Kruse Kronicle

The Numbers And Economics Of COVID-19

Last Thursday, Dr. Allan Bevere interviewed me about my thoughts on the coronavirus pandemic and the economic costs. Thanks for an enjoyable time, Allan. Be sure to follow his blog Allan R. Bevere, Faith Seeking Understanding. 

COVID-19 Is Not Just The Flu

In mid-April, Bill Bennett said COVID-19 is no big deal. Projections showed 60,000 deaths, about the same as the flu. Our stringent "stay-at-home" measures were unnecessary. It is faulty reasoning on several counts. As I noted on Facebook, "We didn't lock down the country to try to prevent 60,000 deaths; we locked down the country to limit deaths to 60,000 (or whatever the ultimate toll is)." (See The Absurd Case against the Coronavirus Lockdown)

By March 31, the tally of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. doubled every three days. Had that rate continued, there would have been 275,000 deaths by April 21. Instead, we had 40,000. The doubling rate has stretched to nine days. We flattened the curve. We do not know the exact rate at which deaths would have multiplied had we not acted, but it is certain it would have been much higher. Slowing the fatalities prevents medical facilities from becoming overwhelmed and ensures that each new hospitalized victim gets optimal care, thus dampening the fatality rate over the course of the pandemic.

Furthermore, the 60,000 flu deaths represent the total for an entire year. In the U.S., COVID-19 is barely two months old. This is like looking at a baseball player's strikeout totals for the previous season, comparing them with his total strikeouts for his first month of the following year, and upon seeing they are about the same, concluding he is doing okay. What will the death count comparison be like a year from now?

Finally, comparing deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 to the Center for Disease Control's flu death total is invalid. (1) The reported flu deaths are calculated using an algorithm. (2) Over the last six years, the number of flu deaths officially coded as such (direct or comorbidity) ranged from 3,448 to 15,620 (See Jeremy Samuel Faust.) The CDC believes flu deaths are underreported for a variety of reasons. Instead of official tabulations, they take the number of flu and pneumonia hospitalizations and report a percentage of them as flu deaths. According to Faust, the result is about six times more flu deaths than the officially reported number each year. (Faust is critical of CDC methods, believing it significantly overstates the death total. I have no way of evaluating that.)

Recent analysis indicates the official COVID-19 count is a significant undercount. Using average numbers of deaths up to a particular point in the year from recent years, analysts are finding sharp rises in the number of fatalities where COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred. Yet, the officially reported COVID-19 deaths account for only half the increase in deaths. That suggests the true COVID-19 impact may be much higher (double?) than the official account. (See here) 

As of today, May 5, we have 70,000 officially reported deaths. So if you want to make legitimate comparisons, it is 70,000 versus about 9,500 for officially reported deaths. Using algorithms to capture unreported deaths, the comparison is more likely something like 100,000+ deaths to 60,000 deaths. And this is comparing COVID-19's first quarter to an entire flu season.

COVID-19 is not just the flu.

1 "Official." A CDC database tracks COVID-19  deaths reported through official channels. Their provisional death count in the National Vital Statistics System shows almost 40,000 COVID-19 deaths. They note that it can take weeks for deaths to make it into the NVSS. The numbers for past weeks are revised as the data is received. The National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System is the source for the numbers we typically see in the media and an up to date report of confirmed and probable deaths. That total stands at about 70,000 today. I am using this number as the "official" count. (Source: Did the CDC Significantly 'Readjust COVID-19 Death Numbers'?)

2 Center for Disease Control, Frequently Asked Questions about Estimated Flu Burden. "How many adults die from flu each year?: Flu deaths in adults are not nationally notifiable. In order to monitor influenza related deaths in all age groups, CDC tracks pneumonia and influenza (P&I)–attributed deaths through the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Mortality Reporting System. This system tracks the proportion of death certificates processed that list pneumonia or influenza as the underlying or contributing cause of death. This system provides an overall indication of whether flu-associated deaths are elevated, but does not provide an exact number of how many people died from flu. As it does for the numbers of flu cases, doctor's visits and hospitalizations, CDC also estimates deaths in the United States using mathematical modeling. CDC estimates that from 2010-2011 to 2017-2018, influenza-associated deaths in the United States ranged from a low of 12,000 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 79,000 (during 2017-2018). The model used to estimate flu-associated deaths uses a ratio of deaths-to-hospitalizations in order to estimate the total flu-related deaths during a season." The site offers links for those wanting more detail.

 

Maternal Mortality Rates Are 27 Times Higher Globally Than In Europe. Why That Is A Good Thing

The chart below is based on maternal mortality rates, the number of women per 100,000 who die from pregnancy-related causes in a year. The first bar shows how many women die each year, while the second bar shows how many would die if they had Europe's living standards. What conclusions would you draw?

The global rate is 216, while the European rate is 8. The global rate is 27 times higher! About 290,000 women die each year because they do not have the living standards of the most affluent countries.

I would hope this would spark a sense of injustice. Something is wrong with a system that creates such a disparity in outcomes. Surely, we must upend this inequitable system and replace it with something just.

Now look at the second chart. What conclusions would you draw?

Before 1800, the global maternal mortality rate was 900. Today it is 216! It has dropped by 75%. By historical standards, this borders on miraculous. Something is right about a system that radically improves human well-being. How can we preserve and extend the improvement? (Note: The global rate dropped steadily from 385 in 1990 to 216 in 2015. The trajectory continues rapidly downward.)

A holistic view of human well-being will consider this chart, including all three bars.

Some observations.

First, we would have a more equitable maternal mortality rate without the systems that developed over the past two centuries. No place on earth would have a rate of eight deaths OR 216 deaths. We would still have a very equitable world of 900 deaths. Is that "equality" preferable to today's eight vs. 216 inequality? I do not think many would agree. The eight vs. 216 differential is good relative to the historical alternative.

Second, that some locales have a rate of eight, points to the possibility of a world where this level of well-being spans the globe. Justice requires that we pursue this equitable outcome. We must look back to understand what brought us to where we are and be discerning about obstacles blocking this objective going forward.

Third, I am using maternal mortality rates as a symbol of broader improvement in human well-being in recent generations, sometimes called the Great Divergence. Appreciating this significant divergence from human history neither requires us, in some consequentialist way, to a) embrace all that has developed in the past couple of centuries nor b) to refrain from asking rigorous questions about justice going forward. There have been profound injustices and inequities in the past two centuries. There are today. And yet, the Great Divergence happened, and it continues. Lack of historical context and blindness to trajectories can lead us to snap-shot-in-time views that inspire us to well-intentioned but destructive actions, destroying good in the process. Keep what works and adjust with discernment. Neither revolution nor complacency will do.

Global Childhood Deaths In Steep Decline

Worldwide, there were 12.6 million deaths of children under five in 1990. As of 2017, there were 5.4 million. Keep in mind that the world population grew by 50% during this time. Had death rates continued at the 1990 rate, there would have been about 19 million childhood deaths.

(Where in the world are children dying.)

Our ancestors did not live in balance with nature. They died in balance with it.

One of the most important observations (among many) from the late Hans Roslings' Factfulness:

When a population is not growing over a long period of time, and the population curve is flat, this must mean that each generation of new parents is the same size as the previous one. For thousands of years up to 1800 the population curve was almost flat. Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature?

Well, yes, there was a balance. But let's avoid the rose-tinted glasses. Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. So the population should have increased with each generation. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn't because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.

Today, humanity is once again reaching a balance. The number of parents is no longer increasing. But this balance is dramatically different from the old balance. The new balance is nice: the typical parents have two children, and neither of them dies. For the first time in history, we live in balance. (pp. 87-88)

Demographers refer to this as the Demographic Transition – the move from high fertility and mortality rates to low fertility and mortality rates. A few centuries ago, living standards in some regions began to rise via technology, specialization of labor, and extensive trade. That trend dramatically accelerated about 250 years ago with the Industrial Revolution. Fewer people died young, and more people lived to old age, but the fertility rate lagged in its decline. The population explosion of recent generations was due to this lagging decrease in the fertility rate relative to the falling mortality rate.

The Demographic Transition began in Europe, but we have seen it repeated in every part of the world in recent generations. The global fertility rate is now below 2.5 children per woman, down from 5.0 fifty years ago and heading toward "balance" at 2.1 children within about twenty years.* Furthermore, life expectancy at birth in recent generations has risen from about thirty years throughout human history to seventy-tw0 today – in excess of eighty in some affluent countries.

Every time I reflect on these numbers, I think of Isaiah 66:20, where Isaiah describes the new creation:

Babies in Jerusalem will no longer live only a few days. Old people will not fail to live for a very long time. Those who live to the age of 100 will be thought of as still being young when they die. Those who die before they are 100 will be considered as having been cursed by God.

We are approaching that reality. The world we live in today was positively Utopian until the past generation or two.

We did not get here by being content to die in harmony with nature. We decoupled from nature. We become radically more innovative and productive. The key to future well-being and the planet's welfare lies in greater decoupling – climate-friendly fuels, environment-friendly production, more productive agriculture, and the eventual transition to endlessly recycled materials. It must be a world where everyone experiences abundance through participation in productivity and exchange networks. That is what "living in balance with nature" truly is.

(Note: At replacement rate fertility, the global population will grow from about 7.7 billion to between nine and eleven billion by the century's end. The children born in 2020 will likely have children at about the replacement rate. However, the population born in 2010 is larger than the coming 2020 population, and the population born in 2000 is larger than in 2010. If all these age cohorts replace themselves in the next few decades, the population will continue to grow but at a decelerating rate.)

World Social Indicators: Child Mortality

Alongside life expectancy, a second measure of prosperity demographers frequently use is the child mortality rate. The child mortality rate is the number of children that die between birth and their fifth birthday per 1,000 live births. Because the first years of life are when human beings are most vulnerable, their ability to survive the first years of life says a lot about the state of their society; thus, the significance of the child mortality rate.

So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of the infant mortality rate (deaths by age one) typical of social scientists and economists who study these issues:

In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third died in the first year of life. Hunger and epidemic disease ravaged the survivors. By 1820, life expectation had risen to 36 years in the west, with only marginal improvement elsewhere. (Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, 69)

Before industrialization, at least one out of every five children died before reaching his or her first birth day; that is infant mortality measured as the number of children dying before the age of one, typically exceeded 200 per 1,000 live births. … In the United States, as late as 1900, infant mortality was 160; …” (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 27)

Estimates are that child mortality was over 40% before 1800.

Let's look at the change in the child mortality rate for the last 200 years:

Globally, that is a drop from forty children per 1,000 to four children per 1,000. This graphic compares nations in 1800, 1950, 1990, and 2013.

Note that the 2013 child mortality rate for all but a few small lagging countries is lower than the rate for all but a few of the wealthiest countries in 1950. The worst country in 2013 has a rate of half that of the best country in 1800.

This is not to say that every nation, every region within a nation, or every subgroup within a nation, has prospered equally well. Still, there is a dramatic improvement in all regions of the world.

During the 1990s, there was a small increase in the rate for the former Soviet nations, but that trend has turned positive again. There are disparities between Anglos and non-Anglos in the United States. The African AIDS epidemic has been harmful. Other regions face other challenges. Yet the overall trend is dramatically downward.

Using child mortality as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than ever, and the gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global social ladder. Again, most of this change occurred when the world population grew sixfold, from less than one billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!

So as we look at the trajectory of change in the world, we find an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is an uneven improvement, but every corner of the planet has improved, and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.

Next, we will look at economic issues.

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World Social Indicators: Life Expectancy

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 when 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, the 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, let's 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:

Source

Using life expectancy as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than ever. The gap is narrowing between the top and bottom of the global community. More amazing, most of this change occurred over a time when the total world population grew sixfold, from less than one billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!

This is not to say that every nation, every region within a nation, or every subgroup within a nation, has prospered equally well. AIDS has been devastating in regions of Africa. War and discord have harmed some nations. Yet over the past forty years, we have seen broad improvement in the world. Keep in mind that the global population nearly doubled during this time:

Interactive Source

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.

Next, we look at infant mortality rates.

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World Social Indicators: Introduction

Is the state of the 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 as 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 dwells 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 a 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, and low crime) must be positive for these two variables to be positive.

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 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 historical 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 physical and material well-being perspective. In the coming days, I'll write several posts that look at key indicators. As you will see, I conclude that we live in an era of unprecedented expansion of global shalom.

That is not to 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 a 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 the 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 world's true state before joining movements to "fix" it. We must lift up achievements as morale builders and learn lessons from successes as we press ahead.

I hope you will join me for some conversation.

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Don't Forget the Good Stuff

It is easy to become obsessed with the challenges and threats we see before us today. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and not see the tremendous good happening in the world. Here are six social indicators pointing to improving the quality of life for billions around the globe. Setbacks and brief reversals are inevitable, but increasingly, the challenges we face are of our own making, like tribalism and authoritarianism. Let us be vigilant in addressing our challenges without losing sight of the bigger picture.

An Improving World

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 is a 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 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.

Rosling Univeristy (How to be smarter than a chimp)

Are you smarter than a chimp? There is a good chance you are not when it comes to knowledge about global socioeconomic trends. For years, Swedish global health expert, Hans Rosling, has been giving Ted talks and making presentations about global trends. One of his favorite teaching tools is to ask people a question like this:

Globally, over the past 20 years, the rate of extreme poverty has:

1. Doubled.
2. Stayed the same.
3. Decreased by more than half.

Now chimps will randomly select, giving each answer a 33% chance. 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 with one variable after another. Audiences routinely score worse than chimps, choosing the most negative option.

An old adage states, "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 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. (Reporters 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 fixate on perceived threats. What was useful for us in the wild is counterproductive 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 you personally 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 include every video I can find with a brief annotation. (I'll add more as I find any.) Many videos overlap or cover similar data but 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 four-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 we are so disinclined to see positive change.

 

Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine. TED December 2010

This is the third one to watch. This is one of my favorites. While fully embracing the concern about the 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 the world. He 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, economic development has always been based on fossil fuels. Higher yields, technology, and markets are key to ending poverty, but more dimensions like human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health, and culture need our attention. The ending has a great surprise!

 

Human Rights and Democracy Statistics- Gapminder c. 2008

Rosling describes why human rights are so hard to describe and evaluate.

Source

Yes they can! - Gapminder c. 2008

Rosling explains that poor nations will one day become prosperous, and we should welcome that.

Source

Poor Beats Rich in MDG Race - Gapminder c. 2008

Rosling shows that countries that have developed from poverty to well-being have done so faster than Western nations. Poor countries today can make the transition much quicker because of what previous countries have learned.

Source

What stops population growth? - Gapminder c. 2008

Small families are the key to ending population growth, and the key to small families is childhood survival.

Source

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 you 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 empowers people to make better decisions, sometimes without realizing they are using statistics.

Source

Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when. TED Nov 2009

Rosling forecasts when China and India will catch 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. There is no significant difference between Islamic and Christian countries regarding 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

No embed is available.

You can view the video here.

Here is a link to a series of short videos on how to use development data visually.

An introduction to visualising development data

 

Global Life Expectancy Increases by About Six Years

Wall Street Journal: Global Life Expectancy Increases by About Six Years

Study in Lancet Says Rise Is Result of Dramatic Health-Care Advances

... The rise in global life expectancy is mainly the result of dramatic advances in health care. In richer countries longer lifespans are spurred by a big drop in deaths related to heart disease, while poorer countries have seen big declines in the death of children from ailments such as pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria. ...

Chronic Hunger Falling, But One in Nine People Still Affected

World Watch: Chronic Hunger Falling, But One in Nine People Still Affected

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 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 way to go.

Dying Young Is Quickly Becoming A Thing Of The Past

Business Insider: Dying Young Is Quickly Becoming A Thing Of The Past

It shows the risk of dying at any given age, with the lighter-colored line representing the risk in 1970 and the darker line representing the risk in 2010. In 1970, people had a 28% chance of dying before they turned 50. By 2010, that risk had been cut in half. For children under five, the news is even better: mortality dropped from 14% in 1970 all the way down to 5% in 2010.

Since 1990, billions more have access to clean water

Christian Science Monitor: Since 1990, billions more have access to clean water

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.

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Matt Ridley: Reasons to Be Cheerful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Are So Many Low-Income People So Overweight? (It's Not Food Deserts.)

Pacific Standard: Why Are So Many Low-Income People So Overweight?

... More recently, in Slate, Heather Tirado Gilligan cites peer-reviewed research to conclude: "[M]ore fresh food closer to home likely does nothing for folks at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Obesity levels don't drop when low-income city neighborhoods have or get grocery stores."...

... That said, I worry about this counter-argument's implications. If healthy food is available and affordable, and if obese, low-income consumers aren't choosing it, it becomes very, very easy to blame the overweight victim in this scenario. In a country that places a big rhetorical premium on individual responsibility, we tend to not only do a lot of blaming the victim—we also seem to kind of enjoy it. ...

... The recent rebuttal to the conventional wisdom that food access doesn't necessarily equal healthier choices—in essence, that poor people could eat well but don't—hardly gives us license to rant, as another commenter did, that "the fact they can't feed themselves is THEIR fault." Instead, it suggests the need for a more nuanced way to think about why so many Americans end up trashing their bodies with corn dogs and cookies when other options are on hand. It's an opportunity, in other words, to rethink the very nature of eating.

We might begin this process by trying to understand diet as a psycho-socioeconomic phenomenon rather than as a matter of food access. There's a critically important aspect to McMillan's story that's essential to this shift in perspective: the people she profiles live lives defined by persistent scarcity—not necessarily food scarcity, but a generalized and even traumatizing kind of material instability. Absolutely nothing about their lives is secure. ...

... The subjects pictured and videotaped in McMillan's story are not just overweight. They're scared out of their minds.

And being scared out of your mind affects how you eat. In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir write that "scarcity captures the mind." Scarcity, they note, "has its own logic." It doesn't take much imagination to hypothesize that, if your entire material existence teetered on the edge of loss—that is, if you were obsessed with scarcity because you had to be—that you'd likely blow your limited food budget on a bag of cookies and fried gizzards rather than a peck of apples and sweet potatoes. Nobody's saying such a choice would be advisable in terms of maximizing personal or public health. To the contrary, buying crap over carrots means that you are driven to eat by a scarcity-induced craving for the most immediate and gratifying satiation—the kind that sugar, salt, and fat excel at providing. But you remain, in fact, a victim. ...

Reading this post, my mind immediately returned to a post I wrote seven years ago, reviewing Charles Karelis' book, The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor.

... Karelis asks us to imagine being on a picnic when suddenly we are stung by a bee, on the hand, let's say. Our mind is now directed toward the pain in our hand to the exclusion of whatever other physical discomfort we may be experiencing. Karelis has one dab of salve at hand, and he applies it to our bee sting. Our pain is relieved. The salve has a high degree of utility for us.

Now instead of one sting on the hand, we are stung on the hand and the neck. There is still only one dab of salve. Its application to one sting will decrease pain but still be left in considerable distracted discomfort. A second dab of salve would have more marginal utility than the first.

