The great majority of people throughout most of human history have precariously been able to subsist. (See Level 1 below.) A great divergence began just over two centuries ago. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled and abject poverty as a percentage of the population has declined.
The average life expectancy at birth used to be about 30 years. That doesn't mean no one lived to old age. One in four children born alive died before their first birthday, so the average life expectancy at birth was skewed downward. But life expectancy at every age has been improving, especially over the past century.
The researchers at Gapminder have constructed this informative chart showing anticipated improving economic status over the next twenty years. (These numbers attempt to account for changes in the value of "a dollar" over time and across national borders.) Each block equates to 100,000 people. As you can see, the population is larger in twenty years, but a higher percentage of people have moved rightward on the continuum to greater prosperity. Many people find these numbers too abstract. What does this mean in practical terms? Gapminder has constructed this helpful chart to describe what life is like at the four levels.
Three truths. The world has become profoundly better in recent generations and is on an improving trajectory. There is much suffering and injustice as vast room for improving our world. We can make the world a better place.
Throughout human history, 90% of people have lived at a subsistence level - at or under what economists today call the extreme poverty line. Between 1820 and 1980, that percentage shrank by half to 44%. Between 1980 and 2005, it halved again to about 22%. During the next ten years it has more than halved to less than 10%. Keep in mind that while these percentages were shrinking, the global population grew from 1 billion to 7+ billion.
That is all well and good but I find most people don't relate well to statistics. Is there some way to visually capture what this means in concrete terms?
Gapminder has an excellent graph that gives a sense of what it means to move from extreme poverty. The left column is indicative of how the extreme poor live relative to the features listed on the left. The second column is indicative of the life to which emerged.
The graph is also instructive in that it divides living standards into four levels. For many of us who went to school in the 1960s to 1990s, our tendency has been to see a binary world - developed and undeveloped, first world and third world, rich and poor, the West and the rest. That has ceased to be the case. It has been on a trajectory away from a binary world all during our lifetimes. At the bottom of the graph you will see seven yellow human figures. Each stands for one billion people. Most of the world is now concentrated in the middle and moving upward, or to the right in this chart. The percentage of people in level one is now well below one billion and shrinking rapidly.
Gapminder Dollar Street has some visited 264 families from across the world and taken photos of their homes and belongings. The links to photos of the households are arranged in columns like the chart, allowing you to walk through the homes and get a sense of what it means to live at various living standards. It is an excellent resource.
We have seen that life expectancy has been improving all across the planet. It is one of the most important measures of well-being. Yet most people think of income when they think of prosperity. Rightly so. Income is correlated with other factors that allow us to move beyond surviving to thriving.
The common refrain we hear today is “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." It is widely repeated. It is a sentiment that often finds its way into the unison prayers of confession in congregations of my tradition. N. T. Wright, a theologian whose work I’ve found very helpful, writes:
And now we have the new global evils: rampant, uncaring, and irresponsible materialism and capitalism on the one hand; raging unthinking religious fundamentalism on the other. As one famous book puts it, we have ‘Jihad versus McWorld.” (Whether there is such a thing as caring capitalism, or for that matter thoughtful fundamentalism, isn’t the point at the moment.) …. It doesn’t take a Ph.D in macroeconomics to know that if the rich are getting richer by the minute, and the poor poorer, there is something badly wrong. (Simply Christian, 8)
It also doesn’t take a Ph.D. in macroeconomics to verify such claims either. ;-) The truth is much more complicated than this declaration and certainly is not true if we take the long view of multiple generations. What can we say about per capita income on an historic basis?
Comparing income across eras is difficult. Inflation and other variables make direct comparison impossible. Furthermore, comparing contemporary currency-based economies to barter economies will not do. Economic historians have developed a concept called “purchasing power parity” (PPP) to aid in this process. The value of a dollar at a fixed point in time is chosen and the value of income at all other points in time is pegged to the purchasing power of the fixed dollar. For our purposes, we will be using a PPP measure of “2011 International Dollars” (I$). Annual per capita Gross Domestic Product (the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a given country in a given period of time, usually a year) will be used as a proxy for income.
Not all economists agree on how to achieve parity between the present and more distant eras. Angus Maddison, one of the foremost authorities on this topic, suggested that about I$1,000 per capita (using 2011 dollars) is a subsistence level of income and was typical of subsistence living prior to the industrial revolution. However, economist Brad Delong, who has done his own analysis, claims:
“A large proportion of our high standard of living today derives not just from our ability to more cheaply and productively manufacture the commodities of 1800, but from our ability to manufacture whole new types of commodities, some of which do a better job of meeting needs that we knew we had back in 1800, and some of which meet needs that were unimagined back in 1800.” (Brad DeLong)
Therefore, DeLong puts historic subsistence living at a lower level, but both scholars end up with similar income estimates in recent eras. Here is the change over the last 2,000 years using Maddison's estimates.
The following chart shows their estimates between 1700 and 2015:
You can see that the growth accelerates beginning in the early nineteenth century. Many have suggested that the industrial revolution began not long after 1750 and it is true that many inventions came into being not long after that time. However, there was a lag time of a few decades between the advent of various technologies and the placement of them into productive use. Maddison argues for a beginning point of 1820 (as do other economic historians.) Whichever the case, keep in mind that the world population grew more than sixfold from less than 1 billion to more than 6.6 billion from 1750 to 2000 during this explosion in per capita income.
So in the aggregate, we can see that growth in worldwide per capita income is astounding. But how broadly spread is the economic expansion?
Demographers commonly use life expectancy rates as a measure of societal well-being. Life expectancy is the number of years someone is expected to live at the time they are born based on actuarial science. Long life is a universal indicator of prosperity across cultures and time. It is an important measure to demographers because achieving it requires a complex mix of variables, like a sustained nutritious food supply, a sanitary and safe environment, relatively little disease, absence of war, and a stable society.
So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of two social scientists and economists typical of those who study these issues:
For most of its existence, homo sapiens lived in far-flung hunter-and-gathering communities, each of which was quite small and barely able to reproduce itself. Life expectancy at birth was hardly twenty-five years on average, and those persons who survived childhood often died violently, in combat with other hunters, at relatively young ages. (Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, 48)
For much of human history, average life expectancy used to be 20-30 years. By 1900, it had climbed to about 31 years … By 2003 it was 66.8 years. (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 31)
To put the last statement by Goklany in perspective lets graph the estimated life expectancy on a chart:
If we show only the last 250 years we get a clearer picture of what has happened:
Using life expectancy as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been. The gap is narrowing between the top and bottomof the global community. More amazing, most of this change occurred over a time when the total world population grew sixfold, from less than 1 billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!
This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, has prospered equally well. AIDS has been devastating in regions of Africa. War and discord has harmed some nations. Yet over the past forty years, we see broad improvement in the world. Keep in mind that the global population nearly doubled during this time:
The trajectory of change is an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven growth but every corner of the planet has improved and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.
Is the state of world getting better or getting worse? How would you answer that question? What indicators would you use?
For Christians, our mission is to seek the greatest shalom possible in the world, always cognizant that shalom in its fullness will only be recognized at the consummation of the new creation. But how would we measure shalom?
Isaiah 65:17-25 is a statement of what the ancient Hebrews understood to be the fullness of shalom.
17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. 18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. 19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. 20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. 21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. 23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD -- and their descendants as well. 24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. 25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent -- its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, (NRSV)
Several themes jump out from this characterization of a world restored to shalom. There are some very practical and specific features:
God will delight in his people and be attentive to them. (18-19, 24)
Safety will prevail. (19)
Infant mortality will cease. (20)
Life expectancy will increase beyond 100 years. (20)
There will be a just and prosperous order in society (absence of war and oppression.) (21-24)
Nature itself will be altered into a more peaceful order. (25)
The New Testament version of the new creation expands this vision even further. In the New Testament, God makes his dwelling with humankind and there is eternal life. But it seems to me that if we look at the features of shalom in this Isaiah, we can get a good sense of whether or not the world is moving in the right direction.
Especially interesting about this Isaiah passage is the direct reference to infant mortality rates and life expectancy. Social scientists frequently turn to these measures for an overall sense of societal welfare. Why? These two indicators serve as indirect indicators of other societal realities. Many other social variables (i.e., adequate food, health care, environment, social stability, healthy social institutions, low crime) must be positive in order for these two variables to be positive as well.
What is particularly interesting is that every time I hear sermons on this passage, the emphasis is on the declining state of shalom in our world. One sermon I heard a few years back lamented rising inequality, AIDS, poverty in Africa, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and polar bears drowning due to melting ice (the last one was in the prayer of confession.) In my Presbyterian tradition, the prayers of confession frequently include lament of our greed and threatened destruction of the plant. I routinely read theologians on social media who decry "neoliberalism" and the deepening dystopia into which it is leading our planet. Public theologian Brian McLaren characterizes the present world order as a “suicide machine.” Is this an accurate assessment?
