any set of people today and multiply it by the growing number of people in the world. ...

... Doing away with billions of people is no substitute for doing away with the vices in people’s behaviour. Instead we need to pursue cleaner, healthier, and more ecologically sound lifestyles and ways of satisfying our needs. For that we need more, not less, creative and passionate people to guide us to a better future. The planet can handle it, if we improve how we handle ourselves. ...

What an excellent essay!

Economics Links

1. Timothy Taylor (The Conservable Economist) has several interesting graphs on The Global Wealth Distribution

2. Britain Just Privatized Its Mail Service at a $1 Billion Discount

The largest initial public offering in Europe in more than two years could have been even larger. The privatization of the Royal Mail, in which around two-thirds of the company’s shares began trading Friday morning, raised £1.7 billion ($2.7 billion) for the government.

Frenzied trading pushed the Royal Mail’s shares up by nearly 40% within minutes of the opening bell. This followed enormous demand for the initial allocation of shares, with the retail portion of the offering oversubscribed by seven times and institutional investors bidding for 20 times as many shares as they were allowed. ...

3. The CPI for clothing has fallen by 3.3% over the last 20 years, while overall prices increased by 63.5%

4. Staying Put: Why Income Inequality Is Up And Geographic Mobility Is Down

MARTIN: In the early 1950s, you say in your piece, about 3.5 percent of all American households moved from one state to another in any given year. You said that this held up through the '70s and then started to fall around 1980. You're saying that the latest available data shows that interstate migration is stuck at about 1.7 percent. This is about the lowest level in...

NOAH: Yeah.

MARTIN: ...about, what, three decades?

NOAH: Yeah. Less than half. ...

... MARTIN: So what does? NOAH: Well, I think it's two things, and one is the familiar story of income inequality. And the other is - has to do with housing prices. Incomes have been stagnant for, really, going back to the late 1970s. They've been stagnant relative to the income growth that we saw before 1979, and they have been literally stagnant for about a dozen years. Median income is now a little below what it was in the late 1990s. And you combine that with rising housing prices, then it becomes difficult for people to move to jobs because they can't afford to live where the new jobs are. ...

... NOAH: Yes, that sounds to me like a very common experience. And yes, obviously people are moving, you know, but in the aggregate, people are moving a lot less than they used to. And, you know, when you look back through American history, I mean, you sort of think - American history really is the story of a succession of movements. There was the westward movement. There was the movement, in the early part of the 20th century, from farms to the cities. There was the great black migration of the early and middle 20th centuries. There was the move to the Sunbelt in the 1970s. That was really the last time people were, in large numbers, moving to jobs. People are still moving to the Sunbelt today, but now it's not moving to jobs. They're moving there for the warm weather or for the cheaper housing. ...

I'm not endorsing his solutions, but the analysis is interesting.

5. Why Did Jews Become Moneylenders? Because They Could

6. One reason C.E.O. pay keeps rising: Open Season

... the drive for transparency has actually helped fuel the spiralling salaries. For one thing, it gives executives a good idea of how much they can get away with asking for. A more crucial reason, though, has to do with the way boards of directors set salaries. ...

... This isn’t just an American problem. Elson notes that, when Canada toughened its disclosure requirements, executive salaries there rose sharply, and German studies have found something similar. ...

... Transparent pricing has perverse effects in other fields. In a host of recent cases, public disclosure of the prices that hospitals charge for various procedures has ended up driving prices up rather than down. And the psychological causes in both situations seem similar. We tend to be uneasy about bargaining in situations where the stakes are very high: do you want the guy doing your neurosurgery, or running your company, to be offering discounts? Better, in the event that something goes wrong, to be able to tell yourself that you spent all you could. And overspending is always easier when you’re spending someone else’s money. Corporate board members are disbursing shareholder funds; most patients have insurance to foot the bill. ...

7. Americans Significantly Overestimate The Percent Of People On Food Stamps

... Around 14.3% of the nation is on SNAP — roughly 1 in 7 Americans — but still people thought participation was much higher, with the average being 22.5%. ...

8. Europe Can’t Find Balance Between Green Goals and Growth

... Europe hoped to act as a global leader by setting its ambitious 2020 climate goals, but its position as a first mover in green policy has only managed to put European industry at a competitive disadvantage relative to the rest of the world. Green energy is more expensive than brown energy and must be propped up by government subsidies to gain significant market share. The costs of these subsidies get passed on to consumers, meaning households and businesses must pay out the nose for electricity. If you’re a decent-sized widget manufacturer in Germany, options in the developing world and shale-rich America start to look more appealing. ...

9. Yes, Economics Is a Science by Raj Chetty

... But the headline-grabbing differences between the findings of these Nobel laureates are less significant than the profound agreement in their scientific approach to economic questions, which is characterized by formulating and testing precise hypotheses. I’m troubled by the sense among skeptics that disagreements about the answers to certain questions suggest that economics is a confused discipline, a fake science whose findings cannot be a useful basis for making policy decisions.