But now let's say we have six bee stings at various locations on our body and still only on dab of salve. The one dab of salve provides minimal relief for us. But each successive dab supplies an increasing quantity of relief.

So what if you woke up daily with six bee stings and had been supplied with six dabs of salve to cover your next six days? Would you allocate them one a day across the next six days, or would you use them all in one day to have at least one day out of the six pain-free? The chronically poor routinely choose the one blissful day. ...

... Therefore, the poor are rationally inclined to spend a small pile of money in one big bang. Buying expensive clothes gets you esteem for at least a moment. Entertainment, gambling, or substance abuse provides at least temporary distraction and relief. Experience tells you there is an inadequate supply of relievers around, so when you have the fortune to get an amount that gives you complete temporary relief, do it! ...

I suspect something similar is at work with food. Food provides comfort from chronic fear and pain. Better to buy some really satisfying food that relieves pain at the moment than to make healthy food choices aimed at long-term health. And that points to another challenge. The chronically poor typically have no long-term time horizon. Debates go on about whether poverty leads to a short-term horizon or the other way around, but expanding time horizons is a piece of the puzzle, as well as finding stability.

Economic Development Links

1. Economist: March of the Middle Class

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

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

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

I love young people who want to change the world!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. MR University: Water and common pool problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. US AID: Full Speed Ahead on Malaria

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

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

12. Huffington Post: Africa Is Richer Than You Think

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 17. Businessweek: The Relentless Rise Of Global Happiness

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

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

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

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

The Poor Will NOT ALWAYS Be With Us

Excellent!

The Poor Will Not Always Be With Us - Dr. Scott Todd from Compassion International on Vimeo.

Science and Technology Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine life without the Internet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Conversable Economist: When Technology Spreads Slowly

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

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

Also this ...

13. Atlantic: America's Coming Manufacturing Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. Slate: What Will Become of the Library?

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

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

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

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

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

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

18. The Big Think: When Evidence Backfires

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

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

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

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

And that's just the beginning. ...

20. BBC: Doctors implant lab-grown vagina

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

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

Global Poverty Is on the Decline, But Almost No One Believes It

Barna: Global Poverty Is on the Decline, But Almost No One Believes It

April 29, 2014—Did you know that, in the past 30 years, the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty has decreased by more than half?

If you said no—if you thought the number had gone up; that more people, not less, live in extreme poverty—you aren't alone. According to a recent Barna Group survey, done in partnership with Compassion International and the new book Hope Rising by Dr. Scott Todd, more than eight in 10 Americans (84%) are unaware global poverty has reduced so drastically. More than two-thirds (67%) say they thought global poverty was on the rise over the past three decades.

Similarly, while both child deaths and deaths caused by HIV/AIDS have decreased worldwide, many Americans wrongly think these numbers are on the rise: 50% of US adults believe child deaths have increased since 1990, and 35% believe deaths from HIV/AIDS have increased in the past five years.

Despite the very real good news, more than two-thirds of US adults (68%) say they do not believe it's possible to end extreme global poverty within the next 25 years. Sadly, concern about extreme global poverty—defined in this study as the estimated 1.4 billion people in countries outside the US who do not have access to clean water, enough food, sufficient clothing and shelter, or basic medicine like antibiotics—has declined from 21% in 2011 to 16% in 2013.

How does this sense of fatalism about global economic and health issues affect Americans' view of the developing world? Does it hinder charitable giving? And are Christians' views any different? ...

Interesting research. I found it interesting how people who regularly attend church are more interested in global poverty and more involved in addressing it than those who don't attend church.

Economic Development Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

11. "Immigration Myths Debunked" | LearnLiberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. USA Today: Blindness rates plummet in developed countries

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

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

The international research review, which includes Eastern and Central

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demography Links

1. Washington Post: Robert Samuelson: America’s demographic denial

... For proof, see Paul Taylor’s new book, “The Next America.” Taylor oversees many of the Pew Research Center’s opinion surveys. His masterful synthesis of polls shows that three familiar mega-trends lie at the core of America’s political and social stalemate. First, immigration. By 2050, immigrants and their U.S.-born children are projected to represent 37 percent of the population, slightly higher than in 1900, when the country last experienced mass immigration. ...

... Second, family breakdown. In 2011, unmarried women accounted for 41 percent of U.S. births, up from 5 percent in 1960. The trend affects all major groups. The rate is 29 percent for whites, 53 percent among Hispanics and 72 percent among African Americans. Although 60 percent of single mothers have live-in boyfriends, half of these relationships end within five years. Single parenthood’s stigma is gone. ...

... Finally, aging. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65. The retiree flood is swamping the federal budget. ...

2. Economist: How divorce and marriage compare internationally

3. NPR: Walking Down The Widening Aisle Of Interracial Marriages

... More than 5.3 million marriages in the U.S. are between husbands and wives of different races or ethnicities. According to the 2010 Census, they make up between opposite-sex couples, marking a 28-percent increase since 2000. ...

4. Pew: Record share of wives are more educated than their husbands

5. NPR: Older Americans' Breakups Are Causing A 'Graying' Divorce Trend

For baby boomers, divorce has almost become, like marriage, another rite of passage. The post-World War II generation is setting : Americans over 50 are twice as likely to get divorced as people of that age were 20 years ago. ...

6. Atlantic Cities: The Developing World's Urban Population Could Triple by 2210

... A new working paper (PDF) by my colleagues Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer of NYU’s Marron Institute projects that the world’s urban population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2210, with nearly 87 percent of the 11.3 billion people on Earth living in cities. That urban population will be split unevenly, with just 1.2 billion people living in the cities of what we now think of as developed countries, and a whopping 8.6 billion making their homes in the cities of the developing world. These projections, based on UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Data, are some of the largest that I’ve seen to date. ...

7. Conversable Economist: U.S. Teen Birthrate Plummets

8. The Diplomat: Japan's Demographic Crisis: Any Way Out?

... However positive the macroeconomic outlook for the Japanese economy and however successful Abe might be at normalizing Japan’s military stance, Japan isn’t back — its falling birthrate and shrinking population will significantly damage its international competitiveness. Japan’s population fell by a record 244,000 last year, further evidencing that this trend is accelerating. Is it all doom and gloom for Japan from here on out or is there a possible way out? ...

... The immigration solution to demographic problems presents a novel scenario for Japan, which has traditionally been ethnically homogenous despite its high level of integration with the global economy. According to the Japanese government, the number of foreign residents in Japan is slowly but surely rising. Should the government’s plan to add an additional 200,000 immigrants per year succeed, Japanese society will begin to look very different within a decade, raising possible national identity issues. Currently, less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is non-ethnically Japanese. Should immigrants comprise a greater percentage of the whole, the idea of Japan will have to change, incorporating its new residents into the fold. That change won’t be easy, but it might be necessary to avert the alternative scenario: a country that shrinks its way into ruin.

9. USA Today: 'Do it for Denmark' ad encourages Danes to have more sex

... Denmark has the lowest birth rate in 27 years, according to the "Do it for Denmark" campaign the travel company launched Wednesday. "The Danish government has not found a solution," the ad says. "But there has to be one."

That solution, according to the company, is to travel, see your partner in the light of a different city and get romantic.

The ad claims that Danes have 46% more sex on vacation and that 10% of all Danish children are conceived on getaways. It's unclear where these stats came from, so take them with a grain of salt. ...

10. Atlantic: There's Something About Cities and Suicide

As more people move to a city, you’d expect about a one-to-one increase in shirts being worn, for instance, or the number of house keys issued. If something doubles as population doubles, that’s not surprising. What is unusual, though, is when something grows faster or slower than a population. That means people seem to be doing more or less of it, on average, and that could signal an interesting societal quirk. ...

... The authors found that if they doubled the size of a Brazilian city, car-crash deaths would also double, as predicted. But the rate of murder would grow by 135 percent—that is, homicides would more than double.

The rate of suicides, meanwhile, increased slower than population growth, rising just 78 percent when population went up by 100. A similar trend was true among the U.S. counties. There seems to be something about big cities that makes murder more likely but suicide less so. ...

11. New York Times: Why Black Women Die of Cancer

SINCE the early 1970s, studies have shown that black Americans have a higher death rate from cancer than any other racial or ethnic group. This is especially true when it comes to breast cancer. A study published last week in the journal Cancer Epidemiology found that, in a survey of 41 of America’s largest cities, black women with breast cancer are on average 40 percent more likely to die than their white counterparts.

The principal reason for this disparity is the disconnect between the nation’s discovery and delivery enterprises — between what we know and what we do about sick Americans. ...

12. Christian Science Monitor: Why African-Americans are moving back to the South

... The Coxes' decision is one unfolding in African-American households across the nation. After decades of mass exodus, blacks are returning to the South in one of the most notable migrations of the new century.

It's a subtle but significant shift that experts say provides not only a snapshot of the changing economics and sociology of the nation but of an emerging new South and, in some cases, of a growing disillusionment with the urban North. ...

13. New York Times: Population Growth in New York City Is Reversing Decades-Old Trend, Estimates Show

New York City may be an expensive place to live. Jobs are not easy to find, even as the city rebounds from the recession. And the public transit system is not always reliable or comfortable.

But despite the challenges of city living, the city’s population is growing in ways not seen in decades.

For the third consecutive year, New York City last year gained more people than it lost through migration, reversing a trend that stretched to the mid-20th century. ...

14. Business Insider: How The American Population Changed In One Year

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

16. Watch as 1000 years of European borders change

17. Business Insider: Here's What The World Would Look Like If It Were Divided Into Regions Of 100 Million People

18. Business Insider: 6 Land Transformations That Are Changing The World (GIFs)

As the global population grows past seven billion, our cities continue to expand, increasing the need for natural resources while simultaneously decreasing the supply.

Google's Earth Engine team created these time-lapse maps to illustrate a few of the trends reshaping the world right now. ...

19. Aljezzera America: How the north ended up on top of the map

Why do maps always show the north as up? For those who don’t just take it for granted, the common answer is that Europeans made the maps and they wanted to be on top. But there’s really no good reason for the north to claim top-notch cartographic real estate over any other bearing, as an examination of old maps from different places and periods can confirm. ...

... The McArthur map also makes us wonder why we are so quick to assume that Northern Europeans were the ones who invented the modern map — and decided which way to hold it — in the first place. As is so often the case, our eagerness to invoke Eurocentrism displays a certain bias of its own, since in fact, the north’s elite cartographic status owes more to Byzantine monks and Majorcan Jews than it does to any Englishman.

There is nothing inevitable or intrinsically correct — not in geographic, cartographic or even philosophical terms — about the north being represented as up, because up on a map is a human construction, not a natural one. Some of the very earliest Egyptian maps show the south as up, presumably equating the Nile’s northward flow with the force of gravity. And there was a long stretch in the medieval era when most European maps were drawn with the east on the top. If there was any doubt about this move’s religious significance, they eliminated it with their maps’ pious illustrations, whether of Adam and Eve or Christ enthroned. In the same period, Arab map makers often drew maps with the south facing up, possibly because this was how the Chinese did it. ...

Can This Man Feed the World? Billionaire Harry Stine's Quest to Reinvent Agriculture -- Again

Forbes: Can This Man Feed the World? Billionaire Harry Stine's Quest to Reinvent Agriculture -- Again

... Stine Seed does business with all of the heavyweights and has for more than three decades, primarily because it has something everybody else needs: the best-performing soybean seeds in the business. Through plant breeding, a roughly 10,000-year-old technique that’s not unlike creating Thoroughbred horses or show dogs, Stine has been perfecting the genetic makeup of soybean seeds–primarily used in animal feed and to produce vegetable oils–since the 1960s. The basic technology may be ancient, but an innovative, data-savvy strategy, married with shrewd leadership and a classic midwestern work ethic, has made Stine’s operation best in class. He isn’t bashful about what his small-town company has accomplished.

“Our germplasm–our genetic base here–is the best in the world,” says Stine. “We dominate genetics in the industry.” ...

... While rivals scoff, he now thinks he can double the world’s output of corn, the most popular crop on Earth. By breeding corn seeds genetically predisposed to thrive when planted in high densities, he thinks he can supercharge the engine generating animal feed, biofuels and food for the whole planet. “We’re going to be able to double corn yields very easily,” says Stine. “And apparently a lot of people working in the same industry can’t see that…. They think, ‘How can this be? And furthermore, how can this little farm kid out here be doing this?’”

After seven years of genetic tinkering he’s won plenty of converts. “It’s an insight that will revolutionize the corn industry,” says Dermot Hayes, a professor of agribusiness at Iowa State University. If it works out, it won’t be the first time this farm kid, unknown outside his industry, has changed the world. ...

... The secret to Stine’s golden corn? Efficiency. In the early 1930s, prior to the Dust Bowl, 7,000 corn plants per acre were grown in the U.S., yielding about 27 bushels per acre. Seeds were planted in rows 42 inches apart so horses could traverse the fields. Now 35,000 plants and 150 bushels per acre is common–nearly five times the yield–thanks to modern tractors, fertilizers, pesticides and seeds genetically modified to resist insects and herbicides. But while genetic modification–using biotechnology to insert a genetic trait into a seed–grabs headlines (and stokes health fears, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of safety), traditional breeding programs by seed developers have done just as much to raise yields. ...

... Stine flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. He began breeding corn to thrive at higher planting density: shorter plants with smaller tassels and more upright leaves that attract more sunlight. A leaner, more efficient plant. After breeding many descendants of the seeds with that genetic makeup, the company has developed corn that can be planted in much narrower rows–12 inches or even pairs of rows 8 inches apart–increasing the number of plants per acre to as much as 80,000. And, of ultimate importance, substantially increasing a farmer’s harvest. ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Slate: The “Made in China” Fallacy

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

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

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

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

8. Project Syndicate: The Poverty of Renewables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Myths That Block Progress For The Poor (2014 Gates Annual Letter)

2014 Gates Annual Letter:  3 Myths the Block Progress for the Poor

"By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can't solve extreme poverty and disease isn't just mistaken. It is harmful. That's why in this year's letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same." - Bill Gates

I sometimes have issues with Gates' optimism about aid, but he does a fairly balanced job in this piece. There were also two graphs that I really liked. They demonstrate once again how misguided so many doomsayers are. There is reason for hope. The big question is how we can get more of this good stuff to happen better and faster, in sustainable ways.

Science and Technology Links

1. PBS: Five Cook Stoves Used Around the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. SourceFed: Man Gets New 3D Printed Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. MIT News: Bionic plants

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

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

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

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

13. Economist: Happy birthday world wide web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19. The Energy Collective: When Renewables Destroy Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics Links

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

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

3. USA Today: Europe widespread corruption 'breathtaking'

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

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

4. National Review: Welfare, Here and Abroad

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

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

A few examples: ...

5. Economist: The parable of Argentina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. New York Times: Can Marriage Cure Poverty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. New York Times: Evaporating Unemployment

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

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

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

 

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

17. Conversable Economist: Halfway to Full Economic Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21. New York Times: Your Ancestors, Your Fate

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

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

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

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

Social Science and Culture Links

1. Two informative articles in Forbes: A Tale Of Two Incomes: How To Handle Having More Money Than Your Friends and A Tale Of Two Incomes: How To Handle Having Less Money Than Your Friends

2. New Yorker: Why Your Name Matters

... The effects of name-signalling—what names say about ethnicity, religion, social sphere, and socioeconomic background—may begin long before someone enters the workforce. In a study of children in a Florida school district, conducted between 1994 and 2001, the economist David Figlio demonstrated that a child’s name influenced how he or she was treated by the teacher, and that differential treatment, in turn, translated to test scores. Figlio isolated the effects of the students’ names by comparing siblings—same background, different names. Children with names that were linked to low socioeconomic status or being black, as measured by the approach used by Bertrand and Mullainathan, were met with lower teacher expectations. Unsurprisingly, they then performed more poorly than their counterparts with non-black, higher-status names. Figlio found, for instance, that “a boy named ‘Damarcus’ is estimated to have 1.1 national percentile points lower math and reading scores than would his brother named ‘Dwayne,’ all else equal, and ‘Damarcus’ would in turn have three-quarters of a percentile ranking higher test scores than his brother named Da’Quan.’ ” Conversely, children with Asian-sounding names (also measured by birth-record frequency) were met with higher expectations, and were more frequently placed in gifted programs.

The economists Steven Levitt and Roland Fryer looked at trends in names given to black children in the United States from the nineteen-seventies to the early aughts. They discovered that names which sounded more distinctively “black” became, over time, ever more reliable signals of socioeconomic status. That status, in turn, affected a child’s subsequent life outcome, which meant that it was possible to see a correlation between names and outcomes, suggesting a name effect similar to what was observed in the 1948 Harvard study. But when Levitt and Fryer controlled for the child’s background, the name effect disappeared, strongly indicating that outcomes weren’t influenced by intrinsic qualities of the name itself. As Simonsohn notes, “Names tell us a lot about who you are.” ...

3. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Living with Discrimination Can Take a Toll on Health

"... The researchers wrote, "the anticipatory nature of vigilance sets it apart from traditional notions of perceived racial discrimination. For decades, a large body of scientific and lay literature has provided evidence of the pervasive consequences of interpersonal and societal discrimination. In qualitative studies, social scientists often report on the way Blacks continually think about the potential for discrimination."

"Overall, the work shows that in cases where racism-related vigilance is low or absent, Blacks and Whites have similar levels of hypertension. But when people report chronic vigilance, the rates in Blacks rise significantly. They rise a little in Hispanics, but not at all in Whites," Hicken explains." ...

4. Carpe Diem: Women earned a majority of 2012 doctoral degrees in 33 STEM fields, can we stop calling it a ‘national crisis’?

5. Gruntled Center: Men and Women Work the Same Total Hours (There is no 'Second Shift')

This is a finding reported in the excellent new book, The XX Factor, by leading British economic researcher Alison Wolf.

She says of all that she reports in this book, this fact is the one she expects readers to have the hardest time believing.  The belief that men and women now work equally outside the home, and then women come home to an unbalanced 'second shift' is very widespread, especially in the U.S. ...

6. The Atlantic: Why Don't More Women Want to Work With Other Women?

... Pew asked 2,002 people if they would prefer to work with men or women. Most—78 percent of men and 76 percent of women—said they didn't care. But for the 22 percent who did have a preference, "it’s men who get the nod from both sexes by about a 2-1 margin," Pew's Rich Morin writes. In fact, more women said they'd rather work with men than men did. ...

7. The Mercury: As Cohabitation Gains Favor, Shotgun Weddings Fade

... The share of unmarried couples who opt to move in together after a pregnancy surpassed what demographers call “shotgun marriages” for the first time over the last decade. That’s according to a forthcoming paper from the National Center for Health Statistics. ...