The most common trait I find in these assessments is that they are usually thoroughly subjective. They are without context and without awareness of empirical realities. Do not misread me here. I am not saying we are without need of confession. Evil is at work in the world and within us. But what if we collectively found a way to double life expectancy, make infant mortality rare, virtually eliminate extreme poverty, reduce global income inequality, and radically reduce the number of deaths due to war. Would we not celebrate? Yes. The historically reality is that all things have happened or are on the way to happening! Yet I do not believe I have ever heard a sermon extolling and celebrating the profound and unprecedented improvements we have seen in global well-being.
I want to offer some thoughts on how we might measure shalom, at least from the perspective of physical and material well-being. I'll write several posts in the coming days that look at key indicators. As you will see, my conclusion is that are we are living in an era of unprecedented expansion of global shalom.
That is in not say we are at some Francis Fukuyama-like “End of History” moment, but the idea that global well-being is in decline is indefensible. Unprecedented positive change is underway and has been for some time. Yet there are still more than billion barely touched by these world events. There is so much more that needs to happen. We have learned a great deal and need to learn a great deal more. In my estimation, the biggest threats to continuation of these advances are radical populist movements from the right and left, disconnected from facts and history. We need to be informed about the true state of the world before we go about joining movements to "fix" it. We need to lift up achievements as morale builders and learn lessons from successes as we press ahead on the journey.
It is easy to become obsessed with challenges and threats we see before us today. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and to see the tremendous good that is happening in the world. Here are six social indicators pointing to improving quality of life for billions around the globe. Setbacks and momentary reversals are certain but increasingly the challenges we face are of our own making; like tribalism and authoritarianism. Let us be vigilant in addressing the challenges we face without losing sight of the bigger picture.
"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
We tend to view our era as a time of unprecedented change while assuming the world before our birth was virtually stagnate. In fact, rapid radical change has been the norm for at least the past few centuries. The case can be made that the generations living just prior to our generation experienced changes every bit as disorienting as ours.
Early in the nation's history, most travel was by water. We built cities on major waterways. Most states in the eastern half of the United States have a major river or the ocean as a boundary. This meant that each state had access to the water transportation super highway. Travel by land was exceedingly difficult. There were few roads. It took days to reach even nearby cities by stagecoach and each night meant fees for food and lodging that were not part of the stagecoach price. You had the labor of a driver spread across a few people. The cost of travel for even short distances could consume a week or more of wages for a typical working person. Only the wealthy and merchants could afford such travel.
I believe it was Pred who said travel from New York to Pittsburgh did not typically take a route across Pennsylvania. It involved boarding a boat in New York, sailing down the east coast around Florida to New Orleans, and then navigating up the Mississippi and the Ohio to Pittsburgh. Boats could handle far more people per trip, required no extra lodging expenses, food was generally provided on board, and laborers per person was much smaller. Water travel was far also more energy efficient and thus less costly.
As turnpikes and canals were built, and with the advent of the steamboat in the 1820s, travel times shrank and so did the prices. Depending on travel destinations, Pred shows the cost of travel per mile between 1800 and 1840 dropped by 50-90%. Railroads shrank distance and dropped costs even more. Today, we can fly from New York to Los Angeles in a few hours for one or two day's wages for someone earning around the US median Salary.
The world continues to change in significant ways but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that our age is the first to encounter sweeping technological and economic changes.
For most Americans living today, there has been a presumption that our children's lives will be more prosperous than own. The American Dream, whatever particularities might include, has always included this assumption. It is virtually a social contract. Is the idea that most of our children will have a more prosperous life than we did really valid?
Robert Gordon, economic historian at Northwestern University, released a book earlier this year, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Gordon's mammoth tome documents changes in the American standard of living over the past 150 years. His research leads him to conclude that not all innovations are equally significant in improving living standards. During the period from 1870-1970, a wave of technological and social innovation emerged that radically improved worker productivity, and therefore improved our standards of living. There has been innovation since 1970 but most of it, apart from communication and entertainment, has been an extension and a deepening of the innovations that occurred prior to 1970. The period from 1870 to about 1920 was a period of development and implementation of innovations that began to have full impact after 1920. Gordon estimates the average annual growth rate in output per hour like this:
1890-1920 = 1.50%
1920-1970 = 2.82%
1970-2014 = 1.62%
For those familiar with American history, you will remember that income inequality was quite high going into the 1920s. Inequality shrank steadily and substantially over the next fifty years, until the mid-1970s. This corresponds with Gordon's estimates of rapidly improving worker productivity. Since the 1970s, there has been slower growth and the growth is more related to capital investment than to improving worker productivity. We have seen income inequality grow since the 1970s.
Gordon is doubtful that we will ever again have a convergence of innovation like we had from 1870-1970. This, combined with certain demographic headwinds, will make sustainable high growth improbable for present generations. I hope to write more about this in coming days but this graphic posted by William Easterly on Twitter caught me eye. It comes from an article by David Leonhardt, The American Dream, Quantified at Last. I take it as more evidence consistent with Gordon's thesis.
“Increasing mobility has left us uprooted and disconnected from communities in America.” This is a common refrain going back at least 100 years. Think of the song following World War I that asked how are you going to keep them down on the farm once they have seen gay Paree’? The lament of increasing mobility is a compelling narrative except for one minor problem: Mobility has been declining for decades.
Sociologist Claude Fischer writes:
The evidence that mobility has declined is more robust for roughly the past 65 years, thanks to annual census-bureau mass surveys. Around 1950, about 20 per cent of Americans changed homes from one year to the next. In the 1980s, under 18 per cent did. By the 2000s, under 15 per cent – and now we are approaching annual moving rates of only 10 per cent. About two-thirds of movers do not go far, relocating within the same county, and the frequency of such local moves has dropped by about half since the Second World War. The proportion of Americans who move across county and state lines is considerably lower, but that rate, too, has dropped substantially, from about 6.5 per cent in the 1950s to under 4 per cent now.
So what is the cause? My best guess is that the greatest single factor in the great settling down was the increasing physical and economic security of US life.
Thanks to a growing and stabilising economy, spreading affluence, vastly improved public health, the establishment of government institutions from policing to business regulation, and all sorts of ‘safety net’ programmes over several generations – from Social Security to federal disaster assistance – fewer and fewer Americans have been forced to move because of unemployment, floods, the death of a breadwinner, and so on. Greater security also helps account for an apparent shift from the 19th to 20th centuries in who was likeliest to move.
I have done extensive work on tracing my ancestors. I have traced every line back to at least my third great grandparents, most of who were born in the early 1800s. I know more about some than others but the part that has always intrigued me is how much they moved. I would estimate that the majority lived in at least three different states and in more than five counties over their lifetimes. I suspect most people who have identified American ancestors this far back have similar stories. But I have also noticed one anomaly.
My great grandmother, Augusta (Holmes) Kruse was born in Dekalb County, Missouri, in 1870, the year after her parents had moved there from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her ancestors go back to seven of the Mayflower passengers and include many other people who arrived shortly thereafter. Her family had stayed in place for nearly 250 years. Her maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Pierce, was seaman who owned ships and sailed the world. Her mother had been to finishing school in Boston. Her grandfather Holmes was an accomplished carpenter. These were not exceptionally wealthy people but they clearly had stable comfortable lives. Her parents moved west because of her father’s health. Augusta married my great grandfather, Carl P. Kruse, who had emigrated from a small town in Denmark where his family had lived for generations and where his father had served in the Danish Parliament. Because of the population explosion in Denmark, farmland was scarce, and wanting to farm, Carl came to America.
Most of my other family lines consist primarily of farmers, miners, and laborers. Ancestors in these families seemed to be constantly on the move. This anecdotal analysis of my family history seems consistent with what the author is describing.
Demographers talk of migration in terms of push and pull factors. Push factors are those that make the status quo more unbearable to maintain. Pull factors are those that promise relatively better circumstance than the status quo. It would appear that in past generations, push factors might have played a bigger role; things like war, drought, local economies gone bad, and the like. However, as America has become more prosperous, there have been fewer pushes pushing fewer of us. Migration is more about positive pulls.
The “settling” of America is one more piece of evidence about an improving world in terms of material well-being. But as the author notes, we still have challenges to social cohesion. While improved transportation and communication may not have made us more inclined to move, it may have reshaped who we choose to interact with in our communities. And as the global economy reshapes the work we do, the trauma of regional job loss is possibly made more traumatic because we are less and less accustomed to uprooting and relocating. Focusing on increasing mobility as a cause of rootlessness takes us in an unproductive direction.
One of the most persistent worries about population and economic growth is that we will eventually use up all our resources and land. It is based on the intuitive (but false) assumption that if it takes X acreage of land to feed a person today, then it will take 2 times X acreage to feed double the population in the future. This thinking does not allow for ongoing innovation and adaptation.