That view is unfair and uninformed. It makes demands on economics that are not made of other empirical disciplines, like medicine, and it ignores an emerging body of work, building on the scientific approach of last week’s winners, that is transforming economics into a field firmly grounded in fact.

It is true that the answers to many “big picture” macroeconomic questions — like the causes of recessions or the determinants of growth — remain elusive. But in this respect, the challenges faced by economists are no different from those encountered in medicine and public health. Health researchers have worked for more than a century to understand the “big picture” questions of how diet and lifestyle affect health and aging, yet they still do not have a full scientific understanding of these connections. Some studies tell us to consume more coffee, wine and chocolate; others recommend the opposite. But few people would argue that medicine should not be approached as a science or that doctors should not make decisions based on the best available evidence. ...

Science and Technology Links

1. Scientists Should Engage in Policy, Carefully

... There is a helpful way of looking at how scientists give advice to policymakers. In Roger Pielke’s book, The Honest Broker, he suggests that there are four ways scientists can choose to engage in the policy process. First, they can act as a “pure scientist” who publishes papers, and even if their work has relevance to a policy issue, they leave it for others to find and use the results. Second, they can act as “science arbiters”, who answer specific factual questions posed by decision-makers. Third, they can become an “issue advocate”, who decide for themselves on the “right” policy decision and become advocates for the “solution”, sometimes closing down the scope of choices available to policymakers. Finally, they can act as “honest brokers”, who aim to expand and clarify the scope of options and choices available to decision-makers, stepping back, leaving it to the policymaker to use this evidence to decide what to do.

On the matter of these four ways, scientists might reflect on where they sit on particular issues when speaking with policy-makers, journalists and even friends. Do they make up their minds about what should happen and advocate their version? Are they even aware when they, as Martin Rees puts it, are “acting as citizens”, or do they slip into territories that involve aspects beyond science and speak about them with the kind of authority they use when speaking about science?

Scientists get excellent training in how to be scientific – in logic, rational thinking and how to aim for objectivity. They don’t however get much training in reflecting on their behaviour or language, or really thinking through the boundaries of where scientific evidence comes up against other, murkier areas such as ethics and economics. Scientists rarely get training in how to give advice to policymakers. They may just be thrown into doing it, having observed how other scientists behave. ...

2. Colorized American Civil War Photos Beautifully Bring Past To Life

Two professional colorists have combined their skills with photographs and fascination with the American Civil War to create a remarkable series of color photographs from the era. ...

Brought to life: Lewis Powell (pictured) conspired with John Wilkes Booth to kill President Lincoln - Powell's job was to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward, a job at which he failed.

3. On Climate Change, Economics Trumps Science

... Look, for instance, at the cases of China and India.

These two countries have resolutely rejected all demands that they adopt binding limits on their emissions. Yet Beijing is fully aware of the threat posed by climate change; in fact, it has plans for massive public-works projects to adapt to it. New Delhi, even if it has less capacity for large-scale public works, is also fully aware of the threat posed by climate change.

These countries' assessments of climate science do not conflict with those of the IPCC. But Beijing and New Delhi apparently prefer to adapt to climate change instead of investing in high-cost efforts to prevent it. Moreover, in making this choice, the politicians may have a better grasp of the big picture than the scientists do. ...

4. Death in the digital age: Are you prepared?

When 15-year-old Eric Rash committed suicide in 2011, his family and friends wanted to know why.

In a bid to find answers, they went to Eric's Facebook account, and after failing to guess his password, appealed to the social media giant to grant them access.

Facebook refused.

Giving unauthorised access to someone other than the account holder, the company said, was against its privacy policy.

The Rashes, who live in Virginia, tried to fight their case in court, but soon found there just wasn't any legislation that covered the management of "digital assets".

The family's tragic battle is just one of many examples in which the internet has been shown to be woefully unprepared for dealing with death. ...

5. New Disney technology can add texture to completely smooth touch screens

6. New App Lets You Settle Check Before Sitting Down

If you’ve ever had a great dinner ruined by the awkwardness of splitting (or not splitting) a check, you might want to check out Cover, a new app launching today in New York City.

Here’s how Cover works: you enter your credit card information into the app, walk into a participating restaurant, check in, set the tip percentage, the number of diners and then let your server know you’re using it.

When you’re done eating, you just walk out and Cover processes the bill. Simple as that. ...

Science and Technology Links

1. Why We Should Look Forward To Living To 120 And Beyond

... Consider these facts:

• More than $1 trillion has been spent on biomedical research over the past 20 years. These investments should soon start yielding longevity dividends.
• The number of scientists working on extending the life span worldwide has increased exponentially as computer and communications technologies have entered the mainstream and China and India have joined the race.
• The life spans of some laboratory animals have already been extended more than tenfold.
• Innovations have already started: vital organs have been grown from patients’ own cells and several stem-cell therapies are being proven.
• Cancer survival rates have increased steadily over the past few years. A diagnosis is no longer a certain death sentence.
• Advances in laboratory diagnostics and biometrics are already providing valuable insight into disease prevention.
• Fast-food outlets have started offering healthier dishes and displaying caloric content and smoking rates in developed countries have declined.