8. New York Times: The Childless Plan for Their Fading Days

... Ms. Tint’s situation is one that more and more elderly people will face over the next few decades as fewer women choose to have children. According to an August 2013 report from AARP, 11.6 percent of women ages 80 to 84 were childless in 2010. By 2030, the number will reach 16 percent. What’s more, in 2010, the caregiver support ratio was more than seven potential caregivers for every person over 80 years old. By 2030, that ratio is projected to decline to four to one. By 2050, it’s expected to fall to three to one. ...

... “Many people are extending the notion of family itself, to nieces and nephews, cousins and so on,” he continued. “But it’s also expanding to ‘pseudo kin’ of friends and neighbors. We see this in the L.G.B.T. community, many of whom have been alienated from their families.”

“While it’s great to have kids who are available to help, there are a lot of complications with having kids around,” said Audrey K. Chun, a doctor who is also a medical director at the Martha Stewart Center for Living at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York. “A lot of the dynamics, decisions that have to be made around the end of life, disagreements that arise between siblings, what mom or dad may have wanted, can be very emotional. Many of my patients without kids are interested in not wasting resources at the end of life — when it’s their time, they don’t want unnecessary suffering, or to be a burden on society. They want to die naturally. Because they don’t have children to advocate for them, they’re much more open and direct about that.” ...

9. The Guardian: This column will change your life: gut feelings

... But how many of us would embark on a serious relationship based on a shared passion for The Shining? When it comes to judging character, we prefer to believe gut instinct beats box-ticking. "We have a deep-seated need to feel that we can judge character," Jason Dana, of Yale University, told the Boston Globe recently. But many studies suggest we can't – and a new paper co-authored by Dana is especially damning. ...

... Technically, the problem with unstructured interviews (or dates) isn't that they're insufficiently informative. It's that they're too informative. Bombarded by data, we seek refuge in "sensemaking", clinging to stories that seem to render things clear. But those stories might include racist or sexist stereotypes about who's good at what. Or they might be the seductive stories of candidates skilled at interviews, yet rubbish at the job itself. "Because of sensemaking," the researchers write, "interviewers are likely to feel they are getting useful information from unstructured interviews, even when they are useless." Settling on a coherent story feels good, but that doesn't mean it's accurate.

This gap – between what our guts say and what the data says – will only grow wider. As Big Data quantifies more of our lives, we'll increasingly face dilemmas: if your instincts tell you to date or hire Person A, but the metrics point to Person B, whom will you choose? ...

10. Associated Press: Accident rates improving for older drivers

... Today's drivers aged 70 and older are less likely to be involved in crashes than previous generations, and less likely to be killed or seriously injured if they do crash, according to a study released Thursday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

That's because vehicles are getting safer and seniors are generally getting healthier, the institute said. ...

11. Conversable Economist: How Pedestrian Countdown Signals Cause Auto Accidents

Pedestrian countdown signals at crosswalks show how much time is left before the light turns yellow, thus letting pedestrians know if they should rush to cross the street--or perhaps wait for the next light. But when these signals were introduced in Toronto, the rate of rear-end auto accidents was higher at the intersections with pedestrian signals compared to neighboring intersections. ...

... In short, the pedestrian countdown signals were good for pedestrians. But some of the drivers were watching the signals, trying to squeeze through before the light changed, and rear-ending other cars.

There's are some narrow lessons here about pedestrian countdown signals and a broader lesson about how information works. Here are two narrow lessons, which come out of a  more detailed analysis of the data: "The first is cities might benefit from installing countdowns at historically highly dangerous intersections and from not installing them at historically safe intersections. The second conclusion is that while countdowns can improve safety in historically dangerous cities, they may be detrimental to safety in historically safe ones." Also, instead of having a pedestrian countdown signal that is visible to cars, it might make more sense to have a verbal countdown that could only be heard by pedestrians. ...

12. PBS: Residents of poor countries have greater sense of meaning in life than those in rich nations, research says

According to new research, people living in poor countries have a greater sense of meaning in their lives than those living in wealthy countries.

These new findings, published in the Association for Psychological Science’s academic journal “Psychology Science,” suggest that this greater sense of life meaning stems from residents’ strong family ties and solid connections to religious tradition. “Thus far, the wealth of nations has been almost always associated with longevity, health, happiness, or life satisfaction,” Shigehiro Oishi, a professor at the University of Virginia and original publisher of this study, said. “Given that meaning in life is an important aspect of overall well-being, we wanted to look more carefully at differential patterns, correlates, and predictors for meaning in life.” ...

13. Huffington Post: 13 Predictions About The Future That Were Spectacularly Wrong

While humankind has made great leaps in science and technology, we have yet to master the art of prophecy. It turns out that predicting the future is tricky business, but time and again, we insist on doing so.

In the spirit of learning from our foolishness, we've partnered with Hendrick's Gin to take a peek into the lofty predictions that turned out to be terribly, spectacularly wrong. ...

14. Washington Post: 40 more maps that explain the world

Maps seemed to be everywhere in 2013, a trend I like to think we encouraged along with August's 40 maps that explain the world. Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to. You might consider this, then, a collection of maps meant to inspire your inner map nerd. I've searched far and wide for maps that can reveal and surprise and inform in ways that the daily headlines might not, with a careful eye for sourcing and detail. I've included a link for more information on just about every one. Enjoy.

This one is one interesting example:

  15. Huffington Post: Ancient Town Discovered In Israel Is 2,300 Years Old, Archaeologists Say

On the outskirts of Jerusalem, archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 2,300-year-old rural village that dates back to the Second Temple period, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced. ...

16. Scientific American: 4,600-Year-Old Step Pyramid Uncovered in Egypt

The pyramid, which predates the Great Pyramid of Giza, is one of seven for which its function remains a mystery. ...

17. Discovery: 11,000-Year-Old Settlement Found Under Baltic Sea

Evidence of a Stone-Age settlement that may have been swallowed whole by the Baltic Sea has resurfaced near Sweden, revealing a collection of well preserved artifacts left by nomads some 11,000 years ago. ...

18. Listverse: 10 Lesser-Known Ancient Roman Traditions

Depending on your personal view, ancient Rome was responsible for giving the modern world a number of traditions, including various legal ideas, democracy, and some of our religious celebrations. However, there are still many ancient Roman traditions that are slightly obscure, mostly relegated to the dustbin of history. Here are some lesser known ones. ...

19. Huff Post: CNN Morality Poll Reveals Surprising Trends In America

A recent CNN poll demonstrates the rapidly increasing support for the legalization of marijuana in America, but the survey also revealed American attitudes about the morality of various other actions.

Opinions on behaviors like drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, cheating on taxes, and adultery have shifted since a similar poll was conducted by Time Magazine in 1987. ...

 

Science and Technology Links

1. The Atlantic: What Americans Don't Know About Science

On a recent survey, just 74 percent of Americans said that the Earth revolves around the sun. ...

... As you'll see, in the words of the report, "many Americans provide multiple incorrect answers to basic questions about scientific facts." Then again, "residents of other countries, including highly developed ones, appear to perform no better."...

... Finally, the report shows us that for at least some of the questions, Americans may be answering not based on knowledge, but on belief. As shown above, only 48 percent of Americans responded "true" to the statement "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." But if the question was reframed slightly, far more people responded with "true." Given the statement "according to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals," 72 percent answered "true." (Emphasis mine.) A similar pattern happens with the Big Bang question. When the statement is simply "The universe began with a huge explosion," 39 percent responded "true." When it is "according to astronomers, the universe began with a huge explosion," 60 percent said "true." This seems to indicate that many Americans are familiar with the theories of evolution and the Big Bang; they simply don't believe they're true.

2. The Atlantic Cities: Pre-Fab Houses to Help the Homeless

3. Foreign Affairs: Networking Nature: How Technology Is Transforming Conservation

Conservation is for the first time beginning to operate at the pace and on the scale necessary to keep up with, and even get ahead of, the planet’s most intractable environmental challenges. New technologies have given conservationists abilities that would have seemed like super powers just a few years ago. We can now monitor entire ecosystems -- think of the Amazon rainforest -- in nearly real time, using remote sensors to map their three-dimensional structures; satellite communications to follow elusive creatures, such as the jaguar and the puma; and smartphones to report illegal logging.

Such innovations are revolutionizing conservation in two key ways: first, by revealing the state of the world in unprecedented detail and, second, by making available more data to more people in more places. Like most technologies, these carry serious, although manageable, risks: in the hands of poachers, location-tracking devices could prove devastating to the endangered animals they hunt. Yet on balance, technological innovation gives new hope for averting the planet’s environmental collapse and reversing its accelerating rates of habitat loss, animal extinction, and climate change. ...

4. Real Clear Science: Science Opinions Cross Partisan Lines

... Our results indicate that, more than political party identification, ideology or religious beliefs, an individual’s beliefs about science and society had the strongest influence on their support for stem cell research. It was also possible to identify distinct segments who differ substantially in what they thought about science’s social implications. Traditional political labels do not easily define these groups.

Based on our data we classify the US public in four categories:

Scientific optimists: These comprise about a third of the public. They believe strongly in the link between science and social progress. They are likely to support most scientific advances and three quarters of this group are in favour of embryonic stem cell research. Optimists are on average highly educated, financially well off and disproportionately white. They are split almost evenly along political lines, with slightly more Democrats among them. In terms of political ideology, they are the most moderate in their outlook.

Scientific pessimists: This group comprises just under a quarter of the public. They have strong reservations about the moral boundaries that might be crossed by scientists and believe science may lead to new problems. They are the most likely to oppose advances in biomedical research, with only 40% in favour of stem cell research. Compared to optimists, this group scores much lower on average in terms of educational attainment and income. More tend to be female and from a minority background. Pessimists split evenly along party lines, but tend to be disproportionately either moderate or conservative in their ideological outlook.

The conflicted: This group represents another quarter of the public. They view science in both optimistic and pessimistic terms. Though they are socially similar to the Pessimists in their background, they tend to be older on average than members of other segments. They appear open to accepting the arguments of scientists and advocates who emphasise the benefits of research. By 2010, more than 60% of this segment had come to favour embryonic stem cell research.

The disengaged: About 15% of the public lacks strong beliefs about how science might impact society. As a result, they are likely to be the most susceptible to shifts in opinion driven by political messages. For example, between 2008 and 2010, support for embryonic stem cell research among this group increased by 20 percentage points. ...

 5. CBR: So what is nanotechnology anyway?

Nanotechonology is one of the current buzzwords of science today, and deals with technology on the 'nano' scale. What's the nano scale!? The nano scale is small that you can't see it with a regular microscope; in fact, a nanometre is one-billionth of a metre. A regular atom is about one-tenth of a nanometre in diameter.

At this scale, scientists are able to manipulate atoms themselves, and that leads to the creation of all sorts of fascinating and interesting materials. One prime example is that of a carbon nanotube, which is made my rolling a sheet of graphite molecules into a tube. The right combination of nanotubes can create a structure that is hundred of times stronger than normal steel but only one-sixth the weight. This is just one example of the practical use of nanotechnology.

A concise actual definition for nanotechnology, found here, is: "The design, characterization, production, and application of structures, devices, and systems by controlled manipulation of size and shape at the nanometer scale (atomic, molecular, and macromolecular scale) that produces structures, devices, and systems with at least one novel/superior characteristic or property."

What is nanotechnology used for? ...

6. Nano Werk: Nanotechnology is getting closer to 3D nanoprinting

Fabrication of three-dimensional (3D) objects through direct deposition of functional materials – also called additive manufacturing – has been a subject of intense study in the area of macroscale manufacturing for several decades. These 3D printing techniques are reaching a stage where desired products and structures can be made independent of the complexity of their shapes – even bioprinting tissue is now in the realm of the possible.

Applying 3D printing concepts to nanotechnology could bring similar advantages to nanofabrication – speed, less waste, economic viability – than it is expected to bring to manufacturing technologies.

In addition, pre-patterned micro- or nanostructures could be used as substrates, allowing researchers to realize unprecedented manufacturing flexibility, functionality and complexity at the nanoscale.

Researchers in Korea have now shown that nanoscale 3D objects such as free-standing nanowalls can by constructed by an additive manufacturing scheme. Even without the motion of the substrate, nanojets are spontaneously laid down and piled to yield nanowalls. ...

7. BBC: Tiny motors controlled inside human cell

For the first time, scientists have placed tiny motors inside living human cells and steered them magnetically. ...

8. Extreme Tech: This single-atom engine breaks the laws of physics, could drive progress in quantum computing

A new invention from Germany’s University of Mainz is not only the world’s smallest engine by an enormous margin, it may have broken a theoretical limit for engine efficiency. The device, a so-called “atomic engine,” produces power thanks to the movements of just a single atom trapped and manipulated. It’s an incredible achievement that, while not particularly useful for engineering in the short term, could revolutionize our understanding of the quantum world. Plus, it’s really neat. ...

9. Re/Code: 3-D Printing’s Next Frontier: Mass Customization

The next evolution of 3-D printing may well be what some call “mass customization,” where customers get to contribute to the design process of a product like a necklace, an orthotic footbed, headphones or a toy. By printing one piece at a time, it can fit the buyer’s identity, shape or preference, and their input becomes part of the creation process.

At a basic level, mass customization is kind of like the next level of printing a face on a mug. Now, you could make the mug from scratch with a relief of the face laid into the material like a sort of personal Mount Rushmore. Or you could dream bigger.

Unlike traditional factories, which are optimized for making large quantities of the same thing and so have minimum orders and set-up costs, 3-D printers create individual objects by painstakingly layering material on top of itself.

As Shapeways marketing director Carine Carmy put it to Re/code, “The printer doesn’t care whether it’s 1,000 of one thing or one of 1,000 things.” ...

10. Huff Post Tech: 3D Printing Has Started A Revolution

... Few companies grasp the coming upheaval. Perhaps because 3D printing, an innovation that can come across as a curiosity, is propelling this disruption. Yet, these printers, which churn out objects by laying thin layer after thin layer of metal, plastics or other materials on top of each other, won't tip the scale alone.

It's their collision with two other disruptive technologies -- intelligent robotics and open source electronics -- that will bring an end to the era of big and complex global supply chains. Together, they're going to usher in the digitalization of manufacturing, by creating flexible, fast, local supply chains underpinned by software. ...

11. Scientific American: Robotic Surgery Opens Up

If the open-source approach to building robot surgeons can cut costs and improve performance, patients will increasingly find them at the other end of the scalpel ...

12. The Skin Gun

Remarkable advancement in treating burn victims.

13. Huff Post Impact: This New Product May Drastically Change The Battlefield For The Better

U.S. combat troops may soon benefit from faster and more effective relief from gunshot wounds on the battlefield.

The U.S. Army has requested expedited approval from the FDA for XStat, a new product that has the potential to decrease troop casualties during warfare. The product acts as a modified syringe -- injecting specially coated sponges into deep tissue wounds to stop hemorrhaging, Popular Science reports. ...

14. Business Insider: Number Of Test-Tube Babies Born In US Hits Record Percentage

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More test-tube babies were born in the United States in 2012 than ever before, and they constituted a higher percentage of total births than at any time since the technology was introduced in the 1980s, according to a report released on Monday. ...

15. Huffington Post: What Percentage Of Our Brains Do We Actually Use? Popular Myth Debunked In TED-Ed Video

It's commonly said that we humans use only about 10 percent of our brains, with some people attributing Einstein's brilliance to his ability to stretch that paltry figure to 15 percent.

But in the video above, neurologist Dr. Richard Cytowic debunks these familiar notions, arguing that brain regions once believed to be "silent" are actually humming with activity.

What exactly do these "silent" regions do? According to Cytowic, they're intimately involved with our ability to plan, make decisions, adapt to evolving situations, and reason abstractly. And evidence suggests that at any moment up to 16 percent of our brain cells are active. ...

16. Associated Press: Ancient baby DNA suggests tie to Native Americans

NEW YORK (AP) -- The DNA of a baby boy who was buried in Montana 12,600 years ago has been recovered, and it provides new indications of the ancient roots of today's American Indians and other native peoples of the Americas.

It's the oldest genome ever recovered from the New World. Artifacts found with the body show the boy was part of the Clovis culture, which existed in North America from about 13,000 years ago to about 12,600 years ago and is named for an archaeological site near Clovis, N.M. ...

17. Live Science: Mother Lode' of Amazingly Preserved Fossils Discovered in Canada

A treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada's Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth, scientists say. ...

18. Christian Science Monitor: When nearly everything on Earth died in the blink of an eye

Scientists have determined that the Permian extinction – the greatest mass die-off in the history of our planet so far – lasted just 60,000 years, an instant in geological time. ...

19. Newser: Source of Stonehenge's Rocks Pinpointed

For nine decades, it's been established that many of Stonehenge's smaller rocks hail from the Preseli Hills in Wales. Now, a newly published study says that we've been wrong about an outcrop that has been accepted as a specific source since 1923. And the new research, published in February's issue of Journal of Archaeological Science,suggests the rocks—known as bluestones, of which there are many types—may not have been transported there by humans at all. As head researcher Dr. Richard Bevins explains, in 1923, geologist H.H. Thomas identified Carn Meini as the source of spotted dolerite bluestones, but a new analysis of the rocks' chemical makeup has fingered Carn Goedog as the true home of at least 55% of those used at Stonehenge, reports Planet Earth. ...

20. USA Today: Genetically engineered crops in nearly 12% of fields

Even as some U.S. consumers reject foods containing ingredients from genetically modified plants, farmers continue to embrace the technology. In 2013, crops grown from seed engineered to withstand weed killers, kill pests or resist diseases made up 11.7% of fields planted worldwide, a report released Thursday says. ...

21: BBC News: Genetically modified potatoes 'resist late blight'

British scientists have developed genetically modified potatoes that are resistant to the vegetable's biggest threat - blight....

22. My Science Academy: Scientists resurrect extinct frog that gives birth through its mouth

Scientists have resurrected an extinct frog species, that gives birth through its mouth, by transplanting its DNA into the eggs of another frog species.

23. Scotsman: Ten myths concerning nuclear power

Civil nuclear power’s historical links with nuclear weapons (and Chernobyl, Fukushima and suchlike) colours our perceptions of this important source of energy. We don’t eschew high explosives for their many valuable uses because they can kill people when abused. We keep driving cars despite the daily death toll.

The fruits of technology always present us with the Faustian dilemma of use for good or evil. The safe application of knowledge depends on the effectiveness of democracy, regulation and governance. Civil nuclear power suffers from its unfamiliarity to the public. This needs correcting by its promoters and by those in a position to influence public attitudes; they need to engage effectively with the public and encourage nuclear opponents to adopt an objective approach to the evidence.

1. Too dangerous? Objective examination of accident statistics for all fuels for deaths per unit of energy transformed shows that civil nuclear power generation has the best safety record. That includes the consequences of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

2. Causes cancer? Risks of cancer due to exposure to radiological hazards from civil nuclear power are extremely low, much lower than the risks from granite in Aberdeen, or from the use of diagnostic and therapeutic radioactivity in medicine (risks which are still heavily outweighed by the benefits). Scientists recognise that nuclear radiation limits are actually set lower than necessary. ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demography Links

1. Business Insider: These Maps Show The Geography Of Interracial Marriage

This map shows white and African American marriages. Go to the article to see maps for other ethnicities.