Look at this graph showing total global hectares being used in farm production from 1960-2009. Note that the global population grew from 3 billion in 1960, to 6.8 billion in 2009.
The population will likely grow again by half over the next fifty years. Note that the projections are for the number of hectares used for farming to actually decline. The alternative projection assumes we adopt more efficient food consumption and stop growing crops for fuel. In either case, we will be using significantly less land than we did in 1960.
This is one example of decoupling, where two seemingly connected trends become disconnected. We are seeing this in water consumption, CO2 produced per dollar of produced goods, and with the amount of natural resources we use. The direst predictions about resources and climate tend to minimize or ignore these decoupling developments. We should not allow dire predictions that ignore decoupling to frighten us away from growth and achieving prosperity for the whole world.
Challenges? Yes. But we are not at the edge of doom.
Life expectancy at birth is one of the single best indicators of societal well-being. So many things have to work well for the great majority of people to live long lives that the high life expectancy serves as proxy for holistic well-being. The measure is of particular value in that it measures something relatively concrete, as opposed to income (which has varying impacts relative to local living standards and exchange rates) or happiness (a highly subjective term.)
Throughout human history, global life expectancy at birth was about 30 years. This does not mean that everyone died before age thirty. It is an average age of death. One in four children died before their first birthday (it is less than 1% in developed nations today). Some people lived to be quite old. But on average people lived to be thirty.
Over the past two hundred years, something has changed. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled and it is still improving. I won't give a dissertation on why that might be but rather invite you to realize that contrary to our intuitions, news reports, and personal biases, we are living through the most astonishing improvement in human flourishing in human history.
Here is a chart showing the trend.
This chart offers an animated presentation of the improvement by nation.
Many Americans, especially progressives, are now “socialists.” The rise of Bernie Sanders has had much to do with it. Yet, when I hear them talk, I keep hearing Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
According to Marxian theory, Socialism is a transitional economic system between capitalism and communism. Capitalism (i.e., private property ownership and the distribution of goods and services through market exchange) will run its course and one day a classless society with no private property will evolve. The workers will hold things in common and goods will be distributed according to need.
Some Marxists believed they could accelerate this evolution through violent revolution and imposition of communist principles. We saw that tactic attempted several times in the last century. Others believed economic evolution should run its course. People could work for greater social justice within the system as they methodically brought every aspect of the economy under the control of the government, eventually ending private ownership of the means of production. From there, it would be just a few more steps to the communist utopia. This transitional system is socialism.
Socialists called themselves “social democrats,” or “democratic socialists,” advocating “social democracy.” The emphasis here is democracy. Since communism is the inevitable outcome, there is no need to short circuit the process through violent revolution. People will choose their way into communism.
During the last century, it certainly became clear that relying on markets and philanthropy alone was not an optimal strategy for a just and flourishing society. Government has assumed control of some functions to ensure the broader welfare of citizens in all of today’s capitalist societies. These functions have been “socialized.” But the broader context is still private property and market systems. “Socializing” selected functions is not a tactical progression toward communism. This is welfare capitalism.
However, a funny thing happened to socialism along the way through the last century. It was mugged by reality. It has become clear that socialism is fatally flawed. Market systems provide a real-time feedback loop of information, matching ever-changing demands with an ever-changing supply. Markets empower countless strangers to benefit each other through specialization and exchange. There is simply no way a centralized entity can manage the production of goods and services. Assuming those with the sufficient information could be trusted to have the wisdom and ethical courage to make optimal decisions, the endless churn of supply and demand makes sufficient information utterly impossible. (Other insurmountable barriers exist but that is for another day.) The “inevitable” road to communism was wrong.
Most political parties variously named “democratic socialist” or “social democrats,” have become advocates for expanding welfare capitalism. For precisely this reason, the word “socialist” has fallen out of favor in many regions. So in short, we have learned that neither pure libertarianism nor socialism is workable. We are all welfare-capitalist now: We rely primarily on private ownership and market exchange, and quibble about what societal functions might be better if socialized.
So let us look for a minute a Bernie Sanders, the “socialist” icon for hipster intellectuals. Sanders talks of making America more like Denmark – or the Nordic economic model. Are Nordic countries socialist? Finnish-American journalist, Anu Partanen, author of The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life, recently noted:
The problem is the way Sanders has talked about it [Nordic economic model.] The way he’s embraced the term socialist has reinforced the American misunderstanding that universal social policies always require sacrifice for the good of others, and that such policies are anathema to the entrepreneurial, individualistic American spirit. It’s actually the other way around. For people to support a Nordic-style approach is not an act of altruism but of self-promotion. It’s also the future.
In an age when more and more people are working as entrepreneurs or on short-term projects, and when global competition is requiring all citizens to be better prepared to handle economic turbulence, every nation needs to ensure that its people have the education, health care, and other support structures they need to take risks, start businesses, and build a better future for themselves and for their country. It’s simply a matter of keeping up with the times.
I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. … The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.
Are you getting that? A robust welfare system is a means to a robust market economy! And that raises another issue: markets.
Paraphrasing Partanen, progressive Americans see Nordic social policies as anathema to market capitalism. They argue that allowing corporations to rig the system in the favor of a few, allegedly an inherent feature of capitalism, is social injustice. It makes no sense. If corporations are rigging the system, then it is not truly a market! The socialist answer would be for the government to assume ownership of corporations. If you just want to end inordinate privilege for big-business, then what you are advocating is – wait for it – freer markets!
In reality, there is no such thing as "free markets." Market economies are based on the premise that absent fraud, misinformation, and externalities, people will make the best and most efficient decisions about what to consume and produce for their own needs, mediated through price information generated by supply and demand. Producers who produce well will be rewarded and those that do not will eventually fold. The reality is that there is always incomplete information and there are nearly always some externalities inherent in trade. Taxes and regulation are also necessary. But generally speaking, trade unencumbered by planners or by gamers of the system leads to higher living standards.
Big-business capitalists use political power to block competition and preserve economic power. They constrain markets. Writing 240 years ago, Adam Smith wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Free markets are the answer to powerful economic players conspiring with government to choke off competition and preserve their privileged status through subsidies, tariffs, and onerous legislation.
Socializing some aspects of society is not antithetical to market economics. We cannot deliver some social goods through markets, or at least not deliver them well. But we must have a robust market economy to generate the tax revenue to make socialized services sustainable. Denmark is the top rated country in the world on business and trade. The other Nordic countries are right behind them. This is not the Sanders model.
Sanders wants to institute protectionist policies, raise taxes on corporations (USA is already on the high side), set a minimum wage 50% higher than other developed countries, and do a host of other trade unfriendly measures. Meanwhile, taxes for all but the wealthiest will stay low (taxes in Nordic countries are high for everyone.) He wants to expand the safety net golden egg while strangling off the goose that lays it. He thrives on populist anti-market and anti-business sentiment. Curiously, Clinton is probably closer to the Nordic model, embracing an expanded and smarter welfare model, while championing (at least in the past) trade and business. Yet she dismisses Denmark as contrary to this vision. Partanen speculates Clinton knows her plans are more genuinely like Denmark than are Sanders’ but she avoids association with the Nordic model because of public misconceptions. I think that is true.
So why are so many supposedly well-educated people now calling themselves socialists? One big reason is surely economic illiteracy. Going back to at least the 1930s, conservatives warned of “socialism” with the advent of Social Security. Same with Great Society programs in the 1960s - now also with ACA and talk of single-payer healthcare. To some degree, left-leaners just decided to own the moniker. Simultaneously, enough libertarian-leaning folks falsely used free markets to rationalize away ANY government involvement in anything; so many lefties just owned this misconception of “free market.” What they want is a more robust version of welfare capitalism and less big-business domination. Economic illiteracy is my generous reading of why people call themselves socialist. But I have a less generous reading as well.
Partanen writes:
Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets. But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government. …
Like the Finns, countless Americans fought to keep America free from the totalitarian ideologies that emerged in the last century. They largely won. They considered it a legacy to pass to future generations of America and to the world. Rightfully so. So why would people seeking a more robust welfare state and less big-business domination call themselves socialists?
Inigo Montoya is wrong with regard to many of the new “socialists.” They know exactly what the word means! They know the emotion it stirs. The misuse is intentional. Calling yourself “socialist” is the left’s version of Trumpist politics: Stir up tribal rivalry with incendiary language. Raise a verbal middle finger to your opponents. When they call you on it, roll your eyes with incredulity that people would accuse you of advocating totalitarianism. “After all, we just want to improve the safety net end reign in corporate greed like any good social democrat.” So to my “socialist” friends who cannot fathom the origins of anger in Trump voters, part of the answer is staring at you in the mirror. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
If your sole concern is fomenting tribal political battles, then the above is mostly irrelevant to you. Calling yourself a socialist is effective for your purposes. If you care about clarifying the truth in pursuit of a greater good for humanity, then you will use language that is faithful to what is being described. Whether through illiteracy or insolence, “socialism” fails that standard. You really need to stop using that word.