Many people would not interpret these seven facts as a single trend leading to dramatic increases in life expectancy because the long-term effects are so unpredictable. But just two decades ago, nobody could imagine the possibility of the technology we use daily now. ...

2. Turning plastic bags into high-tech materials

University of Adelaide researchers have developed a process for turning waste plastic bags into a high-tech nanomaterial.

The innovative nanotechnology uses non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags to make 'carbon nanotube membranes' – highly sophisticated and expensive materials with a variety of potential advanced applications including filtration, sensing, energy storage and a range of biomedical innovations.

"Non-biodegradable plastic bags are a serious menace to natural ecosystems and present a problem in terms of disposal," says Professor Dusan Losic, ARC Future Fellow and Research Professor of Nanotechnology in the University's School of Chemical Engineering.

"Transforming these waste materials through 'nanotechnological recycling' provides a potential solution for minimising environmental pollution at the same time as producing high-added value products." ...

3. Nanotechnology researchers find new energy storage capabilities between layers of 2-D materials

(Nanowerk News) Drexel University nanotechnology researchers are continuing to expand the capabilities and functionalities of a family of two-dimensional materials they discovered that are as thin as a single atom, but have the potential to store massive amounts of energy. Their latest achievement has pushed the materials storage capacities to new levels while also allowing for their use in flexible devices. ...

4. Atomic Goal: 800 Years of Power From Waste

BELLEVUE, Wash. — In a drab one-story building here, set between an indoor tennis club and a home appliance showroom, dozens of engineers, physicists and nuclear experts are chasing a radical dream of Bill Gates.

The quest is for a new kind of nuclear reactor that would be fueled by today’s nuclear waste, supply all the electricity in the United States for the next 800 years and, possibly, cut the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation around the world. ...

5. Could power plants of the future produce zero emissions?

... But now Net Power, based in the US state of North Carolina, believes it can redesign the power plant so it can still run on coal or natural gas, but without releasing harmful fumes.

Rodney Allam, chief technologist at 8 Rivers Capital, which owns Net Power, says: "The perception has been that to avoid emissions of [carbon dioxide] CO2, we have to get rid of fossil fuels.

"But unfortunately, fossil fuels represent over 70% of the fuel that's consumed in the world and the idea that you can get rid of that in any meaningful sense is a pipe dream."

The Net Power system is different from currently operating power plants because carbon dioxide, normally produced as waste when making electricity, would become a key ingredient when burning the fuel. ...

6. Meet The Americans Who Don't Use The Internet

6. NASA preparing to launch 3-D printer into space

MOFFETT FIELD, California (AP) — NASA is preparing to launch a 3-D printer into space next year, a toaster-sized game changer that greatly reduces the need for astronauts to load up with every tool, spare part or supply they might ever need.

The printers would serve as a flying factory of infinite designs, creating objects by extruding layer upon layer of plastic from long strands coiled around large spools. Doctors use them to make replacement joints and artists use them to build exquisite jewelry.

In NASA labs, engineers are 3-D printing small satellites that could shoot out of the Space Station and transmit data to earth, as well as replacement parts and rocket pieces that can survive extreme temperatures. ...

7. What Is the 'Internet of Things'?

... In the '90s computers invaded our homes. In the 2000s computers invaded our pockets. This decade, all our clothing, accessories, vehicles, and everything (?!) appear on the verge of computerization.

Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Currently the idea of the IoT has many definitions. Most include a world in the not-too-distant future where most objects are computerized and seamlessly integrated into our information network, creating "smart" grids, homes, and environments. ...

8. The Bill Gates-backed company that's reinventing meat

... This presents a big opportunity for someone who can devise a tasty and affordable plant-based substitute for meat. That is exactly what Ethan Brown, the founder and chief executive of a California-based startup called Beyond Meat, aims to do, and he has persuaded some smart people to put their money behind him. Beyond Meat makes vegan "chicken-free" strips that it says are better for people's health (low-fat, no cholesterol), better for the environment (requiring less land and water), and better for animals (obviously) than real chicken; most important, if all goes according to plan, they will cost less to produce than chicken. Fortune has learned that Bill Gates is an investor; he sampled the product and said he couldn't tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken. "The meat market is ripe for invention," Gates wrote in a blog post about the future of food. Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, made Beyond Meat its first investment in a food startup. "KP is looking for big ideas, and this qualifies as a big idea," says Amol Deshpande, a former Cargill executive and a partner at the venture firm. "The single biggest inefficiency in agriculture is how we get our protein." Other investors include Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the founders of Twitter; Morgan Creek Capital Management; and the Humane Society of the United States, an animal-welfare group. ...