2. PBS: Study finds that divorce rate rises as economy improves

... The divorce rate dipped from 2.09 percent to 1.95 percent between 2008 and 2009, the Times says, before rising to 1.98 percent in 2010 and 2011. ...

3. CDC: U.S. fertility rate hit historic low in 2012

The 2012 general fertility rate declined to 63.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44, another historic low for the United States. The total fertility rate declined 1 %, to 1,880.5 births per 1,000 women in 2012. ...

4. CNN: Why abortions are way down

The U.S. abortion rate is at its lowest point since 1973. In 2011, there were fewer than 17 terminations for every 1,000 women; a fall of 13% since 2008 and only a little higher than when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. ...

... According to researchers from the Guttmacher Institute, which released the new study, the latest decline is largely the result of improved birth control. In tough economic times, they argue, people tend to pay greater attention to contraception because they are more aware of the potential material costs of becoming pregnant. Also, the arrival of new kinds of contraceptives on the market, such as long-term intrauterine devices, means people aren't relying on pills and condoms that can fail. ...

5. Atlantic: Map: What Country Does Your State's Life Expectancy Resemble?

As a side note, notice how close the rates of many developing nations are to the USA rate 79.7.

6. Forbes: Study: Cancer Rates Rising Across The Globe

... Despite all the advances in cancer medicine over the last few decades, cancer rates are rising. Globally, one in five men and one in six women will develop cancer before the age of 75. One in eight men and one in 12 women will die from the disease. But there’s some encouraging news, too. Many of these cases, say the WHO, could be averted with tools that are easily within our reach: Lifestyle and behavior changes.

In 2012, the WHO estimates that the worldwide cancer burden had increased to 14 million new cases per year, and included 8.2 million deaths. The number of new cases of cancer, they say, will likely rise to 22 million cases annually within the next 20 years. ...

7. BBC: Measles global deaths decline by 78%, WHO estimates

New figures from the WHO suggest that around 13.8 million deaths were prevented during this time and reported cases declined by 77%. ...

... Reported cases of measles worldwide declined from 853,480 to 226,722 over the same time.

Currently, 84% of the world's infants receive the first dose of measles vaccine before their first birthday, according to the WHO. ...

8. Business Insider: America's Obesity Crisis Is Ending — As Long As You're Not Poor

... Obesity is decreasing among adolescents who come from well-educated families, but it has continued to increase in poor teens. Looking at the obesity rate overall, this reads as a plateau. ...

9. Atlantic Cities: Why Big Cities Matter in the Developing World

Half the world's population lives in cities today, a figure that will increase to 70 percent by 2050. In that same time period, McKinsey Global Institute projects that the economic output of the 600 largest cities and metro areas is projected to grow $30 trillion, accounting for two-thirds of all global growth.

Economists and urbanists have long noted the connection between urbanization and economic development. ...

... But it has been difficult to get at the precise ways that global cities relate to productivity and economic development, mainly because of the lack of comprehensive, systematic, and comparable data. Aside from estimates of their populations, none of the major statistical agencies — the United Nations, the World Bank, or others — collect comparable economic data for the world's urban areas.

Fortunately, the Brookings Institution's Global MetroMonitor has compiled data on GDP per capita for the world’s 300 largest metropolitan economies, most recently through 2012. These metros account for nearly one-half (48 percent) of global output, while being home to less than one in five (19 percent) of its people. Undertaken in collaboration with researchers from the London School of Economics, these data are based on assessments from Moody's Analytics and Oxford Economics. ...

10. Business Insider: This Fascinating GIF Shows America's Foreign-Born Population Since 1850

11. New Geography: Moving South and West? Metropolitan America in 2042

The United States could have three more megacities (metropolitan areas over 10 million) by 2042, according to population projections released by the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston  are projected to join megacities New York and Los Angeles as their metropolitan area populations rise above 10 million. At the projected growth rates, Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, and Riverside-San Bernardino could pass the threshold by 2060. The population projections were prepared for USCM by Global Insight IHS. ...

12. Business Insider: This Map Shows How The Center Of America Keeps Moving

13. Business Insider: Americans Are Still Moving To The Suburbs

According to the Census Bureau's most recent release on inter-county migration shows that in some of the nation's largest cities, the trend is to move out to far-flung suburbs. The Census keeps track of population flows between different counties by using data from the 2007-2011 American Community Survey.

14. Atlantic Cities: The Geography of the American Dream

15. New Geography: Rich, Poor, and Unequal Zip Codes

16. Business Insider: This Map Suggests Gentrification In San Francisco Is Caused By Childless Tech Workers And Their Company Buses

We recently showed you a set of maps showing how the tech sector in Silicon Valley is distorting the real estate market around it, all the way into San Francisco. The richest people live around Palo Alto, near the big tech company headquarter campuses, but the highest per-square-foot prices for real estate are in San Francisco.

What appears to be happening is that tech workers whose corporate campuses are in Silicon Valley are choosing to live in the city and commute to work, often by private company shuttle bus. Their demand for housing in San Francisco is pushing up prices there. ...

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

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

Economics Links

1.  Brookings: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030

2. Carpe Diem: World trade and output both reached new all-time record highs in November and are nearly 10% above previous peaks

3. PBS Newshour: More than 200 million people were unemployed in the world in 2013

Worldwide, the number of unemployed people rose by 5 million in 2013 to 202 million, according to the International Labor Organization’s Global Employment Trends report. The global unemployment ratio of youth to adults has reached a new high. The jobless rate for 15- to 24-year-olds hit 13.1 percent in 2013 (or 74.5 million), nearly three times the adult rate.

The organization predicts unemployment will worsen, with 215 million jobless by 2018. Roughly 40 million net jobs will be added each year, the ILO estimates, but that won’t be enough to absorb the 42.6 million people expected to enter the labor force each year. ...

4. Conversable Economist: Limited U.S. Power in a Globalizing Economy

Just to be clear, the U.S. economy is not becoming a economic minnow like Belize or Burundi. But 65 years ago, as the high-income countries climbed out of the wreckage left by World War II and today's emerging economies had not yet engaged in the global economy, the U.S. economy had an extraordinary time of dominance. For a time in the 1960s, it was common to hear that the planned economy of the USSR would outstrip the U.S. economy. In the 1970s and into the 1980, Japan was going to rule the world economy. Around 2000 and the launch of the euro, there was talk about the economic rise of the European Union. But now, we are seeing the rise of a multipolar and distributed world economy, with faster growth happening in the emerging economies, but with stronger linkages of trade and global supply chains reaching across the world economy. The U.S. can certainly be an active and leading participant in shaping the world's economic future. But neither the U.S., nor some combination of high-income countries around the world, has the power to dictate what configurations will emerge.

5. Business Insider: Here's A Chart Of Interest Rates Going Back To 3000 BC

6. PBS: Is the famous ‘paradox of choice’ a myth? Barry Schwartz

"Paradox of choice" is tha notion that too many choices become overwhelming and make life decisions less satisying.

... Often people choose on the basis of essentially irrelevant features of plans, just because the relevant features are too complex to evaluate. Has anyone ever suggested that the sensible alternative to too many options is a single option? Absolutely and unequivocally not. Psychology has known about “single option aversion” for a half century. With too few options, there is the risk that none will be satisfactory, whereas with too many, there is the risk of paralysis, confusion and dissatisfaction.

The trick is to find the middle ground — the “sweet spot” — that enables people to benefit from variety and not be paralyzed by it. Choice is good, but there can be too much of a good thing. Adam Grant and I recently published a paper suggesting that this “too much of a good thing” phenomenon is pervasive in psychology. ...

7. TED: Paul Piff - Does money make you mean?

"It's amazing what a rigged game of Monopoly can reveal. In this entertaining but sobering talk, social psychologist Paul Piff shares his research into how people behave when they feel wealthy. (Hint: badly.) But while the problem of inequality is a complex and daunting challenge, there's good news too. (Filmed at TEDxMarin.)"

8. Forbes: Downton Abbey Makes A Powerful Case For Economic Freedom

... One of the great things about Downton Abbey is that it allows fans to escape their worries and fantasize about life on a luxurious estate in early 20^th century England. But the truth is, few of us could tolerate what we’d be forced to live with, and live without, in that world. ...

9. Carpe Diem: The middle class is shrinking ... because they are moving into the upper class! Census data on income distribution reveal evidence of rising income levels for a rising share of American households

10. AEI: This chart shows how tough it is for the poor to recover from a bad start in life

11. Business Insider: Millennials Are The Most Financially Conservative Generation Since The Great Depression

... According to a new report from investment banking company UBS, Millennials are the most financially conservative generation to come around since the Great Depression. The report, which focused on investors between the ages of 21 and 36, found that Millennials are risk averse when it comes to investing — dedicating 52% of their investment portfolios to cash, compared to 23% cash for other investors. They are also more likely to believe that working hard (69%) and living frugally (45%) puts you on the path to success rather than long-term investing (28%). ...

12. NPR: The Middle Class Took Off 100 Years Ago ... Thanks To Henry Ford?

January 1914 was a frigid month in Detroit — much like January 2014 has been, but nonetheless thousands lined up in the bitter cold outside to take Henry Ford up : $5 a day, for eight hours of work in a bustling factory.

That was more than double the average factory wage at that time, and for U.S. workers it was one of the defining moments of the 20th century. Five dollars in 1914 translates to roughly $120 in today's money. While many economists say today's employers could take some pointers from Ford, they also say 2014 is a totally different world for U.S. businesses and workers. ...

... "It was mainly to stabilize the workforce. And it sure did," Kreipke says. "And raised the bar all over the world."

He says to understand why Ford thought this was a smart move in January 1914, you have to go back to another huge shift that happened a few months earlier: By 1913, Model T production totaled 200,000 — a feat made possible by the creation of the first moving assembly line. Conveyor belts transported small parts to workers, each of whom performed a specific task.

This tremendously sped up production, but Ford still had a problem: While he had standardized production, he hadn't standardized his workforce. Now, he didn't need particularly skilled workers; he just needed ones who would do the same repetitive, specialized tasks hour after hour, day after day.

Kreipke says there was chronic absenteeism and lots of worker turnover. So Ford gambled that higher wages would attract better, more reliable workers. ...

... "Today, overwhelmingly employers view the lowest wage as the most competitive wage," Shaiken says.

These days, global supply chains feed a hypercompetitive auto industry where no one wants to give up even an inch of ground, and keeping up with technology takes precedent over stabilizing the workforce. This just isn't Henry Ford's economy anymore, Shaiken says.

"There are very real economic pressures out there that push down on wages," he says. "So it's not a simple story, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a core truth into what Ford found." ...

13. Business Insider: An Economist Explains Why Wage Growth Is Poised To Take Off

14. Conversable Economist: U.S. Household Finances Rebound

15. Greg Mankiw: Does income inequality increase mortality?

Angus [Deaton] writes the following (emphasis added):

Darren Lubotsky and I ⁷ have investigated the relationship between income inequality, race, and mortality at both the state and metropolitan statistical area level. In both the state and the city data, mortality is positively and significantly correlated with almost any measure of income inequality. Because whites have higher incomes and lower mortality rates than blacks, places where the population has a large fraction of blacks are also places where both mortality and income inequality are relatively high. However, the relationship is robust to controlling for average income (or poverty rates) and also holds, albeit less strongly, for black and white mortality separately. Nevertheless, it turns out that race is indeed the crucial omitted variable. In states, cities, and counties with a higher fraction of African-Americans, white incomes are higher and black incomes are lower, so that income inequality (through its interracial component) is higher in places with a high fraction black. It is also true that both white and black mortality rates are higher in places with a higher fraction black and that, once we control for the fraction black, income inequality has no effect on mortality rates, a result that has been replicated by Victor Fuchs, Mark McClellan, and Jonathan Skinner⁹ using the Medicare records data. This result is consistent with the lack of any relationship between income inequality and mortality across Canadian or Australian provinces, where race does not have the same salience. Our finding is robust; it holds for a wide range of inequality measures; it holds for men and women separately; it holds when we control for average education; and it holds once we abandon age-adjusted mortality and look at mortality at specific ages. None of this tells us why the correlation exists, and what it is about cities with substantial black populations that causes both whites and blacks to die sooner.

In a review of the literature on inequality and health, I note that Wilkinson's original evidence, which was (and in many quarters is still) widely accepted showed a negative cross-country relationship between life expectancy and income inequality, not only in levels but also, and more impressively, in changes. But subsequent work has shown that these findings were the result of the use of unreliable and outdated information on income inequality, and that they do not appear if recent, high quality data are used. There are now also a large number of individual level studies exploring the health consequences of ambient income inequality and none of these provide any convincing evidence that inequality is a health hazard. Indeed, the only robust correlations appear to be those among U.S. cities and states (discussed above) which, as we have seen, vanish once we control for racial composition. I suggest that inequality may indeed be important for health, but that income inequality is less important than other dimensions, such as political or gender inequality.¹⁰

16. Pew Research: There's More to the Story of the Shrinking (Gender) Pay Gap

17. The Daily Beast: No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men

... In its fact-checking column on the State of the Union, the Washington Post included the president’s mention of the wage gap in its list of dubious claims. “There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women… make it difficult to make simple comparisons.” ...

...  Much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors. Early childhood educators and social workers can expect to earn around $36,000 and $39,000, respectively. By contrast, petroleum engineering and metallurgy degrees promise median earnings of $120,000 and $80,000. Not many aspiring early childhood educators would change course once they learn they can earn more in metallurgy or mining. The sexes, taken as a group, are somewhat different. Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths.

But here is the mystery. These and other differences in employment preferences and work-family choices have been widely studied in recent years and are now documented in a mountain of solid empirical research. By now the President and his staff must be aware that the wage gap statistic has been demolished. This is not the first time the Washington Post has alerted the White House to the error. Why continue to use it? ...

18. Atlantic: How When Harry Met Sally Explains Inequality

A new study says that educated people marrying each other has increased inequality by 25 percent.

19. Reuters: The real future of U.S. manufacturing

... The assertion that the United States, or any nation, requires continued investment in the technologies that will drive future production is indisputable. On that score, at least, the Obama White House is fighting the proverbial good fight.

The contention, however, that these technologies and the factories that harness them for production will be sources of well-paid, solidly middle-class jobs, is flawed. In our political debates, we maintain the comforting fiction that a manufacturing revival can and will go hand-in-hand with a jobs revival. Yet, as Obama’s initiative shows, the two can be — and increasingly are — uncoupled.

The issue is not the hollowing-out of manufacturing as defined by less production. Yes, many less expensive, simpler products are now made more cheaply elsewhere and are unlikely to be made in the United States anytime soon — even with the “on-shoring” of manufacturing. Though China ceases  to be the place of low-cost production, Vietnam, the Philippines and who knows where else (even Mexico) will be more attractive for apparel, furniture, electronics and anything plastic for a long time to come.

The high-end production that these new U.S. innovation hubs seek to promote is indeed in demand around the world. It is something where, as yet, China and other low-cost manufacturing centers have not excelled. This is why China actually imports considerable billions of higher-end equipment – particularly from Japan and Germany. So it is true that the United States could have a competitive advantage, especially given the plethora of research universities and the wealth of highly-educated talent that can be used for just this type of production.

But all this is not the same as a job creator for a workforce of at least 120 million and counting in nation of more than 320 million people. These high-tech factories might employ hundreds of people in conjunction with industrial robots, using sophisticated software systems for design and production. These factory workers bear little resemblance to the 1950s line workers doing rote tasks. They are more like Silicon Valley engineers or lab technicians. These are high-skill jobs — and not nearly as plentiful as the factory jobs of the past. ...

Related: Bloomberg - Factory Jobs Are Gone. Get Over It

... In 1953 manufacturing accounted for 28 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 1980 that had dropped to 20 percent, and it reached 12 percent in 2012. Over that time, U.S. GDP increased from $2.6 trillion to $15.5 trillion, which means that absolute manufacturing output more than tripled in 60 years. Those goods were produced by fewer people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of employees in manufacturing was 16 million in 1953 (about a third of total nonfarm employment), 19 million in 1980 (about a fifth of nonfarm employment), and 12 million in 2012 (about a tenth of nonfarm employment).

Service industries—hotels, hospitals, media, and accounting—have taken up the slack. Even much of the value generated by U.S. manufacturing involves service work—about a third of the total. More than half of all people still employed in the U.S. manufacturing sector work in such services as management, technical support, and sales. ...

 20. PBS: Paul Soloman on Man vs the Machine: Will Human Workers Become Obsolete?

 21. Huff Post: The End of Capitalism

Interesting thoughts. I don't know if he has it just right, but I do think he is correct that we may be on the verge of something as transformative to capitalism as industrialization was to agricultural societies:

... The location of creation has switched. Under industrial capitalism, machines operating centrally created riches. James Watt perfected his steam engine, but then the machines took on a life of their own - the machines themselves, and machine-like corporations built around them, churned out money. People danced around the edges, enlarging and improving the machines, putting them together in large mills or mines to turbo-charge productivity, adapting their pace of work to that of the machines. The machines and the capitalists were in charge.

Now it is not machines or their owners, but creative individuals who are center-stage. People not only invent new technology - they are the new technology. As sociologist Manuel Castells says, "For the first time in history, the human mind is a direct productive force ... Computers, communication systems, and genetic decoding and programming are all amplifiers and extensions of the human mind."
In the West, knowledge has become personalized. Open innovation requires it. The effect of open innovation is to transfer initiative and wealth from established corporations to new ones, and from shareholders to individuals. From thought to action, individuals are at the heart of creation, including wealth creation. Every element of the unique human personality takes part in creation - intellect, imagination, emotion, calculation, empathy, and the ability to evoke enthusiasm from other seriously talented people. Each person does it their way. Steve Jobs may not have been the nicest person in Silicon Valley, but he got amazingly talented people to distort reality and create previously unimaginable products. The individual is everything.

In all kinds of ways, therefore, we are moving away from capitalism, from an economy centered on capital and large, established, hierarchical corporations. But we are not moving from private hierarchy to public hierarchy, from capitalism to socialism or communism. Free enterprise is alive and well - arguably too alive and well. The new system is even more market-oriented than capitalism, and much more decentralized. It is as decentralized as any system can possibly be, because it is decentralized to individuals, and above all to a tiny minority of new superstar individuals. Welcome to the personalized economy. ...

22. Carpe Diem: Cash for kidneys will solve the organ shortage, save money spent on dialysis, and then we’ll wonder why it took so long

(Not necessarily agreeing here. Just reporting.)