The world is becoming a better place. It is not utopia. We are not without substantial challenges. But we are becoming (as in movement along a trajectory) better (as in measurably improved according to a standard.)
The Human Development Index is a United Nations measure of well-being combing data about income, literacy, education, and life expectancy. Here is the index for the nations of the world in 1980 and then in 2012. The reality is that we are living through the most astonishing transformation toward human well-being in all of history. You can find the interactive version of the chart at Our Data.
Are you smarter than a chimp? When it comes to knowledge about global socioeconomic trends, there is a good chance you are not. For years, Swedish global health expert, Hans Rosling, has been giving Ted talks and making presentations about global trends. One his favorite teaching tools is to ask people a question like this:
Globally, over the past 20 years, the rate extreme poverty has:
Doubled.
Stayed the same.
Decreased by more than half.
Now chimps will select at random, giving a 33% chance of each answer. Yet when Rosling asks audiences, at least half will say A, a sizable percentage will say B, while a few will say C. Yet C is the correct answer! This is the case on one variable after another. Audiences routinely score worse than chimps, choosing the most negative option.
As an old adage has it, "It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know that ain't so." That we routinely pick the wrong answer more often than chimps shows that we clearly we have bias.
In the Ted talk, How not to be ignorant about the world, Hans' son Rosling notes that part of the problem is our education system. Teachers go to college at a particular point in time and learn the state of the world at that time. But they tend not to learn about ongoing developments. The data has often been hard to come by and hard to interpret. So teachers are biased by what they learned years ago. (Reporter have the same problem.) But there are other factors.
During our evolutionary history, our brains became wired to notice threats. Hunters walking through the brush who were attentive to the possibility of tigers lying in wait, likely survived those who went about carelessly enjoying a beautiful day. So when we reflect on broad human trends, we are disposed to fixate on perceived threats. What was useful for us in the wild, is counter-productive for us as we try to interpret socioeconomic trends. If you want to outscore a chimp on an exam about global well-being, Ola Rosling suggests that you must drop your predispositions and adopt these four rules of thumb:
1. Assume most things are improving. 2. Assume most people are in the middle of a distribution, not a binary of rich and poor. 3. Assume social development precedes becoming wealthy. (Don’t assume that a population must be rich before meeting basic social needs.) 4. Assume you are exaggerating the threat if the topic is something about which you personally have great fear.
Additionally, Hans, Ola, and others have been working to build the Gapminder website to provide you with data that can be presented in meaningful ways. But one of the most important contributions the Roslings have made is their collection of entertaining and informative videos. In this post I am including every video I can find with a brief annotation. (I'll add more as I find any.) Many of the videos overlap or cover similar data but they are all well worth viewing. So here is your resource for becoming smarter than a chimp. Don't say I never gave you anything.
(This link also has links to most of these videos including some shorts not listed here: Gapminder Video)
Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes (2010)
If you are just getting acquainted with Rosling, I'd begin here. This 4 minute presentation gives you a quick sense of what he is talking about.
Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world. TED June 2014
This is the second video to watch. The front half is Hans making his case that the world is improving and the back half is Ola explaining, as I recounted above, why are so disinclined to see positive change.
Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine. TED December 2010
This is the third one to watch. This one of my favorites. While fully embracing the concern about environmental impacts of economic growth, Rosling shows the importance of economic growth through the story of the washing machine.
THE REST ARE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen. TED February 2006
The TED presentation that kicked it all off. He focuses on the positive changes underway in world and points to his efforts to liberate, integrate, and animate data, and to find ways to present data the public finds understandable.
Hans Rosling: New Insights on Poverty. TED March 2007
Rosling shows that social development tends to precede economic development. He addresses the issue that unfortunately to date, economic development has always been based on fossil fuels. Higher yields, technology, and markets are key to ending poverty but there are more dimensions that need our attention like human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health, and culture. The ending has a great surprise!
Human Rights and Democracy Statistics- Gapminder c. 2008
Rosling describes why human rights are so hard describe and evaluate.
Rosling shows that countries that have developed from poverty to well-being have done so at far faster rates that Western nations did. Poor countries today can make the transition much quicker because of what previous countries have learned.
Hans Rosling: Insights on HIV, in stunning data visuals. TED February 2009
Uses Gapminder data to show nuances in how AIDS has spread and what it takes to defeat it.
Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset. TED June 2009
This is the third video should watch. Rosling deconstructs the dichotomy of wealthy and developing nations, and challenges the idea of thinking in sweeping terms like "Africa."
The Joy of Stats with Professor Hans Rosling - Gapminder c. 2010
Rosling shows how making data available and animating is empowering people to make better decisions, sometimes without really realizing they are using statistics.
Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when. TED Nov 2009
Rosling forecasts when China and India catches up with the USA and UK.
Hans Rosling: Global population growth, box by box. TED June 2010
Rosling says that child survival is the new green. This video explains why.
Hans Rosling: The good news of the decade? We're winning the war against child mortality. TED September 2010
Rosling breaks down the remarkable trends in child mortality. Education of women accounts for at least 50% of the drop.
Hans Rosling: Religions and babies. TED April 2012
Religion is not a factor in family size. No significant difference between Islamic and Christian countries when it comes to births per woman. The defining difference is economic well-being.
DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population. BBC November 2013
A one hour investigation into the dynamics of population growth using stories about real live families interspersed with Rosling's entertaining presentation of data.
Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years. BBC September 2015
Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling are truly brilliant and entertaining. The first part of this video highlights how poorly we assess what is happening in the world. The back half gives some simple tips on how to avoid developing false perceptions and suggests why it is important that we do so. Enjoy!
Once again, Oxfam is circulating their statistic that 62 people have as much wealth at the bottom half of the world’s population. Think about that for a moment. When you read that, what do you think that means? Particularly, what is wealth?
Many people will interpret “wealth” as financial assets. Many others realize wealth includes the value of our non-financial possessions. Therefore, Oxfam is saying that if you add up the value of all our possessions, 62 people own half. Right? Wrong! Though that is the message they want you to hear.
Terminology lesson. The sum of your financial assets and your non-financial possessions is your total assets. Wealth is your total assets minus your debt. Wealth is your net worth. Oxfam misconstrues wealth as total assets. (And as this has been thoroughly documented in the press for years now, we can only assume the misrepresentation is intentional.)
Thanks to Reuters reporter Felix Salmon, who dug into Oxfam’s sources, we know Oxfam uses Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook to calculate their numbers. Here is how it works (using the 2015 Databook):
Step 1: Find the global wealth total. Page 90 says it is $263 trillion.
Step 2: Find the percentage of wealth owned by the bottom 50%. Here are the percentages of global wealth for the bottom 5 deciles of wealth ownership from lowest to highest (p. 148): -0.3 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.3 + 0.5 = 0.7%.
Step 3: Calculate the amount of wealth for the bottom half. Multiply $263 trillion by .07%. That gives $1.84 trillion.
Step 4: Get a list of the wealthiest people in the world and then add them up until you get to $1.84 trillion.
That may seem right at first glance but look at this graph from Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2015. (p. 15) It shows what percentage of each decile lives in which region of the world. I’ve added two notations.
Note that the United States has 10% of the world’s least wealthy people (circle 1). China has none of them (circle 2)! How is that possible? Because the bottom number for wealth at he left side of the chart is not zero. It is a negative number. The middle class American with a mortgage, student loans, and consumer debt totaling more than the value of her home, bank account, and other possessions, is less “wealthy” than a Chinese peasant farmer who owns virtually nothing but also has no debt. The entrepreneur who borrowed a million dollars for his business is even “poorer” than these two. This is who Oxfam is grouping together in its bottom 50% of wealth. It is a meaningless comparison. But the deception does not stop there.
Oxfam builds a narrative that the increasing concentration of wealth at the top has the corresponding negative effect of making people poorer at the bottom. Their misrepresentation of wealth as total assets gives us no insight into this claim. I will suggest that for the poorest people in the world, income is a more critical issue than wealth or total assets. One must have an income that at least meets basic needs before she can begin to save, invest, and buy capital goods.
Extreme poverty, measured by income, is rapidly disappearing. The percentage of people living on less than $1.90 per day has shrunk from almost 40% in 1990, to less than 10% today (and we have added an extra 2 billion people.)
Furthermore, the global distribution of income has been progressively moving toward a bell curve distribution and away from a bi-modal distribution, with wealthy people clustered at the top and very low income people clustered at the bottom.