Economists Gary Becker and Julio Elias make the case in today’s WSJ that a market for organs and donor compensation of about $15,000 would eliminate the growing kidney shortage.  As the chart above shows, the kidney waiting list has nearly doubled from 50,000 in 2001 to almost 99,000 today, while the number of annual kidney transplant operations has increased only slightly from 14,279 in 2001 to fewer than 17,000 in 2013. Over the last eight years, kidney transplants have remained stuck at slightly below 17,000 per year, while the kidney waiting list has swelled by almost 30,000.  Therefore, there an additional 30,000 patients today (99,000) than in 2006 (69,600) competing for the same number of transplants. And that’s why, as Becker and Elias point out, the average waiting time for a kidney has increased to 4.5 years from 2.9 years a decade ago. The authors argue that “Paying donors for their organs would finally eliminate the supply-demand gap.”

Isn’t donor compensation immoral? No, according to Becker and Elias (emphasis added: ...

Science and Technology Links

I've gotten very behind on my links pages. Here is my attempt to catch up on science and technology links. Sorry for the length, but there is some good stuff here. I'll have another post with environment links shortly.

1. Ancient Origins.net: Entire Neanderthal genome finally mapped – with amazing results

This incredible research has revealed the following:

• There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years. Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
• Ancient human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly complex family tree.
• The Denisovans share up to 8 percent of their genome with a "super achaic" and totally unknown species that dates back around 1 million years.
• The results conflict with the theory that modern humans arose completely from one "out of Africa" migration more than 60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
• About 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of all people with European ancestry can be traced to Neanderthals.
• Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan DNA.
• 6 percent of the genome of Australian Aborigines and indigenous Papua New Guineans belong to the Denisovan species.
• The Han Chinese, native to East Asia, and the Dai people of southern China are related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
• Some indigenous people from Brazil, such as the Karitiana, are not only related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but they show relatively high genetic contributions from the Denisovans.
• Only 87 genes responsible for making proteins in cells are different between modern humans and Neanderthals. Intriguingly, some of the gene differences involve ones involved in both immune responses and the development of brain cells in people.
• Somewhere within these 87 genes may lay the answer to why Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct.
• And least consequential of all, the Neanderthal woman's parents were related, possibly half-siblings, or an uncle and niece. As evolutionary biologist Mattias Jakobsson stated, the incest finding "is more of an anecdote". The results from one individual cannot be applied to an entire species, in the same way that the recent discovery of an incest family in Australia does not apply to the whole of the human race.

- See more at: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/entire-neanderthal-genome-finally-mapped-amazing-results-001138#sthash.XmA90FGI.dpuf

Here are a few of the findings:

• There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years. Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
• Ancient human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly complex family tree.
• The results conflict with the theory that modern humans arose completely from one "out of Africa" migration more than 60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
• Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan DNA.

2. Science: How Farming Reshaped Our Genomes

Before farming began to spread across Europe some 8500 years ago, the continent's occupants were hunter-gatherers. They were unable to digest starch and milk, according to a new ancient DNA study of a nearly 8000-year-old human skeleton from Spain. But these original occupants did already possess immune defenses against some of the diseases that would later become the scourge of civilization, and they apparently had dark skin. The findings are helping researchers understand what genetic and biological changes humans went through as they made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. ...

3. Atlantic: Male and Female Brains Really Are Built Differently

By analyzing the MRIs of 949 people aged 8 to 22, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, while female brains are more interconnected between hemispheres. ...

... By analyzing the subjects' MRIs using diffusion imaging, the scientists explored the brains' fiber pathways, the bundles of axons that act as highways routing information from one part of the mind to the other. After grouping the image by sex and inspecting the differences between the two aggregate "male" and "female" pictures, the researchers found that in men, fiber pathways run back and forth within each hemisphere, while in women they tend to zig-zag between the left, or "logical," and right, or "creative," sides of the brain.

Because female brains seem to have a stronger connections between their logical and intuitive parts, "when women are asked to do particularly hard tasks, they might engage very different parts of the brain," said Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the report. "Men might over-engage just one part of the brain."

This could mean, for example, that men tend to see issues and resolve them directly, due to the strong connections between the "perception" and "action" areas of their brains, while women might be more inclined to combine logic and intuition when solving a problem. ...

4. Atlantic Cities: How Far You Could Get From New York in One Day, From 1800 to Today

5. Huff Post Tech: Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone

6. Huff Post Tech: Isaac Asimov's Predictions For 2014 From 50 Years Ago Are Eerily Accurate

Fifty years ago, American scientist and author Isaac Asimov published a story in The New York Times that listed his predictions for what the world would be like in 2014.

Asimov wrote more than 500 books in his lifetime, including science fiction novels and nonfiction scientific books, so he was well-versed in thinking about the future.

In his article, called "Visit to the World's Fair of 2014," Asimov got a whole bunch of his guesses right -- and his other predictions are making us a little envious of his imagined future. ...

7. Huff Post Tech: This 1981 News Report About The Internet Is Adorable, But Totally Wrong

As you might have guessed, they get virtually nothing right. Memes, cat videos, Miley Cyrus, even Facebook -- all are mysteries to the people of the past. Take a look and glory in your superiority. But beware - the world of 2034 is laughing at you behind your back.

 8. New York Times: Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All

... Hampton found that, rather than isolating people, technology made them more connected. "It turns out the wired folk — they recognized like three times as many of their neighbors when asked," Hampton said. Not only that, he said, they spoke with neighbors on the phone five times as often and attended more community events. Altogether, they were much more successful at addressing local problems, like speeding cars and a small spate of burglaries. They also used their Listserv to coordinate offline events, even sign-ups for a bowling league. Hampton was one of the first scholars to marshal evidence that the web might make people less atomized rather than more. Not only were people not opting out of bowling leagues — Robert Putnam's famous metric for community engagement — for more screen time; they were also using their computers to opt in. ...

…this was Hampton's most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It's not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston's Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. "The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles," Hampton writes. Men seem to be "taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine."

Across the board, Hampton found that the story of public spaces in the last 30 years has not been aloneness, or digital distraction, but gender equity. "I mean, who would've thought that, in America, 30 years ago, women were not in public the same way they are now?" Hampton said. "We don't think about that."...

9. Space.com: Scale of Universe Measured with 1-Percent Accuracy

WASHINGTON — An ultraprecise new galaxy map is shedding light on the properties of dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion.

A team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances to galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1 percent accuracy — an unprecedented measurement. ...

10. Atlantic: Almost No Americans Die From Lightning Strikes Anymore—Why?

In the lightning-death literature, one explanation has gained prominence: urbanization. Lightning death rates have declined in step with the rural population, and rural lightning deaths make up a far smaller percent of all lightning deaths (see figure at right). Urban areas afford more protection from lightning. Ergo, urbanization has helped make people safer from lightning.

11. Huff Post Science: Creationist Beliefs Linked To Personality Type In New Survey Of Churchgoers

... A new study suggests that people who believe in creationism are more likely to prefer to take in information via their senses versus via intuition. In contrast, religious believers who see the Bible's creation story as symbolic tend to be more intuitive. ...

12. Atlantic: Why Has Republican Belief in Evolution Declined So Much?

There's been a drop of more than 10 points—to just 43 percent—in the last four years. ...

... What does that leave? Maybe the gap represents an emotional response by Republicans to being out of power. Among others, Chris Mooney has argued that beliefs on politically contentious topics are often more rooted in opposition to perceived attacks than anything else—an instance of "motivated reasoning." Given that Democrats have controlled the White House and Senate since 2009, this could be backlash to the political climate, though it will be hard to tell until Republicans control Washington again.

Of course, motivated reasoning might help explain why many Democrats also believe in evolution.

13. Business Insider: MakerBot Launches' Mini' 3D Printer For Consumers For The Same Price As A Laptop

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis unveiled the "MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact 3D" today, a smaller, cheaper, simpler 3D printer that he believes will finally make all consumers want to start extruding corn-based plastic in their own homes, and printing objects on demand. ...

14. Mashable: The Answer to Affordable Housing Could Lie Within a 3D Printer

... The process involves a giant robot with a hanging nozzle and a flexible arm on a gantry-type crane — the whole rig is known as a "contour crafter" — above the foundation. The contour crafter then proceeds to layer concrete based on a computer-generated pattern. The layers eventually take shape into walls, embedded with all the necessary conduits and passages for electricity, plumbing and air conditioning.

The research team envisions a future where contour crafters could be used for disaster relief to build emergency housing and to create affordable housing for those who are displaced, homeless or in desperate living conditions. ...

15. Business Insider: Biotech Firm: We Will 3D Print A Human Liver In 2014

2014 could be a landmark year for an amazing medical technology: human organs built by 3D printers.

San Diego biotech firm Organovo promises that its "bioprinting" technology will successfully print a human liver by the end of 2014, the company told Computerworld's Lucas Mearian. ...

16. Conservable Economist: First Burger Grown from Stem Cells Served in London

"On August 5, 2013, the first hamburger grown from stem cells in a laboratory, and not in a cow, was served in London. ... If this technology continues to evolve and is deployed at scale, it will have significant social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications." Carolyn Mattick and Brad Allenby launch the discussion in "The Future of Meat," in the Fall 2013 Issues in Science and Technology.

To be sure, the technology isn't quite ready for fast food. "From an economic perspective, cultured meat is still an experimental technology. The first in vitro burger reportedly cost about $335,000 to produce and was made by possible by financial support from Google cofounder Sergey Brin." Mattick and Allenby discuss a number of technological challenges.

But the potential for altering the environmental footprint of meet the global demand for meat is remarkable. ...

17. Project Syndicate: The GMO Stigma

... In September, an eminent group of scientists called upon the scientific community to "stand together in staunch opposition to the violent destruction of required tests on valuable advances, such as golden rice, that have the potential to save millions" of people from "needless suffering and death." But this passionate appeal fails to address the fundamental problem: the unfounded notion that there is a meaningful difference between "genetically modified organisms" and their conventional counterparts.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe fact is that GMOs and their derivatives do not amount to a "category" of food products. They are neither less safe nor less "natural" than other common foods. Labeling foods derived from GMOs, as some have proposed, thus implies a meaningful difference where none exists – an issue that even regulators have acknowledged.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphHumans have been engaging in "genetic modification" through selection and hybridization for millennia. Breeders routinely use radiation or chemical mutagens on seeds to scramble a plant's DNA and generate new traits.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphA half-century of "wide cross" hybridizations, which involve the movement of genes from one species or genus to another, has given rise to plants – including everyday varieties of corn, oats, pumpkin, wheat, black currants, tomatoes, and potatoes – that do not and could not exist in nature. Indeed, with the exception of wild berries, wild game, wild mushrooms, and fish and shellfish, virtually everything in North American and European diets has been genetically improved in some way. ...

18. New York Times: Is Moore's Law Over? Designing the Next Wave of Computer Chips

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Not long after Gordon E. Moore proposed in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be etched on a silicon chip would continue to double approximately every 18 months, critics began predicting that the era of "Moore's Law" would draw to a close.

More than ever recently, industry pundits have been warning that the progress of the semiconductor industry is grinding to a halt — and that the theory of Dr. Moore, an Intel co-founder, has run its course.

If so, that will have a dramatic impact on the computer world. The innovation that has led to personal computers, music players and smartphones is directly related to the plunging cost of transistors, which are now braided by the billions onto fingernail slivers of silicon — computer chips — that may sell for as little as a few dollars each.

But Moore's Law is not dead; it is just evolving, according to more optimistic scientists and engineers. Their contention is that it will be possible to create circuits that are closer to the scale of individual molecules by using a new class of nanomaterials — metals, ceramics, polymeric or composite materials that can be organized from the "bottom up," rather than the top down. ...

19. Business Insider: Here's Why 'The Internet Of Things' Will Be Huge, And Drive Tremendous Value For People And Businesses

The Internet Of Things represents a major departure in the history of the Internet, as connections move beyond computing devices, and begin to power billions of everyday devices, from parking meters to home thermostats. 

Estimates for Internet of Things or IoT market value are massive, since by definition the IoT will be a diffuse layer of devices, sensors, and computing power that overlays entire consumer, business-to-business, and government industries. The IoT will account for an increasingly huge number of connections: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018. That year, it will be roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCs combined. ...

20. Extreme Tech: Cold fusion tech picked up by major US partner, prepares for launch in the American and Chinese energy markets

... Cold fusion, also known as low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), is a technology that promises to create huge amounts of green energy from very cheap fuel. In the case of Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyser), nickel and hydrogen are fused into copper — a process that has 10,000 times the energy density of gasoline, and 1,000 times the power density. For more background information on cold fusion/LENR, and why it's safer and cleaner than normal nuclear reactors, read our previous E-Cat story. Suffice it to say, the scientific community's main contention is whether this reaction is actually possible or not. Rossi says he's found a special catalyst that makes it possible; lots of other scientists, though, claim it's hogwash. (Read: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.) ...

21. Real Clear Science: Debunking Myths on Nuclear Power

... There are five declared and four other nuclear-armed countries (assuming Israel's warheads detonate). There are 31 nations with nuclear power stations (and 58 with research reactors). Only seven of the nine nuclear-armed countries have civilian power programs.

All of the technical factors can be circumvented with sufficient time and money. Uneconomic fuel cycles can be run and warheads built with high levels of radioactivity. However, no country has developed indigenous nuclear weapons after deploying civilian nuclear power stations.

Historically, if a country wants to produce a nuclear bomb, they build reactors especially for the job of making plutonium, and ignore civilian power stations.

22. Breaking Energy: Terawatt Era: Solar Technology's Next 40 Years

... Whereas the past 4 years saw an incredible halving of cost seven times, this will not continue. There may only be one halving left to achieve. The action will be in deployment, and it will be phenomenal. The next 40 years should see seven doublings of in-place capacity. In Solar 1.0, the megawatt-era has given way to today's gigawatt-era. In the next 40 years the gigawatt-era will give way to the terawatt-era. By 2054 we should see over 17 terawatts of solar capacity in place around the world, which would equate to more than 10% of global energy demand at that point. At an average installed cost of $1/watt (which we will have passed by then), this represents a $17 trillion opportunity. ...

23. Wired: Watch: How Super-Efficient Nanomaterials Could Herald a Design Revolution

The Great Pyramid of Giza is 174 meters tall and weighs 10 megatons. The Eiffel Tower is over twice that height but weighs just five and half kilotons–some 10 times lighter. The difference, according to materials scientist Julia Greer, is that "elements of architecture" were introduced into the design that allowed it to be stronger and more lightweight while using far less materials. Where the pyramids are four solid walls, the Eiffel Tower is more skeletal in structure–and vastly more efficient as a result. ...

 

The (Mostly) Improving State of the World

Washington Post: 40 charts that explain the world

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

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

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

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

 

Economics Links

1. The Atlantic: If You Really Care About Ending Poverty, Stop Talking About Inequality

Don’t mind the rich-poor gap. Statistical analysis shows three factors—overall income growth, marriages, and local government spending—matter most for poorer children chasing the American Dream. ...

... But for all the new attention devoted to the 1 percent, a new dataset from the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard and Berkeley suggests that, if we care about upward mobility overall, we’re vastly exaggerating the dangers of the rich-poor gap. Inequality itself is not a particularly potent predictor of economic mobility, as sociologist Scott Winship noted in a recent article with his colleague Donald Schneider based on their analysis of this data.

So what factors, at the community level, do predict if poor children will move up the economic ladder as adults? What explains, for instance, why the Salt Lake City metro area is one of the 100 largest metropolitan areas most likely to lift the fortunes of the poor and the Atlanta metro area is one of the least likely?

Harvard economist Raj Chetty, a principal investigator at the Equality of Opportunity Project, has pointed to economic and racial segregation, community density, the size of a community’s middle class, the quality of schools, community religiosity, and family structure, which he calls the “single strongest correlate of upward mobility.” ...

2. AEI Ideas: 70% of Americans born at the bottom never reach the middle

... But while intergenerational mobility has not worsened, it has failed to improve. Perhaps it would have worsened if not for the war on poverty, or perhaps we have not reduced poverty enough. More likely, income is less important for child mobility — and income inequality less consequential — than Great Society liberalism asserted.

We need a war on immobility — a bipartisan crusade to identify and address the barriers that leave 70 percent of poor children below the middle class as adults. ...

3. PBS: Poverty rates surge in American suburbs

... According to Kneebone, since 2000, the number of poor people living in suburbs has grown by 65 percent. 

For example, poverty is up by almost 16 percent in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.  Up more than 27 percent in the suburbs of providence.  Nearly 79 percent outside Seattle.  And in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, the number of poor has swelled almost 143 percent.  More poor people now live in America’s suburbs than in cities or in rural areas.

The main explanation for this shift is simply demographics.  Many more Americans have moved to suburbs in recent years, and that growth included low-income residents and new immigrants.  Other factors - suburbs are still recovering from the foreclosure and financial crises.  Kneebone says federal programs for the poor were mostly designed back in the 60’s with rural or urban communities in mind, and when hard times came to the suburbs, many weren’t prepared. ...

4. Family Studies: Why Working-Class Men Are Falling Behind

... All of these things mentioned above—early reliance on stimulating entertainment, lower educational attainment, disconnection from families and role models, and the attractions of different, “edgy” subcultures—contribute to a widening gulf between those more connected to family, work, and society, and those without these commitments. While men are losing connections, women continue to participate in the labor force, attend religious services more often, and belong to other community and civic organizations. This is partly because many have dependent children and need to support them, whereas men can to a large extent avoid this responsibility.

Men who are not committed to families enjoy all the options that a consumer culture gives them, have more independence and freedom, and thus are found in a wider array of subcultural activities that take men away from consistent work and commitment to families. At the same time that non–college-educated men have fewer economic opportunities, they have more opportunities to indulge in various activities. That’s a recipe for ever-widening gaps between these men and the rest of society.

 5. Business Insider: The Most Damning Chart That Shows How Far The Economy Still Has To Recover

6. New York Times: More U.S. Economists See Half-Full Glass

Record exports and the smallest trade deficit in four years. Healthier consumer spending, including the strongest annual increase in automobile sales since 2007, spurred by a booming stock market and an improving housing sector. And a slow but steady pickup in job creation that has pushed unemployment to its lowest level since 2008.

The confluence of all these forces in recent weeks has prompted economists to sharply revise their expectations for growth in late 2013 and early 2014, and prompted hopes that a more sustained economic expansion has finally arrived.

Plenty of caution is in order. It is a refrain that has been heard several times since the end of the Great Recession, and frustrated job seekers and income-stretched workers have plenty of reasons to be dubious about the upbeat forecasts.

Still, a series of arrows from disparate parts of the economy in both the United States and elsewhere around the world are finally pointing in the right direction, experts and policy makers say. ...

7. AP: Gloomy Americans foresee a downhill slide to 2050

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Ask people to imagine American life in 2050, and you'll get some dreary visions.

Whether they foresee runaway technology or runaway government, rampant poverty or vanishing morality, a majority of Americans predict a future worse than today.

Whites are particularly gloomy: Only 1 in 6 expects better times over the next four decades. Also notably pessimistic are middle-age and older people, those who earn midlevel incomes and Protestants, a new national poll finds. ...