And this chart shows hows the mean and median global per capita income numbers keep rising, also noting that the global GINI coefficient declined from 68.7 to 64.9 between 2003 and 2013. (Lower GINI number means more equality.)
To me, this chart suggests that recent trends in technology and globalization have benefited billions of people who once lived in bare subsistence poverty. There is a small minority of people at the left of the chart who are not being touched by these changes, most of them living in counties with turmoil and failed nation-states. At the extreme right are the owners of capital who have benefited from productivity and expanded trade. Middle class people in developed nations have experienced downward pressure on their wages due to technology and from a burgeoning supply of labor in a global economy. However, living standards are not just a function of wages but also the cost of living. A case can be made that the developed world middle class had improvements in living standards because globalization kept the cost of living lower than it otherwise would have been. That does not show up in this chart. It is more complex than this but I think a chart like this is a better place to begin a discussion.
In short, Oxfam wants to promote a narrative that casts global capitalism primarily as an exploitative enterprise, a zero-sum game where the growth of wealth at the top necessarily means the reduction of wealth at the bottom. The narrative intuitively makes sense. Some version of this thinking is common but it is virtual gospel on the left where the moral compass is directed predominately by equalization rather a robust conceptualization of justice. But it is wrong. It is every bit as ideologically myopic as the "free markets and democracy fixes everything" mantra on the right.
Finally, let me be clear about what I did not say. I did not say I thought that the growing concentration of wealth at the top was good, that there are not masses of people who need substantial improvement in their economic well-being, that global capitalism is an unqualified good, or that there are not profound economic injustices in the world. I did not speak to any of Oxfam's proposed policy solutions. Discernment on economic issues is complex and requires our best efforts at sound analysis if we want to be bring lasting and just change. Oxfam's misuse of the data to support ideologically predetermined policy's does not help. They are telling the truth about the numbers they use, knowing the numbers they use will lead most of us. That is what I'm addressing.
It’s the end of the world as we know it – because the world is getting remarkably better! Almost every indicator of human well-being shows improvement on a global basis. We live in the best era in human history. How does that make you feel? Like the old REM song, does it make you feel fine? Or does it maybe make you feel incredulous? Defensive? Offended?
I’ve been writing and linking stories about global improvements on social media for at least ten years. I’ve learned that if I point to a negative trend, then people usually respond with somber acknowledgement of a problem. But if I mention a positive trend, I routinely get push back. I get everything from personal anecdotal evidence to accusations of callousness toward those who continue to suffer from some particular problem. This becomes particularly true if there is a strong political agenda connected with a trend. Conservatives don’t want to hear that crime is in steady decline. Progressives don’t want to hear there is a steady decline in church arson, race motivated or otherwise.
Why is it so hard for us to see and accept that the overall state of the world is improving? A recent article at Slate documents once again the improving state of our world, The World Is Not Falling Apart: Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times. (Now I know that it is because the article is from Slate that my conservative readers already have their defenses up. When the exact same information gets presented by groups like CATO, progressives go into the same mode. That is yet another feature of the problem.) The data is interesting and well worth the read but it is the following four paragraphs that I think are particularly insightful. It goes a long way to explaining why it’s the end of the world as we know it and we don’t feel fine.
How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.
We also have to avoid being fooled by randomness. Cohen laments the “annexations, beheadings, [and] pestilence” of the past year, but surely this collection of calamities is a mere coincidence. Entropy, pathogens, and human folly are a backdrop to life, and it is statistically certain that the lurking disasters will not space themselves evenly in time but will frequently overlap. To read significance into these clusters is to succumb to primitive thinking, a world of evil eyes and cosmic conspiracies.
The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down? As Bill Clinton likes to say, “Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.” We will see that the trend lines are more encouraging than a news junkie would guess.
To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn.
3. The nature of employment will change. For the rest of your employees, gig work will grow. ...
4. Winners will win bigger, and the rest will fight harder for the remains. ... McKinsey Global Institute puts it: "tech and tech-enabled firms destroy more value for incumbents than they create for themselves."
5. Corporations will have shorter lives. The average life span of companies in the S&P 500 has already fallen from 61 years in 1958 to 20 years today. It will fall further.
6. Intellectual property knows no natural boundaries.
... The headline goal, of cutting the proportion of people living in poverty in half, was achieved five years early, in 2010, by which time a billion people had left absolute poverty. And now the rate of poverty has fallen to less than a third of its 1990 level (that is, from 47 per cent of the world’s people to 14 per cent).
The other MDGs saw impressive outcomes. The percentage of malnourished people has been cut in half. So has the number of children dying before the age of five, and the percentage of people without access to clean drinking water. The maternal mortality rate has almost dropped by half. The number of primary-age children out of school fell from 100 million to 57 million; the primary enrollment rate in sub-Saharan Africa rose to 80 per cent from 52 per cent. New HIV infections annually fell from 3.5 million in 2000 to 2.1 million in 2013. ...
... There’s a problem with all the self-congratulation, though: Nobody has been able to find any connection between those impressive outcomes and anything done by the UN since 2000.
Charles Kenny and Andy Sumner of Washington’s Center for Global Development have spent the decade tracking the progress of the UN’s goals. In a series of studies, they’ve found that in most areas the goals had little or nothing to do with the outcomes. ...
... What did cause the world to improve so dramatically between 2000 and 2015? In large part, two things: After 1990, the old closed, nationalist economies of the postcolonial era and the Cold War broke down (with ugly results at first) and gave rise to the set of phenomena we call “globalization.” And after 2000, countries in Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and much of Africa started developing better institutions of government, education and health. Stronger liberal economies and stronger states worked wonders.
The UN’s new post-2015 goals at least recognize that economic growth is crucial (they call for an astonishing 7-per-cent growth a year in the poorest countries). It may, in fact, be the only key factor – and it’s the one the UN can’t control.
In fact, what is needed is a healthy economic ecosystem grounded in efficient and just soci0-economic structures, with markets providing a real-time feedback loop through which a society can be adaptive to ever changing priorities. That ecosystem needs to be justly connected to the larger ecosystem of global productivity and exchange.
There is a common tendency to believe that development can be achieved through top down analysis, planning, and implementation. This is generally the U.N. Millennium Development Goals model. Such projects rarely effective. It presumes that experts can correctly identify the most critical needs, that the priority of those needs will stay constant, and that they can identify which levers to flip to get the optimal outcome.
Mohammad Yunus uses the image of the Bonsai tree to illustrate the problem. The tiny Bonsai tree grows from the same seed as the tall tree in forest. The difference is that the Bonsai tree has only the nutrients of the tiny pot in which to grow. The poor are Bonsai people. They are capable of growing as strong and tall as anyone else if planted in the right soil. The right soil is healthy socioeconomic structures and inclusion in networks of productivity and exchange.
The U.N. approach has elements of paternalism. The poor are quite capable of addressing their own needs if the"right soil" is present. Because of geopolitical concerns or pure ineptness, the West has too often played a role in "degrading the soil." This article reminds us once again how impotent so many of our "big idea" solutions are. The critical factors lie in the less than glamorous work of building healthy institutions.
"The legendary statistical showman Professor Hans Rosling returns with a feast of facts and figures as he examines the extraordinary target the world commits to this week - to eradicate extreme poverty worldwide. In the week the United Nations presents its new goals for global development, Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years looks at the number one goal for the world: eradicating, for the first time in human history, what is called extreme poverty - the condition of almost a billion people, currently measured as those living on less than $1.25 a day.
Rosling uses holographic projection technology to wield his iconic bubble graphs and income mountains to present an upbeat assessment of our ability to achieve that goal by 2030. Eye-opening, funny and data-packed performances make Rosling one of the world's most sought-after and influential speakers. He brings to life the global challenge, interweaving powerful statistics with dramatic human stories from Africa and Asia. In Malawi, the rains have failed as Dunstar and Jenet harvest their maize. How many hunger months will they face when it runs out? In Cambodia, Srey Mao is about to give birth to twins but one is upside-down. She's had to borrow money to pay the medical bills. Might this happy event throw her family back into extreme poverty?
The data show that recent global progress is "the greatest story of our time - possibly the greatest story in all of human history". Hans concludes by showing why eradicating extreme poverty quickly will be easier than slowly.
Don't Panic - How To End Poverty In 15 Years follows Rosling's previous award-winning BBC productions Don't Panic - The Truth About Population and The Joy Of Stats."
"The decline of white suburbia has already begun. ...
... For the Brookings Institution, Frey explains that white populations accounted for just 9 percent of the population growth of the suburbs (in the 100 largest metro areas) between 2000 and 2010. The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings just launched a fascinating map that shows where white cities and suburbs gained and lost populations. It shows that some metro areas are already breaking from the population pattern that has fueled the last half-century of growth: white losses in cities, white gains in suburbs."
Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day) is shrinking. The global poor are not getting poorer. The world population grew from 4.5 billion people in 1981, to 6.9 billion in 2010, - a 60% increase. The percentage of people living in extreme poverty in developing nations dropped from over 50% to 21%. (From about 1.95 bil to 1.2 bil - and estimates are now well below 1 bil in 2015.)
That doesn't mean life just above the extreme poverty line is desirable. That doesn't mean there isn't a great deal more to do. But let's be honest about the trajectory. And let's also be honest that central to the decline in extreme poverty has been inclusion of the poor in networks of productivity and exchange - that is to say, they embraced some form of market capitalism. Unqualified dismal of "capitalism" (almost never defined by critics), as some religious leaders are prone to do, should be challenged.
"Centennials are growing up with a less idealist and more pragmatic edge. They’re facing situations that the Millennials didn’t have to deal with until early adulthood. As a result, Centennials are growing up more savvy, in graver times when everybody doesn’t win and when choices are limited and success is harder to come by."
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 of the populist support for renewable energy comes from concern over climate change. I am not someone who is persuaded that apocalyptic doom is certain without swift and radical restructuring of the global economy. I am persuaded that increasing CO2 at present rates has the potential to 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 be weighed as well.
Equally important to me, if not more so, is human freedom and well-being. Decentralized renewable energy would create enormous opportunity 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 if at all. Yet I keep imaging myself in 1895 looking at expanding U.S. cities and the problem of horse transportation. There is a guy 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?
Prior to 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 tend to overestimate how much change can happen in the near term - say five years - but radically underestimate what can happen in twenty years.
Over the last sixteen years, the share of pre-tax income earned by the top 1% has ranged between 17% and 23%. I calculate an average of 20% over that time frame, precisely where it is today. Read Mankiw's post for more details.
A peculiar note: I suspect if you were to show this data from 1975 forward without the title and the y-axis label, I suspect many people would think this was a graph about global warming.
(Source: Milanovic, B., Lead Economist, World Bank Research Department, Global income inequality by the numbers. Annotations by James Plunkett.)
I have seen the unannotated version of this graph several times but the annotations really make things clear. The graph shows that much more is going on here than simplistic narratives of "The are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer" (the graph discredits the second half of that statement) and the 1% versus everyone else.
We are getting richer. Not every human being on the planet and not every country. But the average person has an economic standard of living that's far better than it used to be.
One way of measuring it is to look at the amount of goods and services produced per person - gross domestic product or GDP per capita.
For the global population that rose almost fourfold in the 60 years up to 2010.
There were some marked divergences between countries. In China the increase was a stunning eighteen-fold. South Korea and Taiwan managed even more. On average, they are 25 times richer than in 1950.
A few countries, mainly in Africa, lost ground. In the Democratic Republic of Congo average living standards fell by more than half in the same period. ...
... One benefit from that is that we are living longer. In the middle of the last century a new-born baby could expect to live 50 years. Now the figure is 70. Once again there are large variations between countries but the favourable trend in that period is present in almost every nation - Botswana is the only one where life expectancy declined (by a few months). ...
... There is of course a debate, a rather vigorous one, to be had about just how bad a thing rising inequality really is. That is even more true of the question of what, if any, government policies should be employed to tackle it.
Rising inequality is a reminder that, richer though the world is, some people don't feel it.
This article does a good job at highlighting postive trends while also recognizing that improvements are uneven. The article touches on concerns about inequality but there are also environmental impact and resource depletion issues to be raised. The key to wisdom is understanding that these trends - the positive and the negative - are all interconnected.
Is the greater concentration of wealth at the top (to the degree it is really happening) a by-product of the same forces that are lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty? If so, blindly attacking wealth inequality and may thwart the progress of millions climbing out of poverty.
Is the global economic growth that is improving the living standards of so many people also causing damage to the climate and environment to the point that one day soon we all will see our living standards diminish? If so, blindly pursing economic growth may actually end up diminishing our quality of life.
The key is to think holistically. Populist movments usually take us in the opposite direction.
Most people are exceptionally illiterate about the trajectory of demographic and economic changes in the world, believing the world is decaying. That leads many to disengage in hopelessness. In reality, globalization combined with investment in human capital and infrastructure has put extreme poverty in rapid retreat. The global poor are not getting poorer. The world is getting better!
I have continuously pointed to evidence of these developments through social media for more than a decade. Not infrequently, posts about positive trends are met with incredulity and even anger. How can I speak of an improving world when so many are suffering? It is as if nothing positive may be acknowledged until total success is achieved. Yet it is the relentless focus on the negative, attempting to shame and guilt people into action (many times with distorted and exaggerated data) that actually drives people away from action into donor fatigue and hopelessness. There must be hope that things can get better.
A recent guest preacher recounted a scene from the end of Schindler’s List. Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jews from the Nazis, reproofs himself as he realizes that if he had sold his car or other possessions, he might have saved at least one more person. He finds himself in a difficult place. How can he celebrate the lives saved when so many still died? But how can he not celebrate 1,200 lives that were indeed saved?
Endless fixation on the negative leads to despair and diminishes the value of lives that have improved. Such fixation is unwarranted and counterproductive, and that is why I will continue to press on with stories of hope and improvement. We need balance. We need hope. And based on the Barna data below, there is much work to do.
The poorest regions of the world have been growing the fastest for at least twenty years. The Economist forecasts world GDP to be 2.9%, while Asia and Australasia (less Australia) is at 5.7%, and Sub-Saharan Africa is at 4.5%. These rates actually indicate a considerable slowing of growth from recent years. The US forecast is 3.2%. This is more evidence of the that global inequality is shrinking, even though inequality within many nations is increasing. As the bottom of the economic ladder rises higher so does the distance between the bottom and the top. A recent article forecast that their would be no poor nations by 2050. I think that is likely. See: Gauging growth in 2015
Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times.
I've repeatedly revisited the theme in my blogging that the world is getting better in so many important ways. That is routinely met with skepticism, even outrage. How can I be so insensitive as to say the world is getting better while millions are suffering and dying? Of course, the short answer is that I didn't say that the world has achieved perfection but only that it has gotten better.
I love these five paragraphs in the intro to this lengthy article:
... How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.
Amen!
We also have to avoid being fooled by randomness. Cohen laments the “annexations, beheadings, [and] pestilence” of the past year, but surely this collection of calamities is a mere coincidence. Entropy, pathogens, and human folly are a backdrop to life, and it is statistically certain that the lurking disasters will not space themselves evenly in time but will frequently overlap. To read significance into these clusters is to succumb to primitive thinking, a world of evil eyes and cosmic conspiracies.
Human beings are natural pattern seekers. Psychological studies show we often identify patterns where none exist.
Finally, we need to be mindful of orders of magnitude. Some categories of violence, like rampage shootings and terrorist attacks, are riveting dramas but (outside war zones) kill relatively small numbers of people. Every day ordinary homicides claim one and a half times as many Americans as the number who died in the Sandy Hook massacre. And as the political scientist John Mueller points out, in most years bee stings, deer collisions, ignition of nightwear, and other mundane accidents kill more Americans than terrorist attacks.
The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down? As Bill Clinton likes to say, “Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.” We will see that the trend lines are more encouraging than a news junkie would guess.
I love the distinction between trend lines and headlines! Consider that adage stolen.
To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn. ...
The quantitative mindset is indeed the most morally enlightened. It compensates for the human tendency to privilege information on what is happening to those geographically and culturally nearest to us. But it also counters a "parochialism of the present," where we discount the often greater suffering of those in the past relative to those who suffer in the present because the present is our context.
Be sure to read the whole thing. Here are just a few charts:
The rate of justifiable homicide by law enforcement is much higher in the United States than in other developed nations. The number of incidents has been increasing since 2000, even as the crime rate has dropped markedly. (See Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement by the Numbers) Why is this so?
The reason for the high rate of justifiable homicide relative to other nations seems straightforward to me. America is a violent society. Blame it on our frontier heritage, or whatever you will, the fact is that American homicide rates are much higher than in other developed nations. Firearms are abundant. Confrontations have a much greater chance of involving lethal force. Our relatively high rate strikes me as a statement about our society, not about the law enforcement community. The
The challenging question is why the rate of justifiable homicide by law enforcement should be increasing while crime rates have been falling. I am not certain. I am not a criminologist. The criminologist I read say solid data is lacking. Definitive answers are hard to come by. Here are my speculations.
Verbal Judo
Several years ago, I read book by a police officer named George Thompson called Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion. Thompson had been an English professor with a black-belt in karate before going into law enforcement. He tells about his first night on patrol. He pulled over a man for a traffic violation. When the man got mouthy, Thompson forcibly subdued and arrested him. Thompson was summoned to his superior at the end of the shift. He anticipated praise for his work. Instead, his captain explained that such a stop should not have ended in an arrest. Thompson would never make it as a police officer if he could not learn how to deal better with people.