8. Bloomberg: American Consumers in 2013 Most Upbeat Since Before Recession

American consumers in 2013 were more upbeat than at any time in the previous six years as views on the economy, finances and the buying climate improved.

The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index (COMFCOMF) averaged minus 31.4 for 2013, the highest since 2007, when it was minus 10.5. The weekly index fell for the first time since mid-November, dropping to minus 28.7 for the period ended Dec. 29, from minus 27.4.

An improved job market, higher stock prices and rising home values lifted sentiment at the end of the year and helped drive holiday retail shopping. Stronger wage and employment growth would help propel bigger gains in confidence and encourage Americans to boost spending, which accounts for almost 70 percent of the economy. ...

9. Conversable Economist: The Slowdown in Rising U.S. Healthcare Costs

...The red line makes two obvious points. First, the slowdown in rising health care costs started back around 2002 or 2003. Indeed, health care economists have been writing about it for a couple of years now, and OECD evidence point out that a similar slowdown seems to be occurring across high-income countries. Thus, eager claims by Obama administration officials about how the Affordable Care Act--although still far from fully implemented--is bringing down the rise in health care costs are a prime example of finding a parade, running to the front, and then claiming to lead the parade. As the writers of the Health Affairs article note: "The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which was enacted in March 2010, had a minimal impact on overall national health spending growth through 2012." ...

10. Conversable Economist: The median woman's wage to the median man's wage has been closing over time

11. Why Not Give Money Instead of a Gift?

"... Ariely, a good friend of Making Sense, whom we featured prominently in our segment about teaching kids how to save, most recently appeared in our segment on the economic waste of Christmas gift-giving, explaining why non-monetary gifts are more socially acceptable. Money's an awkward gift, and, as Ariely explains in the web-exclusive video above, a poor motivator. ..."

12. The Atlantic: Should Your Minimum Wage Depend on Your Age?

Speaking on Fox News recently, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer proposed what, to many, might have sounded like a rather novel compromise on the minimum wage. His idea? We should have two of them, a higher minimum for "breadwinners," and a lower minimum for everybody else.

Here was Krauthammer's thinking, paraphrased. It might be hard to feed a whole household on $7.25 an hour. But raising the minimum is most likely to hurt teenagers and minorities who rely on low-paid, entry-level jobs to get a foothold in the working world. So how do you lend a hand to hard-pressed families without penalizing the young? Force employers to pay the "breadwinners" more, and everybody else less. 

He called his two-tiered solution "a reasonable answer that Republicans and conservatives could offer." ...

... Klein is right that that whole "breadwinner" concept would probably be more trouble than it would be worth. But what if we tweaked the idea just a little bit, and based the minimum wage on something more straightforward, like a worker's age? 

We wouldn't be the first country to try it.  Take Australia. ...

13. Forbes: Raising Minimum Wage? How About Raising Employee Ownership?

With an eye towards the 2014 midterms, the administration is keen to talk about something other than health care and is banging the drum for raising the federal minimum wage.  Republicans — voicing concerns about job loss and impact on small businesses — will oppose an increase and the issue will go nowhere at the federal level.

For fair-minded policy makers interested in helping working families today – and not just pushing a campaign issue – there is a different answer. It is one that has bipartisan support and could actually get passed: encourage companies to provide greater ownership opportunities or revenue sharing to all their workers. ...

14. PBS: Who Counts as Poor in America?

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson announced a legislative agenda to wage "unconditional war on poverty in America." But how do we know what poverty is in America?

15. Here's How The U. S. Bureau Keeps Track Of Poverty In America

Demography Links

1. New York Times: Why Are Americans Staying Put?

... “This decline in migration has been going on for a long time now, through all sorts of ups and downs in the housing market,” said Greg Kaplan of Princeton University, who, along with Sam Schulhofer-Wohl of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has studied the issue in depth. But even with the pressure of high housing costs in many areas, Americans are moving less, Kaplan said. “That might explain why people are moving from San Francisco to, I don’t know, Houston,” he said. “But you’ve seen a decline in migration from Texas to California as well as California to Texas.”

This is not a short-term supply-and-demand issue or a side effect of a slow-growth economy or a shift in demographics. The change is deeper. Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl have won applause from other economists for developing a novel theory to explain this creeping inertia: labor markets in the United States have simply become more homogeneous. Earnings have become more similar across the country, meaning there is less incentive to move from one place to another in search of a raise. The country has also become less diverse, work-wise. Pick any two cities, and chances are they offer a more similar mix of jobs than they did 20 or 50 years ago. We have become less a nation of Pittsburghs and more a nation of Provos. ...

... Even so, many economists believe that if Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl’s narrative is right, there is reason to suspect that a less-mobile populace might not mean a less-dynamic economy. Workers haven’t stopped moving because housing prices or other financial or social concerns are holding them back. They’ve stopped moving because they just don’t see the need to. “Whether it’s a good thing depends on why,” Kolko said. “If your job prospects don’t depend on having to move someplace else, the decline in mobility might be a good thing.”

2. The Atlantic: Stuck: Why Americans Stopped Moving to the Richest States

... "Americans are moving far less often than in the past, and when they do migrate it is typically no longer from places with low wages to places with higher wages," Tim Noah wrote in Washington Monthly. "Rather, it’s the reverse." Why America lost her wanderlust is not entirely clear—perhaps dual-earner households make long moves less likely; perhaps the Great Recession pinned underwater homeowners on their plots—but those still wandering a ren't going to the right cities. ...

... Americans aren't simply moving to the states with the lowest unemployment (Oregon, Tennessee, and North Carolina all have jobless rates above the national average). More importantly, we aren't moving to states with the best records for low-income families getting ahead. In fact, we're often fleeing the best places for a upwardly mobile middle class. ...

... This doesn't make much sense if you envision American families rushing to the most promising metros. It does make sense if you see American families rushing to the most affordable homes. ...

3. Huffington Post: U.S. Population Grows At Slowest Rate Since The Great Depression

... The U.S. population grew by just 0.72 percent in the year ended July 1, 2013, the Census Bureau reported Monday. That’s the slowest growth rate since 1937. Population growth has hovered at super-low levels for the past few years, according to William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research organization. The trend is "troubling," Frey said, and is due largely to the weak economy. ...

4. New Geography: The Geography Of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs

One supposed trend, much celebrated in the media, is that younger people are moving back to the city, and plan to stay there for the rest of their lives. Retirees are reportedly following suit. ...

... But a close look at migration data reveals that the reality is much more complex. The millennial “flight” from suburbia has not only been vastly overexaggerated, it fails to deal with what may best be seen as differences in preferences correlated with life stages.

We can tell this because we can follow the first group of millennials who are now entering their 30s, and it turns out that they are beginning, like preceding generations, to move to the suburbs. ...

5. Business Insider: Female Mortality Rates Are One Of The Strangest And Most Disturbing Trends In The United States

Change in female mortality rates from 1992–96 to 2002–06 in US counties

6. Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States

Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data—remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century.

7. Forbes: What Would The U.S. Be Like If We Had 124 States?

8. NPR: Overweight People In Developing World Outnumber Those In Rich Countries

... "Over the last 30 years, the number of people who are overweight and obese in the developing world has tripled," says , of the Overseas Development Institute in London.

One-third of adults globally are now overweight compared with fewer than 23 percent in 1980, the report . And the number of overweight and obese people in the developing world now far overshadows the number in rich countries. ...

9. Economist: The high rate of suicide in Asia

 10. PBS Newshour: Japanese population declined by record number in 2013

The Japanese population, which has been shrinking for the last couple of years, declined by a record 244,000 people in 2013, according to health ministry estimates.

If the current trend persists, the BBC reports the country will lose a third of its population in the next 50 years. ...

 11. Real Clear World: Easing China's One-Child Policy Won't Stop Demographic Decline

In an attempt to mitigate a near-certain demographic future of rapid aging, shrinking labor force and critical gender imbalance, the Chinese government has adjusted its one-child policy. The decision demonstrates that, irrespective of a nation's politico-economic system, governments cannot avoid demography's juggernaut consequences. This mid-course correction in population policy will have marginal effect as China is aging at a much faster pace than occurred in other countries. This, along with a shrinking workforce and critical gender imbalance, will increasingly tax the government. ...

(Related: New Geography: China Failing its Families)

 12. Business Insider: These Facebook Maps Reveal Migration Trends Around The World

... The maps use two simple data points offered up by its 1 billion users — where you live and your hometown — to draw a map of how groups of people migrate from place to place. The Facebook Science team was looking specifically for “coordinated migration,” when a significant proportion of a population from one city moves collectively to another city. This could be the result of economics, wars, natural disasters or even state policies. ...

13. Atlantic Cities: Our Favorite Maps of 2013

Dustin Cable's stunning Racial Dot Map actually put every person in America (308,745,538 of us) on a map as individual dots of different colors.

14. Business Insider: Where Drivers Drive On The Left And Where They Drive On The Right

15. Top Public Health Risks

 

Charting the Life Expectancies of the World's Countries

Atlantic Cities: Charting the Life Expectancies of the World's Countries

What's the best nation in the world to live in if you enjoy, ya know, staying alive?

That would be Monaco, where a person born in 2013 can expect to live on average up to age 90. Conversely, the worst place to be born last year in terms of suffering an early death is Chad, where the typical life stops a year before one's 50th birthday.

These insights are crammed with dozens of others into "Life Expectancy at Birth," a fascinating new visualization from data artist Marcelo Duhalde. ...

A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops

New York Times: A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops

... Like some others on the nine-member Council, Greggor Ilagan was not even sure at the outset of the debate exactly what genetically modified organisms were: living things whose DNA has been altered, often with the addition of a gene from a distant species, to produce a desired trait. But he could see why almost all of his colleagues had been persuaded of the virtue of turning the island into what the bill's proponents called a "G.M.O.-free oasis."

"You just type 'G.M.O.' and everything you see is negative," he told his staff. Opposing the ban also seemed likely to ruin anyone's re-election prospects. ...

...At stake is how to grow healthful food most efficiently, at a time when a warming world and a growing population make that goal all the more urgent.

Scientists, who have come to rely on liberals in political battles over stem-cell research, climate change and the teaching of evolution, have been dismayed to find themselves at odds with their traditional allies on this issue. Some compare the hostility to G.M.O.s to the rejection of climate-change science, except with liberal opponents instead of conservative ones.

"These are my people, they're lefties, I'm with them on almost everything," said Michael Shintaku, a plant pathologist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, who testified several times against the bill. "It hurts."...

This is a very interesting article with implications for how we wrestle with many complex issues. The scientific perspective on stem-cell research, climate change, and evolution dovetails well with the meta-narrative liberals have of the world. G.M.O.'s (and I'll add nuclear power) do not. This tells us that despite progressive pretensions of having a superior commitment to science, they don't. Emotion enters into decision-making ("You a discrediting my narrative!"). They operate not irrationally but within bounded rationality, reason based on a limited understanding consistent with how they generally understand the world to operate. They rely on heuristics to make sense of complex issues. They are not driven by science to their positions, but rather the science conveniently corresponds with a previously held narrative on some issues (and they are quite happy to appropriate that science in furtherance of their narrative.) But when science runs counter to the narrative, it is the narrative, not science, which is determinative. In short, liberals are just like the rest of us: humans.

Over the years, I've become increasingly aware of how hard it is to move past my initial emotional reactions when my metanarratives are challenges and press deeper to get at the truth. Personal disorientation is often stressful. But I also realized early in life that the search for truth is often socially disruptive. The truth of these complex issues is frequently unfriendly to all metanarratives in one way or another, and as soon as you step on someone's metanarrative, you risk relationships. While I'm not intimidated by dealing with conflict, perpetual battles certainly bring no joy. And that is precisely where the pursuit of truth often leads.

I have a lot of admiration for Greggor Ilagan in this story. I'm sure I'm more right of center than he is, and we would likely disagree on any number of policy matters. Still, I strongly identify with Ilagan and the personal costs he experienced for being authentic in his discernment. He is an inspiration to me. May God grant that each of us would learn better to discern with warm hearts and cool heads.

Economics Links

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

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

2. Everyone is putting out their most important economic charts list for 2013:  Atlantic: The Most Important Economic Stories of 2013—in 44 Graphs.  Economist: 2013 in charts.  Huffington Post: The 13 Most Important Charts Of 2013.

3. Economist: The world has become better fed over the past 50 years

MANY people will groan after stuffing themselves on a Christmas feast. A traditional three-course turkey dinner can be as much as 3,500 calories. Such indulgences are a luxury in many parts of the world—but thankfully less so. Over the past half-century, the amount of food that people consume has increased (measured in calories), according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Our interactive map and chart tracks countries across five decades, letting users select places, years on the timeline or any chart-line. (It performs poorly on smartphones; our apologies.) ...

In a related story at NPR: More People Have More To Eat, But It's Not All Good News

... The good news is: The percentage of the world's population getting what the researchers say is a sufficient diet has grown from 30 percent to 61 percent.

In 1965, a majority of the world survived on less than 2,000 calories a day per person. This was especially true in parts of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, China and Southeast Asia. Now, 61 percent of the world has access to 2,500 or more calories a day.

But one thing the scientists discovered is that the countries that have a history of food insufficiency didn't just up and start growing lots more food. Instead, for the most part they're increasing supply by importing food from abroad. ...

I'm unclear why the author thinks importing food is a problem but other challenges he mentions in the article are an issue.

4. Carpe Diem: When it comes to home appliances, the ‘good old days’ are now: they’re cheaper, better, more energy efficient than ever

... In 1981, the 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above from a 1981 Wards Christmas catalog sold for $359.88. The average hourly manufacturing wage then was $7.42, meaning that it would have taken 48.5 hours of work at the average hourly wage for a typical factory worker to earn enough income 32 years ago to purchase the dishwasher above. ...

... The new Kenmore 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above is currently listed on the Sears website for sale at $539.99. At the current average hourly wage of $20.26 for production workers, the average factory worker today would only have to work 26.7 hours to earn enough pre-tax income to buy today’s energy-efficient dishwasher, which is only a little more than one-half of the 48.5 hour time-cost for the 1981 model.

Bottom Line: Today’s modern household appliances are not only cheaper than ever before, they are the most energy-efficient appliances in history, resulting in additional savings for consumers through lower operating costs. The average dishwasher today is not only more than twice as energy-efficient as a comparable 1981 model, but its real cost today is only about 50% of the price of the 1981 dishwasher, measured in hours worked at the average hourly wage. Put those two factors together, and the average American’s dishwasher today is about six times superior to the dishwasher of thirty years ago. ...

5. Carpe Diem: How much did real US median income increase from 1979 to 2007? A lot depends on the measure of income used

"The median income data [often cited] are on tax units rather than households, they do not include many government transfer payments, they are pre-tax rather than post-tax, they do not adjust for changes in household size, and they do not include nontaxable compensation such as employer-provided health insurance.

Does this matter?  Yes!"

6. American Interest: Economic Mobility is a Male Problem

The biggest victim of family breakdown might be lower-class men. In City Journal Kay Hymowitz has a fascinating yet alarming piece on how family breakdown hurts men’s prospects more than women’s. One of the most interesting facts she highlights is that if you separate out men from women, women in America are roughly as upwardly mobile as women anywhere else in the world. It’s only when you add men back in and compare the US whole population to populations abroad that things look bleak:

Numerous studies have confirmed that the U.S. has less upward mobility than just about any developed nation, including England, the homeland of the peerage. Yet, if you look at boys separately from girls, as the Finnish economist Markus Jäntti and his colleagues at the Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labor did, the story changes markedly. In every country studied, girls are more likely than boys to climb up the income ladder, but in the United States, the disadvantage for sons is substantially greater than in other countries. Almost 75 percent of American daughters escape the lowest quintile—not unlike girls in the comparison countries of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Fewer than 60 percent of American sons experience similar success. ...

7. AEI Ideas: 3 charts that show what’s really going on with economic mobility in the US

8. Washington Post: Full employment, not inequality, should be the top economic priority - Ezra Klein

... While there are ways to reduce inequality without doing much about employment (say, by taxing the rich and using the proceeds on defense spending), it's hard to imagine full employment not doing much to reduce inequality. ...

... All that said, income inequality and social mobility really are startling trends that people should be very worried about and that the political system should be working aggressively to solve, or at least ameliorate. I don't have many policy disagreements with the folks focusing on inequality. But politics is about prioritization, and what politicians end up doing is in part driven by what problems their political coalitions are most worried about. ...

9. Conversable Economist: Falling Unemployment and Falling Labor Force Participation

10. Business Insider: This Map Shows Which Parts Of The Country Have A Huge Gender Gap In The Workforce

11. PBS: The rise of the 'new rich': 1 in 5 Americans will reach affluence in their lives

It's not just the wealthiest 1 percent.

Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America's economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation's income inequality.

The growing numbers of the U.S. poor have been well documented, but survey data provided to The Associated Press detail the flip side of the record income gap -- the rise of the "new rich." ...

12. Atlantic Cities: America's Wealth Is Staggeringly Concentrated in the Northeast Corridor

 

13. New York Times: Demand Soaring, Poor Are Feeling Squeezed

... Today, millions of poor Americans are caught in a similar trap, with the collapse of the housing boom helping stoke a severe shortage of affordable apartments. Demand for rental units has surged, with credit standards tight and many families unable to scrape together enough for a down payment for buying a home. At the same time, supply has declined, with homebuilders and landlords often targeting the upper end of the market. ...

14. Bloomberg: North America to Drown in Oil as Mexico Ends Monopoly

The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.

Plagued by almost a decade of slumping output that has degraded Mexico’s take from a $100-a-barrel oil market, President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking an end to the state monopoly over one of the biggest crude resources in the Western Hemisphere. The doubling in Mexican oil output that Citigroup Inc. said may result from inviting international explorers to drill would be equivalent to adding another Nigeria to world supply, or about 2.5 million barrels a day....

15. Oil Price: Cheap Fossil Fuels: Good or Bad for the World’s Poor?

... Let’s try reconciling all of the themes raised in Lomborg’s article and in my comments by reframing them in this way:

•    Yes, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a while. For that reason, a smart energy policy needs to focus on shifting the mix of fossil fuels, so far as is possible, to relatively clean natural gas and away from relatively dirty coal, while also keeping the pressure on for energy conservation across the board.
•    Price signals are one way to keep the pressure on. A carbon tax is a somewhat crude way to penalize relatively dirty fuels, in that climate change is not the only issue. We should be concerned, too, about sulfur and mercury from burning coal, urban air pollution from gasoline and diesel fuels, and local environmental risks of fracking for natural gas. Still, a carbon tax serves at least roughly to penalize the dirtiest fuels the most.
•    And yes, no environmental policy is going to be successful politically if it is seen as a matter of saving the earth versus helping the poor. Fuel subsidies have to go, since, realistically, they are a burden, not a boon, to the poor, but at the same time, some of the budgetary economies from the elimination of subsidies and some of the revenues from carbon taxes should  go toward smarter policies to help the world’s least advantaged.