During his apprenticeship as a police officer, Thompson came to see karate and judo as metaphors for a policing mindset. Karate is about meeting force with force while Judo is about using your opponent’s momentum to throw him the direction you want him to go. So how might this work with an irritable speeder?
Officer: “Sir, I need to your driver’s license and registration.” (The officer makes clear what compliance looks like.)
Speeder: “Seriously! What did I do? Fail to flip a freakin’ turn signal? Drug dealers on the street and terrorist blowing up buildings. Don’t you jackasses have something better to do? How many people’s houses are being robbed?”
Officer: (calmly) “I can appreciate that sir but I still need to see your driver’s license and registration.”
There might be two or three iterations of this interchange with the officer calmly making clear what is required each time. The officer is giving the offender an opportunity to vent while still making clear the need for compliance. If compliance is still not forthcoming, the officer might say something like:
Officer: (calmly) “Sir, if you do not comply, I will have to arrest you. You will spend the night in a cold uncomfortable cell instead of in your nice warm bed. I will have to spend an hour or more, sitting in my car, filling out paperwork. Neither of us wants that. Please hand me your driver’s license and registration.”
The officer is reiterating the need for compliance but he is now making clear the consequences of non-compliance. He appeals to the direction the offender wants to go (home to a warm bed) as an act of verbal judo.
If the offender still will not comply, then the officer will say something like:
Officer: (calmly) “Sir, are you sure there is nothing I can say to gain your compliance?”
At that point, the officer and his partner are positioning themselves to spring into action to apprehend the noncompliant offender.
This is verbal judo. It is applicable to almost any position of authority. The subject is not required to like the person in authority or to like the demand. He or she has the space to voice opposition. The goal is to gain compliance by helping the person clearly see the consequences of noncompliance and help him or her see that compliance is desirable. The aim is to defuse resistance, not escalate it. Most often, the person will comply before things escalate to using force.
My point is not the specifics of the technique. I am pointing to the mindset. “Verbal Judo” is a different mindset than rolling up on a scene, barking orders, and taking the least perceived slight as justification for escalating to tasers, take downs, and lethal force. I believe most officers have typically embraced a defusing model of policing. A base that on my limited interaction with the few law enforcement officers I have known and for whom I have great respect. They genuinely see their job as a calling to serve and protect.
Unfortunately, I worry this sense of calling is eroding. It concerns me that too many officers may now see Thompson’s aggressive escalating rookie behavior as the optimal model. I cannot empirically substantiate this except to so say that I see the rising rate of justifiable homicides as a likely proxy for violence by law enforcement in general. Furthermore, the Justice Department just completed a study of the Cleveland Police Department and found the following patterns:
The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;
the unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including Tasers, chemical spray and fists;
Excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check; and
The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable. (Source)
A former St. Louis police officer recently wrote:
… As a cop, it shouldn’t surprise you that people will curse at you, or be disappointed by your arrival. That’s part of the job. But too many times, officers saw young black and brown men as targets. They would respond with force to even minor offenses. And because cops are rarely held accountable for their actions, they didn’t think too hard about the consequences. …
… I, too, have faced mortal danger. I’ve been shot at and attacked. But I know it’s almost always possible to defuse a situation.
Once, a sergeant and I got a call about someone wielding a weapon in an apartment. When we showed up, we found someone sitting on the bed with a very large butcher knife. Rather than storming him and screaming “put the knife down” like my colleagues would have done, we kept our distance. We talked to him, tried to calm him down.
It became clear to us that he was dealing with mental illness. So eventually, we convinced him to come to the hospital with us.
I’m certain many other officers in the department would have escalated the situation fast. They would have screamed at him, gotten close to him, threatened him. And then, any movement from him, even an effort to drop the knife, would have been treated as an excuse to shoot until their clips were empty. … (Source)
I have listened to other ex-officers from other cities give similar testimony. Despite what I perceive to be majority of officers entering their work as noble calling, the evidence seems to point to systemic problems that goes beyond isolated individuals going rogue. I nominate two factors for consideration.
Broken Windows
First, broken windows policing. As I understand it, this model suggests that disorder in a community makes residents withdraw and isolate themselves. This creates opportunities for more serious criminal activity to move in. A downward cycle ensues. Broken windows policing focuses on addressing even minor problems as means of restoring a sense of order, catalyzing an upward positive cycle.
The broken windows policy came into vogue with the crack-cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The crime rate did plummet after 1994, and this policy may have played a key role. But is there a point at which neighborhoods reach a semblance of health and it is counterproductive to continue this policy? Does continuation begin to feel like harassment? Add to this that has typically been implemented in minority neighborhoods. Continued enforcement means minority residents being charged with violations that are routinely ignored in white communities. It is not hard to see how a cycle of escalating resentment between law enforcement and citizens could emerge.
9/11
Second, 9/11. It is curious that 2001 is the year where we see the divergence between a dropping crime rate and rising justifiable homicide rate. Law enforcement must take extraordinary measures in crises. We give law enforcement officers considerably more latitude. Many perceive our society to have been in a perpetual state of crisis ever since the attack on the World Trade Center. Militarization is on the rise, both in mindset and in the equipment law enforcement agencies are acquiring. Fear of terrorism has become wedded to a perception that crime and chaos is spinning wildly out of control. (As noted in the previous post, crime rates have plummeted to their lowest rates in fifty years, but the widespread perception is much different.) (Related: Police Violence Is The Exception.)
In this environment, defusing difficult encounters becomes a luxury. I routinely hear conservative commentators characterizing those who the police shoot as “resisting arrest” when they do not instantly follow an officer’s direction. They justify law enforcement in aggressive confrontation. This could certainly be true in a crisis situation, but for jaywalking? For selling “loosies?” I absolutely agree that citizens should show respect for police officers but I flatly reject that failure to show such respect necessitates escalation by an officer. Officers who do not know how to defuse situations, or are unwilling to try, are not qualified to be in law enforcement. George Thompson’s captain was right.
I’m not suggesting that these are the only two variables. For instance, a National Sheriff’s Association report points to an increase in encounters between police and people suffering from mental illness. (Source) Still, I think broken windows and 9/11 are key contributors that set the stage for much else.
Now I have purposely been sidestepping the issue of race because I wanted to lay the above foundation before incorporating race. More in the next post.
Although the proportion of people experiencing chronic hunger is decreasing globally, one in nine individuals still does not get enough to eat. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 805 million people were living with undernourishment (chronic hunger) in 2012–14, down 209 million since 1990–92 (Figure 1).
Keep in mind that the global population grew by one third during the same time period. About 18.7% of the world lived with chronic hunger in 1991 while 11.2% do so today. Had the percentages stayed the same as in 1991 there would be 1,340,000,000 people in hunger instead of 805,000,000. Things are getting better but we have a long ways to go.
The rapid spread of Christianity is forcing an official rethink on religion. ...
... In April one of Wenzhou’s largest churches was completely demolished. Officials are untroubled by the clash between the city’s famously freewheeling capitalism and the Communist Party’s ideology, yet still see religion and its symbols as affronts to the party’s atheism. ...
... Christianity is hard to control in China, and getting harder all the time. It is spreading rapidly, and infiltrating the party’s own ranks. The line is blurring between house churches and official ones, and Christians are starting to emerge from hiding to play a more active part in society. The Communist Party has to find a new way to deal with all this. There is even talk that the party, the world’s largest explicitly atheist organisation, might follow its sister parties in Vietnam and Cuba and allow members to embrace a dogma other than—even higher than—that of Marx.
Any shift in official thinking on religion could have big ramifications for the way China handles a host of domestic challenges, from separatist unrest among Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uighurs in the country’s west to the growth of NGOs and “civil society”—grassroots organisations, often with a religious colouring, which the party treats with suspicion, but which are also spreading fast. ...
... Buddhism, much longer established in China than Christianity, is surging too, as is folk religion; many more Han are making pilgrimages to Buddhist shrines in search of spiritual comfort. All this worries many officials, for whom religion is not only Marx’s “opium of the people” but also, they believe, a dangerous perverter of loyalty away from the party and the state. Christianity, in particular, is associated with 19th-century Western imperial encroachment; and thus the party’s treatment of Christians offers a sharp insight into the way its attitudes are changing.
It is hard even to guess at the number of Christians in China. Official surveys seek to play down the figures, ignoring the large number who worship in house churches. By contrast, overseas Christian groups often inflate them. There were perhaps 3m Catholics and 1m Protestants when the party came to power in 1949. Officials now say there are between 23m and 40m, all told. In 2010 the Pew Research Centre, an American polling organisation, estimated there were 58m Protestants and 9m Catholics. Many experts, foreign and Chinese, now accept that there are probably more Christians than there are members of the 87m-strong Communist Party. Most are evangelical Protestants.