Those ideas might help point us toward policies that are good for both the poor and the planet.

16.  askblog: The Market is a Process, not a Decision Mechanism

... I think that many commentators contrast the market and government as mechanisms for making decisions. In this contrast, the market sometimes has an efficiency advantage, but government is presumed to have a moral-authority advantage.

Instead, think of the market as a process for testing hypotheses. The process is brutally empirical, winnowing out losing strategies and poor execution. In contrast, elections are a much weaker testing mechanism. Elections are unable to winnow out sugar subsidies, improvident loan guarantees, schools that produce bad outcomes, etc. ...

17. Quartz:  Why the left-leaning Nelson Mandela was such a champion of free markets

One often overlooked aspect of Nelson Mandela’s legacy is South Africa’s economy. Parallel to everything amazing the man is connected to—freeing the country from the shackles of apartheid, subordinating retribution in favor of peace and reconciliation, and unifying a volatile nation at risk of civil war—he laid the groundwork for South Africa as the continent’s economic powerhouse. ...

18. Atlantic: Why Economics Is Really Called 'the Dismal Science'

... But this origin myth is, well, mythical. Carlyle did coin the phrase "the dismal science." And Malthus was, without question, dismal.

But Carlyle labeled the science "dismal" when writing about slavery in the West Indies. White plantation owners, he said, ought to force black plantation workers to be their servants. Economics, somewhat inconveniently for Carlyle, didn't offer a hearty defense of slavery. Instead, the rules of supply and demand argued for "letting men alone" rather than thrashing them with whips for not being servile. Carlyle bashed political economy as "a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing [science]; what we might call ... the dismal science.” ...

Science and Technology Links

1. Scientific American: Scientific American's Top 10 Science Stories of 2013

A carbon threshold breached, commitments to brain science made, mystery neutrinos found and human evolution revised—these and other events highlight the year in science and technology as picked by the editors of Scientific American

2. Reuters: "Peak farmland" is here, crop area to diminish: study

(Reuters) - The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.

Their report, conflicting with United Nations studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7 billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland". ...

... "We believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York.

"Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and Development Review. ...

3. Mashable: The Universal Translator Is Real and Its Name Is Sigmo

Ever since Star Trek explained away how all alien races could speak English through a piece of future tech called the Universal Translator, technology companies have worked to create just such a device. One may have succeeded in developing a 1.0 version with the Sigmo.

The Sigmo is a small, pillbox-sized device equipped with a microphone and speaker, but with a cloud-connected twist. Select the language you'd like to translate into, then hold the Sigmo up and speak to it. The Sigmo records your voice, then sends the recording to the cloud for translation via Bluetooth connection with your smartphone.

4. Inhabit: Africa's First Plastic Bottle House Rises in Nigeria

... the nearly-complete home is bullet and fireproof, earthquake resistant, and maintains a comfortable interior temperature of 64 degrees fahrenheit year round!

5. Wired: The World’s Largest Mega-Ship Launches for the First Time

... At 600,000 tons and 243 feet wide, when the Prelude left its dry dock in South Korea after a year-long build, it unseated the Emma Maersk (1,302 feet) as the world’s largest ship. But calling it a ship is almost a misnomer. The Prelude is a floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility that will be posted off the coast of Western Australia and will stay there for the next quarter-century.

As an FLNG plant, the Prelude handles everything involved in capturing, processing, and storing liquid natural gas, sucking the stuff from deep within the Earth and refining 3.9 million tons each year before it’s offloaded onto smaller ships that bring it back to the mainland. ...

6. Business Insider: The Number Of Smartphones In Use Is About To Pass The Number Of PCs

7. Scientific American: China Moon Rover Landing Marks a Space Program on the Rise

China cemented its reputation as the fastest rising star on the space scene this weekend by landing a rover on the moon—a challenging feat pulled off by only two nations before: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. “This is a very big deal indeed,” says lunar scientist Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “Landing on the moon is not something easily attained—it requires precision maneuvering, tracking, computation and engineering. It is a delicate task and the Chinese success reflects a mature, evolving and capable program.” ...

8. Scientific American: Study Linking Genetically Modified Corn to Rat Tumors Is Retracted

Bowing to scientists' near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats, after the authors refused to withdraw it.

The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, and published in 2012,  showed “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,” said a statement from Elsevier, which publishes the journal. But the small number and type of animals used in the study mean that “no definitive conclusions can be reached.” The known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague–Dawley strain of rat ”cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups,” it added. ...

9. Forbes: Scientists Make More Eye Cells - With An Inkjet Printer

British researchers have used an inkjet printer to successfully print retinal cells for the first time, in what could be a breakthrough for the treatment of optic nerve injury and diseases like glaucoma. ...

10. Berkley Earth (via Watts Up With That): Explaining and Understanding Declines in U.S. CO2 Emissions

11. Carpe Diem: Fossil fuels will continue to supply > 80% of US energy through 2040, while renewables will play only a minor role

12. Slate: $7 Trillion to Fight Climate Change? Bjorn Lomborg

The EU proposes spending that much on projects that will barely reduce temperatures or lower sea levels. ...

... This does not mean that climate change is not important; it means only that the EU’s climate policy is not smart. Over the course of this century, the ideal EU policy would cost more than $7 trillion, yet it would reduce the temperature rise by just 0.05^o Celsius and lower sea levels by a trivial 9 millimeters. After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference. ...

... We need a smarter approach to tackling climate change. Rather than relying on cutting a few tons of incredibly overpriced CO₂ now, we need to invest in research and development aimed at innovating down the cost of green energy in the long run, so that everyone will switch. ...

13. New York Times: The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels

... About 3.5 million of them die prematurely each year as a result of breathing the polluted air inside their homes — about 200,000 more than the number who die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air outside, according to a study by the World Health Organization.

There’s no question that burning fossil fuels is leading to a warmer climate and that addressing this problem is important. But doing so is a question of timing and priority. For many parts of the world, fossil fuels are still vital and will be for the next few decades, because they are the only means to lift people out of the smoke and darkness of energy poverty. ...

... The developed world needs a smarter approach toward cleaner fuels. The United States has been showing the way. Hydraulic fracturing has produced an abundance of inexpensive natural gas, leading to a shift away from coal in electricity production. Because burning natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, this technology has helped the United States reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the lowest level since the mid-1990s, even as emissions rise globally. We need to export this technology and help other nations exploit it.

At the same time, wealthy Western nations must step up investments into research and development in green energy technologies to ensure that cleaner energy eventually becomes so cheap that everyone will want it.

But until then they should not stand in the way of poorer nations as they turn to coal and other fossil fuels. This approach will get our priorities right. And perhaps then, people will be able to cook in their own homes without slowly killing themselves.

14. NPR: Environmentalists Split Over Need For Nuclear Power

15. BBC: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

Harnessing fusion - the process that powers the Sun - could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.

But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.

Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion. ...

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

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

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

Economics Links

1. Poor and Middle Class Incomes Have Increased Significantly

"... Using this more sophisticated cost-of-living adjustment, which is preferred by the Congressional Budget Office and Federal Reserve Board, the increase in median household income was not 5 percent but 16 percent from 1979 to 2012. In 2007, like 1979 a peak in the business cycle, median income as defined by the Census Bureau was 25 percent higher than in 1979. 

Similarly, the official Census Bureau figures indicate that the household at the 20th percentile of income—poorer than 80 percent of households and richer than only 20 percent of them—was no better off in 2012 than in 1979. Switching to the better cost-of-living adjustment, however, shows a 10 percent improvement—and a 19 percent improvement comparing the 1979 peak to the 2007 peak.

The Census Bureau narrowly defines income to exclude the non-cash benefits that constitute an important part of the safety net, as well as employer-provided fringe benefits. That means it assumes that food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and employer-provided health insurance have no value to families trying to pay their bills and live more comfortably. For that matter, it considers income before taxes are deducted, missing any increase in disposable income that declining taxes may have yielded. 

From 1979 to 2007, median pre-tax income defined to include non-cash benefits rose by about 30 percent. I find about the same increase for median post-tax income, but my estimates do not account for tax credits. The Congressional Budget Office reports a 33 percent increase in pre-tax income and a 42 percent increase in post-tax income. At the 20th percentile, pre-tax income rose by 26 to 38 percent, depending on how Medicare and Medicaid are valued. The truth is almost surely somewhere in the middle. The post-tax increase was similar.

Finally, the Census Bureau figures do not account for the fact that households have become smaller over time. When households have fewer mouths to feed, a given amount of income goes a longer way, so even if incomes had not grown, Americans would have been better off. 

After adjusting for household size, median pre-tax income was about 40 percent higher in 2007 than in 1979, and according to CBO, post-tax income was 49 percent higher. At the 20th percentile, size-adjusted household income rose by 28 to 46 percent (with the health insurance valuation much more consequential than the inclusion of taxes).

These are sizable gains over time—just not as large as those experienced in the “Golden Age” of the 1950s and 1960s or as substantial as those seen at the top of the income distribution. ...

I want to study this report a little more.

2. 21 Charts On US Inequality That Everyone Should See

3. American Inequality in Six Charts

4. Here's Who Earns The Minimum Wage, In 3 Graphs

5. The Mythology of the Minimum Wage

... A more effective way to help those in need is for policymakers to work on improving programs that have a track record of success, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC). The EITC has proven to be very effective at moving Americans from out of work to having a job. The EITC is also more effective at targeting those in poor households because it is based on income and not just wages. In the end, the EITC benefits 56.1 percent of workers in poverty.

A strong social safety net is one of the most important things a nation can provide its people, but an increase in the minimum wage should not be part of the strategy. Redistributing income from those who need it the most--the job seekers--to those who need it the least-- job holders in high income households expands the income divide and is a counterproductive anti-poverty policy.

6. Should Walmart Pay Its Workers More?

... It’s important to highlight the plight of the working poor. At a time when food stamps are being cut and some on the right attempt to argue against the basic idea of a safety net it is useful to show what actual need looks like in this country, and that many who work hard still encounter real economic hardship. So by all means, let’s talk about increasing the EITC, making a better and more robust safety net, and ways to improve the welfare of low-income people in this country. But let’s not pretend that a huge percentage of the context in which this story is being discussed isn’t that it is Walmart’s duty to raise the wages above the current market level. I’m happy to talk about economic hardship and things to do about it, but let’s not ignore the conversation most people are actually having and the bad ideas actually being proposed.

7. Krugman: The Amorality Of The Market Economy Can Not Be Legislated Away

... The final argument is his attempt to get at what the liberal case for higher minimum wages is at it’s core: it’s about opposing the idea that wages are determined by prices.

In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are a market price–determined by supply and demand, the same as the price of apples or coal. And it is for that reason, rather than the practical details, that the broader political movement of which the demand for a living wage is the leading edge is ultimately doomed to failure: For the amorality of the market economy is part of its essence, and cannot be legislated away.

I think Krugman’s points on the minimum wage are still very applicable despite being published way back in 1998.

8. The Minimum Wage and the Laws of Economics

I can’t open the paper these days without stumbling onto something about the minimum wage, which I take to be a good thing as it’s a simple, popular way to help address the problem of very low-wage work in America.  It’s not a complete solution; it’s not the only solution — it is, in fact, a relatively small-bore policy that sets an important labor standard: the government will compensate for the severe lack of bargaining clout among our lowest-wage workers by setting a floor below which we won’t allow their wages to fall.

It’s also that case that we need to look carefully these days at any policies that will help offset income inequality and wage stagnation, especially ones with low budgetary costs, or in this case, virtually none.  That’s one reason that I expect President Obama to amplify these points in an economics speech on Wednesday in Washington. ...

... Thus we can conclude that at least part of the problem with the low-wage labor market is the quality of the jobs, at least from the perspective of compensation, not the quality of the workers.  Sure, soft skills — showing up on time, dealing maturely with peers — are as important as ever, but people with shortcomings in those areas show up in all sectors.  Typical low-wage workers don’t lack the skills to do their jobs.  They lack the bargaining power to be paid decently for the work.  Relative to most others in the job market, they’re least able to press for a share of the profits they’re helping to generate.

When you think of it this way, a lot of the cramped economic debate opens up.  Since workers are not really paid their precise marginal product, you wouldn’t expect them to be laid off because of a moderate, mandated wage increase.  In periods of high profitability, you’d expect some of the wage increase to be paid for out of profits.  In a real-world context, you’d want a policy taking direct aim at deteriorated job quality and thus helping to offset the acute lack of bargaining clout among low-wage workers.

Does that mean completely ignoring the “laws” of supply and demand and setting the minimum at any level we want?  Of course not.  Workers may not be paid their “marginal product,” but there is some rough correlation between their pay and the value of their work (the great labor economist Richard Freeman gets at this by using the flat edge of the chalk to draw demand curves).  History teaches that moderate wage increases — say, those including not much more than 10 percent of the work force in their sweep — have nothing like the job-loss effects that opponents claim (which isn’t to say “zero,” but the beneficiaries far outnumber those hurt by the policy). ...

9. Retail Wages Are Market Wages, Not a Welfare Program

... Employers pay employees based on the worth of the employee, how much profit that person adds to the company’s bottom line. That amount has no connection at all to the cost of living or to any neutral observer’s idea of what a “fair” wage might be. A business has no reason to care or to know how much money you need (or think you need) to live the life you have chosen to live. Businesses care about what each employee does for them.

An employer may choose to pay a higher-than-market wage for a variety of reasons, but those reasons do not include charity. Some companies (including some retailers such as Costco) follow the efficiency wage hypothesis, positing that paying a higher than normal wage will induce the employee to work extra hard and be very loyal to that employer. This is perfectly rational economics if the hypothesis proves true. Companies are still only paying for what they receive; they have simply found a way to get more profit per employee by paying them higher wages. Other firms may pay more, or provide better benefits, to reduce employee turnover, which can be very costly to the company. Many tech firms are examples of both these behaviors.

The two most recent welfare reforms in this country, in 1975 and in 1996, have both tried to engineer a system of complementary social safety net features and incentives to work. In both cases, the welfare system was judged to have become too skewed toward the safety net and to actively be discouraging people from working. For example, in the 1990s a single mother of two would have needed a job paying well over $20,000 before it would have made economic sense to leave welfare and start working. Simply losing her Medicaid eligibility would have cost her around $10,000 per year even back then. People were being penalized for working. Most people will not work if it makes them poorer.

The point of the current system is to encourage people to work by not making them ineligible for benefits simply by virtue of being employed. Thus, having workers at retail stores or fast food restaurants who also qualify for public assistance is not a reason to condemn those employers, but instead one to praise the politicians and public policy experts who redesigned the welfare system. ...

10. When it comes to home appliances, the ‘good old days’ are now

11. About Half of Kids With Single Moms Live in Poverty

... Among all children living only with their mother, nearly half — or 45% — live below the poverty line, the Census Bureau said. For those living with just the father, about 21% lived in poverty. By comparison, only about 13% of children with both parents present in the household live below the poverty line. ...

12. The End Of The Era Of Multinationals

... But since I clearly can’t help myself, I will make a prediction. When tax reform does come, and whatever it means whenit gets here, U.S. multinationals will pay a price. Now, I’m no communist; in fact, I’m a practicing capitalist, but the multinationals sort of deserve what’s coming, because they’re sort of pigs. They have been working the U.S. tax system for years – just like they have been working tax systems around the world. They have managed to build up quite an arsenal of weapons to help themselves – things like transfer pricing, check-the-box, tax havens, deferral, just to name a few. All these weapons are legal. The system seems rigged their way. ...

13. The Largest U.S. Charities For 2013

Its incoming donations didn’t go up much. But by a wide margin, United Way remains No.1 on the annual Forbes list of the largest U.S. charities.

The Alexandria, Va.-based network of more than 1,000 separate units largely dependent on paycheck deductions received $3.9 billion in gifts for the year ending December 31, 2012, $24 million more than the previous year. In a difficult economic environment, that represented a 0.6% increase.

No. 2 again is the  Salvation Army , a church better known for its social services efforts whose U.S. headquarters also is in Alexandria.  Its donations rose 11% to $1.9 billion, more than making up for a 6% fall from the previous year.

A list newcomer comes in at No. 3, Task Force for Global Health, which is based in Decatur, Ga. To implement its health activities in 50 countries, including the U.S., the charity brought in $1.7 billion, most of it donated medicines.

Rounding out the billion-dollar-donation club:  Feeding America at $1.5 billion and Catholic Charities USA at $1.4 billion. Feeding America, a Chicago-based supplier of of food banks, saw its incoming gifts, mainly donated food, rise a whopping 33%, in contrast to a 10% donation drop at Catholic Charities, which directs its efforts toward fighting poverty. ...

Science and Technology Links

1. The Cultural Cognition Project

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

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

2. The Myth of Organic Agriculture

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

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

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

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

3. The Safety of Bioengineered Crops - Timothy Taylor

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

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

 4. How nanotechnology could revolutionise food storage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. The Future of Water Sustainability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Unavoidable Answer for the Problem of Climate Change

10. The World in 50 Years - An Energy Perspective

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

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

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

11. The trend in violent tornadoes? (Source)

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

13. Smithsonian makes push in 3D imaging of artifacts

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

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

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

14. Robots Allow Doctors To Remotely Advise, Diagnose Patients

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

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

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

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

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

Hans Rosling: How much do you know about the world? [Video]

BBC: Hans Rosling: How much do you know about the world?

Be sure to click through to the article and see the 2.5 minute video.

Many people don't know about the enormous progress most countries have made in recent decades - or maybe the media hasn't told them. But with the following five facts everyone can upgrade their world view.

1. Fast population growth is coming to an end

It's a largely untold story - gradually, steadily the demographic forces that drove the global population growth in the 20th Century have shifted. Fifty years ago the world average fertility rate - the number of babies born per woman - was five. Since then, this most important number in demography has dropped to 2.5 - something unprecedented in human history - and fertility is still trending downwards. ...

2. The "developed" and "developing" worlds have gone

... So much has changed, especially in the last decade, that the countries of the world today defy all attempts to classify them into only two groups. So many of the formerly "developing" group of countries have been catching up that the countries now form a continuum. ...

3. People are much healthier

Fifty years ago, the average life expectancy in the world was 60 years. Today it's 70 years. What's more, that average of 60 years in the 1960s masked a huge gap between long lifespans in "developed" and short lifespans in "developing" countries.

But today's average of 70 years applies to the majority of people of the world. ...

4. Girls are getting better education

... The better education of girls is just a first step on the long road to gender equity. But sadly it is also changing the character of gender inequity. Violence against young women and restrictions on their rights to choose how to live their lives are now replacing lack of schooling as the main gender injustice.

5. The end of extreme poverty is in sight

... Economists define it as an income of less than $1.25 per day. In reality, it means that a family cannot be sure from one day to the next that they will have enough to eat. ...

... But the number of people in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank, has fallen from two billion in 1980 to just over one billion today. Though many people in the world still live on a very low income, six out of seven billion are now out of extreme poverty and this is a critical change. ... [Note: There were 4.5 Billion people in 1980. That means the extreme poverty rate has dropped from 45% to 15%.]

Demography Links

1. A look at global population trends in the Christian Science Monitor.

"Too many people is a big problem, but too few is a concern as well." "The story of the 21st century has been one of falling birthrates, rising standards of living, and a revolution in food production. But the global picture is uneven: As populations decline in wealthier nations, in other countries – particularly in Africa, says a new report – they are rising at rates that may mire their people in poverty."

2. The end of global population growth may be almost here — and a lot sooner than the UN thinks

3. 232 Million People Left Their Countries for New Ones—Where Did They Go?

4. World Immigration Called 'Win-Win' For Rich Nations, And Poor

The number of people who leave their countries to work abroad is soaring, according to the United Nations. More than 200 million people now live outside their country of origin, up from 150 million a decade ago.

5. Two interesting articles about Japan and fertility: Want To See A 'Demographic Death Spiral?' Look At Japan, Not Russia and Almost Half Of Young Japanese Women Are Not Interested In Sex. From the second story:

"... Even though casual sex is becoming more common in Japan, a 2011 survey found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of relationship — a rise of 10% from five years earlier, according to Haworth.

One of the reasons for the decline in dating and sex among young Japanese adults seems to stem from the fact that men and women have different long-term values — while men have become less career-driven, women are valuing their careers more than romantic relationships, and don't want to give up their fulfilling (and time-intensive) jobs. ..."

6. Mapping 22 Different Latino Populations Across the U.S.A.

Where do America's Latino and Hispanic populations live? Let's start with where they're not living: in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and a whopping chunk of the Midwest that probably hears a sí as often as the cry of an Amazonian toucan. ...

 7. U.S. Women Are Dying Younger Than Their Mothers, and No One Knows Why

... In March, a study published by the University of Wisconsin researchers David Kindig and Erika Cheng found that in nearly half of U.S. counties, female mortality rates actually increased between 1992 and 2006, compared to just 3 percent of counties that saw male mortality increase over the same period. ...

8. Several articles about the most popular baby names in recent days. For example, Here's The Most Popular Baby Name In Each State. I especially liked these two gifs: America's Most Popular Boys' Names Since 1960, in 1 Spectacular GIF and A Wondrous GIF Shows the Most Popular Baby Names for Girls Since 1960.

9. Census: Americans are moving again

Those on the move are once again setting their sights on their favorite Sun Belt places, like Florida, Arizona and Nevada, a demographer says.

10. U.S. obesity rate levels off, but still an epidemic

"More than a third of adults are obese, which is roughly 35 pounds over a healthy weight."

11. Where Are The Boomers Headed? Not Back To The City

... Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier. If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas. Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas, predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51 metro areas actually gained boomers. ...

 12. The Myers Briggs States of America

Sunbelt, Rustbelt, Energy Belt – geographers, economists and urbanists have long endeavored to map the economic, political and cultural structures of America's regions. But to what extent do these places have their own distinctive personalities?

We all have our handy stereotypes for regional personalities, of course. Stolid Midwesterners, indolent but mercurial Southerners, and nervous, fast-talking New Yorkers make repeat appearances in pop culture. But can we identify the actual psychology, the deep personality traits that define regional distinctiveness?

Those questions are at the center of a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. ...

13. The Difference Between Democratic Congressional Districts And Republican Ones In 1 Chart. In short, as population density increases, so does a preference for Democrats.

Science and Technology Links

1. Why We Should Look Forward To Living To 120 And Beyond

... Consider these facts:

• More than $1 trillion has been spent on biomedical research over the past 20 years. These investments should soon start yielding longevity dividends.
• The number of scientists working on extending the life span worldwide has increased exponentially as computer and communications technologies have entered the mainstream and China and India have joined the race.
• The life spans of some laboratory animals have already been extended more than tenfold.
• Innovations have already started: vital organs have been grown from patients’ own cells and several stem-cell therapies are being proven.
• Cancer survival rates have increased steadily over the past few years. A diagnosis is no longer a certain death sentence.
• Advances in laboratory diagnostics and biometrics are already providing valuable insight into disease prevention.
• Fast-food outlets have started offering healthier dishes and displaying caloric content and smoking rates in developed countries have declined.

Many people would not interpret these seven facts as a single trend leading to dramatic increases in life expectancy because the long-term effects are so unpredictable. But just two decades ago, nobody could imagine the possibility of the technology we use daily now. ...

2. Turning plastic bags into high-tech materials

University of Adelaide researchers have developed a process for turning waste plastic bags into a high-tech nanomaterial.

The innovative nanotechnology uses non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags to make 'carbon nanotube membranes' – highly sophisticated and expensive materials with a variety of potential advanced applications including filtration, sensing, energy storage and a range of biomedical innovations.

"Non-biodegradable plastic bags are a serious menace to natural ecosystems and present a problem in terms of disposal," says Professor Dusan Losic, ARC Future Fellow and Research Professor of Nanotechnology in the University's School of Chemical Engineering.

"Transforming these waste materials through 'nanotechnological recycling' provides a potential solution for minimising environmental pollution at the same time as producing high-added value products." ...

3. Nanotechnology researchers find new energy storage capabilities between layers of 2-D materials

(Nanowerk News) Drexel University nanotechnology researchers are continuing to expand the capabilities and functionalities of a family of two-dimensional materials they discovered that are as thin as a single atom, but have the potential to store massive amounts of energy. Their latest achievement has pushed the materials storage capacities to new levels while also allowing for their use in flexible devices. ...

4. Atomic Goal: 800 Years of Power From Waste

BELLEVUE, Wash. — In a drab one-story building here, set between an indoor tennis club and a home appliance showroom, dozens of engineers, physicists and nuclear experts are chasing a radical dream of Bill Gates.

The quest is for a new kind of nuclear reactor that would be fueled by today’s nuclear waste, supply all the electricity in the United States for the next 800 years and, possibly, cut the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation around the world. ...

5. Could power plants of the future produce zero emissions?

... But now Net Power, based in the US state of North Carolina, believes it can redesign the power plant so it can still run on coal or natural gas, but without releasing harmful fumes.

Rodney Allam, chief technologist at 8 Rivers Capital, which owns Net Power, says: "The perception has been that to avoid emissions of [carbon dioxide] CO2, we have to get rid of fossil fuels.

"But unfortunately, fossil fuels represent over 70% of the fuel that's consumed in the world and the idea that you can get rid of that in any meaningful sense is a pipe dream."

The Net Power system is different from currently operating power plants because carbon dioxide, normally produced as waste when making electricity, would become a key ingredient when burning the fuel. ...

6. Meet The Americans Who Don't Use The Internet

6. NASA preparing to launch 3-D printer into space

MOFFETT FIELD, California (AP) — NASA is preparing to launch a 3-D printer into space next year, a toaster-sized game changer that greatly reduces the need for astronauts to load up with every tool, spare part or supply they might ever need.

The printers would serve as a flying factory of infinite designs, creating objects by extruding layer upon layer of plastic from long strands coiled around large spools. Doctors use them to make replacement joints and artists use them to build exquisite jewelry.

In NASA labs, engineers are 3-D printing small satellites that could shoot out of the Space Station and transmit data to earth, as well as replacement parts and rocket pieces that can survive extreme temperatures. ...

7. What Is the 'Internet of Things'?

... In the '90s computers invaded our homes. In the 2000s computers invaded our pockets. This decade, all our clothing, accessories, vehicles, and everything (?!) appear on the verge of computerization.

Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Currently the idea of the IoT has many definitions. Most include a world in the not-too-distant future where most objects are computerized and seamlessly integrated into our information network, creating "smart" grids, homes, and environments. ...

8. The Bill Gates-backed company that's reinventing meat

... This presents a big opportunity for someone who can devise a tasty and affordable plant-based substitute for meat. That is exactly what Ethan Brown, the founder and chief executive of a California-based startup called Beyond Meat, aims to do, and he has persuaded some smart people to put their money behind him. Beyond Meat makes vegan "chicken-free" strips that it says are better for people's health (low-fat, no cholesterol), better for the environment (requiring less land and water), and better for animals (obviously) than real chicken; most important, if all goes according to plan, they will cost less to produce than chicken. Fortune has learned that Bill Gates is an investor; he sampled the product and said he couldn't tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken. "The meat market is ripe for invention," Gates wrote in a blog post about the future of food. Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, made Beyond Meat its first investment in a food startup. "KP is looking for big ideas, and this qualifies as a big idea," says Amol Deshpande, a former Cargill executive and a partner at the venture firm. "The single biggest inefficiency in agriculture is how we get our protein." Other investors include Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the founders of Twitter; Morgan Creek Capital Management; and the Humane Society of the United States, an animal-welfare group. ...

 

Religion Links

1. First the Nones, now the Spirituals

... Earlier this year, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, my colleagues over at Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, decided to find out. In an email survey of nearly 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country, they asked, "In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person? Select One."

The result, cross-tabulated with a series of other questions, is a portrait of a collective identity distinctly different from both the religious and the secular, representing (along with each of the others) roughly one-third of the college population. So who are those collegians who identify themselves as "spiritual" in America today?

1. They're more likely to be female than male. In fact, while equal proportions of the young men and women call themselves religious, the former identify as secular versus spiritual by a ratio of over three to two; the latter, as spiritual versus secular by nearly two to one.

2. They are much more likely to believe in God than the Seculars, but the deity in question is more frequently a "higher power" than a personal God. ...

Related: U.S. College Students Evenly Divided Between Religious, Secular and Spiritual, in New ARIS Study

... Among the students surveyed, 31.8% identified their worldview as Religious, 32.4% as Spiritual, and 28.2% as Secular. Within each group there was a remarkable level of cohesion on answers to questions covering a wide array of issues, including political alignment, acceptance of evolution and climate change, belief in supernatural phenomena such as miracles or ghosts, and trust in alternative practices such as homeopathy and astrology. ...

2. Unpaid Pastors May Be 'Future Of The Church' For Protestant Congregations

... Though small evangelical congregations have long relied on unpaid pastors, mainline churches haven't. They've generally paid full-time or nearly full-time salaries, said Scott Thumma, a Hartford Seminary sociologist of religion.

That's changing, however, as churches face declining numbers and look to new ministry models to make ends meet. Thumma sees more mainliners cutting back to halftime or one-quarter-time packages for clergy, who increasingly work second jobs. ...

3. Trends Among Growing Churches: Some Reflections on the Fastest Growing and Largest U.S. Churches

... On this year's lists, we noticed many of the same trends we've seen in the past. Among the recent trends, we continue to see multisite churches becoming more and more common. Among the 100 Largest churches, we find only 12 have a single campus (although one church did not report how many campuses it has). On the Fastest-Growing list, the number with a single campus is much greater—42, reflecting close to a split in the number of churches that do and do not have multiple campuses.

Some once believed this move to grow via multiple campuses was a temporary trend, but it appears to be a trend that's here to stay. While it was once the domain of only the largest churches, we now see smaller churches deploying the same methodology. What's interesting to me is the number of churches that utilize a multisite methodology and are also committed to church planting. The two are definitely not exclusive of one another. I think this may have something to do with the missionary heart of these churches. ...

4. Do we need denominations?

When people search for a church to join, one early stage decision in the process is whether to find a denominational or non-denominational church. Are denominations important? Is it good for a congregation to be part of a denomination?

On the one hand, independent, non-denominational megachurches and their pastors too often feature in media headlines, as reporters and editors almost gloat in uncovering the latest scandal. Even when there is no scandal, the retirement or death of an independent church pastor (regardless of the congregation's size) will often set that congregation on an irreversible downward glide path toward institutional oblivion.

On the other hand, conventional wisdom has it that denominations in general, and mainline Protestant denominations like The Episcopal Church in particular, are dying anachronisms.

Are denominations important? ...

The short answer is "Yes!" ;-)

5. Church Hunting? There's an App for That

... Launched in September 2011, FaithStreet is one of those brilliant innovations designed to meet a big need with simple technology. Churches fill out an online profile with key information such as location and contact numbers. Web visitors can easily browse churches near them that fit their needs. But Coughlin's web application is an unorthodox business model: FaithStreet doesn't make money unless people give to their local churches. Churches that use FaithStreet encourage attendees to give online, from which FaithStreet takes a cut. "What's great about the model is we win only when the church does," says Coughlin. ...

6. The myth of scientists as atheists

... In fact, I believe that the notion that almost all scientists are atheists is a myth. A recent Pew poll agrees with my view: 51% of polled American scientists believing in some kind of deity. While that rate is far lower than the general public in the US, it is still a majority. ...

7. The Religious Alternative To Obamacare's Individual Mandate

... The sharing ministries are not insurance: there's no guarantee that a given bill will be covered. Instead, it's like a co-op, where members decide what procedures to cover, and then all pitch in to cover the cost as group.

"It's a group of people, in this case Christians, who band together and agree that they want to share one another's burdens," says Andrea Miller, medical director for the largest Christian health-insurance alternative, Medi-Share.

She says members put aside a certain amount of money every month, which then goes to other Christians who need help paying their medical bills. Medi-Share's monthly fees vary, but that family options "average less than $300 a month."

There are a few requirements to fulfill before participating, Miller says. The first is that you have to be Christian. "Second, you need to agree to living a Christian lifestyle, including no smoking, including not abusing alcohol or drugs," she says.

To constitute as a health care sharing ministry — and therefore be exempt from the Affordable Care Act requirements — the nonprofit has to have been in existence since 1999 (Medi-Share has existed since '93). The ministries also have an independent accounting firm conduct a publicly available annual audit. ...

8. At Biologos, "Reflections on Reading Genesis 1-3: John Walton's World Tour": Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Earlier this year, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, my colleagues over at Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, decided to find out. In an email survey of nearly 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country, they asked, "In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person? Select One."

The result, cross-tabulated with a series of other questions, is a portrait of a collective identity distinctly different from both the religious and the secular, representing (along with each of the others) roughly one-third of the college population. So who are those collegians who identify themselves as "spiritual" in America today?

1. They're more likely to be female than male. In fact, while equal proportions of the young men and women call themselves religious, the former identify as secular versus spiritual by a ratio of over three to two; the latter, as spiritual versus secular by nearly two to one.

2. They are much more likely to believe in God than the Seculars, but the deity in question is more frequently a "higher power" than a personal God.

- See more at: http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/09/26/first-the-nones-now-the-spirituals/#sthash.mpIr5pSX.dpuf

Earlier this year, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, my colleagues over at Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, decided to find out. In an email survey of nearly 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country, they asked, "In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person? Select One."

The result, cross-tabulated with a series of other questions, is a portrait of a collective identity distinctly different from both the religious and the secular, representing (along with each of the others) roughly one-third of the college population. So who are those collegians who identify themselves as "spiritual" in America today?

1. They're more likely to be female than male. In fact, while equal proportions of the young men and women call themselves religious, the former identify as secular versus spiritual by a ratio of over three to two; the latter, as spiritual versus secular by nearly two to one.

2. They are much more likely to believe in God than the Seculars, but the deity in question is more frequently a "higher power" than a personal God.

- See more at: http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/09/26/first-the-nones-now-the-spirituals/#sthash.mpIr5pSX.dpuf

First the Nones, now the Spirituals

First the Nones, now the Spirituals

Science and Technology Links

1. The ten most important innovations of all time

1. Paper (105AD – Europe 10th century – Germany 1400)
2. Printing Press (1450)
3. Telegraph (1837) ...

What would you remove/add to the list?

2. Natural Gas May Be Easier On Climate Than Coal, Despite Methane Leaks

3. Internet Archaeologists Reconstruct Lost Web Pages

The Internet is disappearing. And with it goes an important part of our recorded history. That was the conclusion of a study Technology Review looked at last year, which measured the rate at which links shared over social media platforms, such as Twitter, were disappearing.

The conclusion was that this data is being lost at the rate of 11% within a year and 27% within two years.

Today, the researchers behind this work reveal that all is not lost. Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., have found a way to reconstruct deleted material, and they say it works reasonably well. ...

4. 5 Huge Industries That Are Already Feeling The Effects Of 3-D Printing

Earlier this week we presented the thesis from Credit Suisse that not only is 3-D printing not a flash in the pan, existing market research reports have actually understated its potential market. 3-D printing is exactly what it sounds like: making 3-D objects from a device that's conceptually more like a printer than from a typical manufacturing process.

But we wanted to get a little bit more specific about where exactly this is going to happen.

So with the help of an excellent report from consulting firm CSC, we now present five industries that are already feeling the effects of 3-D printing's imminent dominance — for better or worse. ...

5. Innovation of the Week: A Low-Cost Composting Toilet

... The WAND Foundation has developed several dry composting toilet models, some of which were recognized at the 2011 Tech Awards at Santa Clara University. At the conference, Cora Zayas-Sayre, executive director of the WAND Foundation, explained that by using local materials, the organization has been able to build 275 toilets at a cost of US$30 per toilet. She added that this innovation has already impacted the lives of 3,000 people.

This innovation simultaneously addresses two challenges that prevail in developing countries: the unsustainable and costly use of water-sealed toilets, and the hygienic management of human waste. Water-sealed toilets require pumping mechanisms to transport water and sewage between 300 and 500 meters away from the home, a method that is economically and environmentally unsustainable. Inadequate management of human waste can lead to a host of health problems in developing areas, and dramatically impact quality of life. ...

6. World continues 'enormous progress' against AIDS

New infections each year are down 33% since 2001.

7. Rooftop Farming Is Getting Off The Ground

... The green-roof movement has slowly been gaining momentum in recent years, and some cities have made them central to their sustainability plans. The city of Chicago, for instance, that 359 roofs are now partially or fully covered with vegetation, which provides all kinds of environmental benefits — from reducing the buildings' energy costs to cleaning the air to mitigating the

Late this summer, Chicago turned a green roof into its first major rooftop farm. At 20,000 square feet, it's the largest soil-based rooftop farm in the Midwest, according to the Chicago Botanic Garden, which maintains the farm through its program. ...

8. Interesting piece using driverless cars as an example and the inability of some people to see the potential innovations: The third industrial revolution

... In fact, these possibilities are only the tip of the iceberg. Autonomous vehicles' most transformative contribution might be what they get up to when people aren't in the vehicles. One suddenly has access to cheap, fast, ultra-reliable, on-demand courier service. Imagine never having to run out for milk or a missing ingredient again. Imagine dropping a malfunctioning computer into a freight AV to be ferried off to a repair shop and returned, all without you having to do anything. Imagine inventories at offices, shops and so on refilling constantly and as needed: assuming "shops" is still a meaningful concept in a world where things all come to you.

The really remarkable thing about such possibilities is that the technology is basically available today. It isn't cheap today, but that may change very quickly. If the public lets it, of course. When it comes to AVs stagnation, if it occurs, will be the fault of regulatory rather than technological obstacles.