Predicting Christianity’s growth is even harder. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China’s Christian population the largest in the world. Mr Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire. ...
... A new breed of educated, urban Christians has emerged. Gerda Wielander of the University of Westminster, in her book “Christian Values in Communist China”, says that many Chinese are attracted to Christianity because, now that belief in Marxism is declining, it offers a complete moral system with a transcendental source. ...
... Some Chinese also discern in Christianity the roots of Western strength. They see it as the force behind the development of social justice, civil society and rule of law, all things they hope to see in China. ...
... The paradox, as they all know, is that religious freedom, if it ever takes hold, might harm the Christian church in two ways. The church might become institutionalised, wealthy and hence corrupt, as happened in Rome in the high Middle Ages, and is already happening a little in the businessmen’s churches of Wenzhou. Alternatively the church, long strengthened by repression, may become a feebler part of society in a climate of toleration. As one Beijing house-church elder declared, with a nod to the erosion of Christian faith in western Europe: “If we get full religious freedom, then the church is finished.
People in emerging economies are considerably more satisfied with their lives today than they were in 2007. A Pew Research Center survey finds that publics in emerging nations now rival those in advanced economies in their self-reported well-being. The rise in happiness among middle income countries is driven in large part by attitudes in Asian nations, such as China, Indonesia and Malaysia. People in developing economies are also happier today than they were seven years ago, though the improvement has been more modest. ...
There are many other graphs that could be shown about a host of important social indicators but the article closes with the most important one: life expectancy. Improvements in life expectancy require that a wide range of variables move in a positive direction and for that reason an improvement in life expectancy is often a proxy for overall well-being.
The author closes with:
So complain all you want about how horrible everything is. There's certainly a lot left to fix. But as you complain, remember:
Here are a few of my favorites. Click through to see the rest. The big question is not how to halt the world from spirialing into chaos. The big question is how do we get an improving world t0 improve more quickly and more broadly. We have challenges ... climate and eco-system impacts, evolving energy challenges, shift to renewable/recylable resources ... but we have always had challenges. This is the golden era of humanity as it relates to material, physical, and political well-being. We just have to keep pushing to make it golden for everyone.
The U.S. imprisonment rate has fallen for a fifth straight year, a run not seen since Richard Nixon was in The White House. According to data released Tuesday from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while the U.S. incarceration rate is still remarkably high, 2013 marks a 10-year low. For five reasons, the de-incarceration trend has an excellent chance of continuing.
Second, U.S. prison policy is primarily set by states and hence is less constrained than other potential reforms stalled by Washington's political gridlock. ...
Third, even though conservatives and liberals are battling each other vigorously on many policy fronts, de-incarceration is not one of them. ...
Fourth, a new generation of evidence-based community supervision programs ...
Last, just as a high crime rate can create the conditions for more crime (e.g., by overwhelming law enforcement) and a low crime rate can create the conditions for less crime (e.g., by encouraging more citizens to walk the streets at night), lower imprisonment rates also appear capable of creating virtuous self-reinforcing cycles....
Over the past couple of decades, easier access to clean water has become a reality for a huge portion of the world’s population.
According to a publication released by the World Health Organization, an arm of the United Nations that monitors the health and well-being of people around the world, more than 2 billion people have gained access to an improved source of drinking water since 1990.
An “improved” water source is a water source that is likely not to be susceptible to outside contamination, especially by human waste, according to the UN’s WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program.
In addition to improved water sources, about 4 billion people have achieved the gold standard in clean water access: clean water piped directly into their homes. That’s well over half the world’s population.
This extraordinary step toward providing universal access to clean water has been the result of a massive global effort on behalf of governments, philanthropists, and nongovernmental organizations. ...
And you might want to add market exchange to the mix. It has also played a role.
We a prone to fixate on problems and threats. The news concentrates on Ebola, violence in the Middle East and Ukraine, 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. ducation 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. ...
Let us by all means 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.
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. ...
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 challenges that lie ahead. I know this 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 a host of other ideologies. If I were teaching a class on demography or economic development, this video would be the first hour of the first class of the semester.
Amazing! Today’s iPhones have the same capabilities (and more!) than 13 distinct electronics gadgets, worth more than $3,000, found in a 1991 Radio Shack ad. Buffalo writer Steve Cichon was the first to dig up the old ad and make the point about the seemingly miraculous pace of digital advance, noting that an iPhone incorporates the features of the computer, CD player, phone, “phone answerer,” and video camera, among other items in the ad, all at a lower price. The Washington Post‘s tech blog The Switch picked up the analysis, and lots of people then ran with it on Twitter. Yet the comparison was, unintentionally, a huge dis to the digital economy. It massively underestimates the true pace of innovation and, despite its humor and good intentions, actually exposes a shortcoming that plagues much economic and policy analysis.
To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991. ...
... Considering only memory, processing, and broadband communications power, duplicating the iPhone back in 1991 would have (very roughly) cost: $1.44 million + $620,000 + $1.5 million = $3.56 million.
This doesn’t even account for the MEMS motion detectors, the camera, the iOS operating system, the brilliant display, or the endless worlds of the Internet and apps to which the iPhone connects us.
This account also ignores the crucial fact that no matter how much money one spent, it would have been impossible in 1991 to pack that much technological power into a form factor the size of the iPhone, or even a refrigerator.
Tim Lee at The Switch noted the imprecision of the original analysis and correctly asked how typical analyses of inflation can hope to account for such radical price drops. (Harvard economist Larry Summers recently picked up on this point as well.)
But the fact that so many were so impressed by an assertion that an iPhone possesses the capabilities of $3,000 worth of 1991 electronics products – when the actual figure exceeds $3 million – reveals how fundamentally difficult it is to think in exponential terms.
- See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf
Tim Lee at The Switch noted the imprecision of the original analysis and correctly asked how typical analyses of inflation can hope to account for such radical price drops. (Harvard economist Larry Summers recently picked up on this point as well.)
But the fact that so many were so impressed by an assertion that an iPhone possesses the capabilities of $3,000 worth of 1991 electronics products – when the actual figure exceeds $3 million – reveals how fundamentally difficult it is to think in exponential terms. ...
Indeed!
To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991. - See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf
Amazing! Today’s iPhones have the same capabilities (and more!) than 13 distinct electronics gadgets, worth more than $3,000, found in a 1991 Radio Shack ad. Buffalo writer Steve Cichon was the first to dig up the old ad and make the point about the seemingly miraculous pace of digital advance, noting that an iPhone incorporates the features of the computer, CD player, phone, “phone answerer,” and video camera, among other items in the ad, all at a lower price. The Washington Post‘s tech blog The Switch picked up the analysis, and lots of people then ran with it on Twitter. Yet the comparison was, unintentionally, a huge dis to the digital economy. It massively underestimates the true pace of innovation and, despite its humor and good intentions, actually exposes a shortcoming that plagues much economic and policy analysis.
To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991.
- See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf
Amazing! Today’s iPhones have the same capabilities (and more!) than 13 distinct electronics gadgets, worth more than $3,000, found in a 1991 Radio Shack ad. Buffalo writer Steve Cichon was the first to dig up the old ad and make the point about the seemingly miraculous pace of digital advance, noting that an iPhone incorporates the features of the computer, CD player, phone, “phone answerer,” and video camera, among other items in the ad, all at a lower price. The Washington Post‘s tech blog The Switch picked up the analysis, and lots of people then ran with it on Twitter. Yet the comparison was, unintentionally, a huge dis to the digital economy. It massively underestimates the true pace of innovation and, despite its humor and good intentions, actually exposes a shortcoming that plagues much economic and policy analysis.
To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991.
- See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf
Amazing! Today’s iPhones have the same capabilities (and more!) than 13 distinct electronics gadgets, worth more than $3,000, found in a 1991 Radio Shack ad. Buffalo writer Steve Cichon was the first to dig up the old ad and make the point about the seemingly miraculous pace of digital advance, noting that an iPhone incorporates the features of the computer, CD player, phone, “phone answerer,” and video camera, among other items in the ad, all at a lower price. The Washington Post‘s tech blog The Switch picked up the analysis, and lots of people then ran with it on Twitter. Yet the comparison was, unintentionally, a huge dis to the digital economy. It massively underestimates the true pace of innovation and, despite its humor and good intentions, actually exposes a shortcoming that plagues much economic and policy analysis.
To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991.
- See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf
... Globalization has winners and losers. The winners—particularly the upwardly mobile middle classes of China, India, Indonesia,Brazil, and Egypt—occupy the long hump of this elephant-like line. They have seen their inflation-adjusted incomes grow by 70 percent or more. The world's "1%" (which works out to the top 12 percent of the U.S., or households making more than $130,000) is also racing away with income, particularly at the tippy-top.
But the story for world's poorest percentiles has been the same as for the developed world's lower-middle class: No growth or worse. ...
