Kruse Kronicle

Calmly Considered: Scarcity or Abundance-- Which Is Our World?

Last month, Dr. Allan Bevere and I got together to discuss the nuances of "scarcity and abundance" from theological perspectives. Too often people from the two fields talk past each other with unfair characterizations on this topic. Our conversation hopefully shines some light.

The World Is Becoming A Better Place To Live For Most People

The great majority of people throughout most of human history have precariously been able to subsist. (See Level 1 below.) A great divergence began just over two centuries ago. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled, and abject poverty as a percentage of the population has declined. 

The average life expectancy at birth used to be about 30 years. That doesn't mean no one lived to old age. One in four children born alive died before their first birthday, so the average life expectancy at birth was skewed downward. But life expectancy at every age has improved, especially over the past century.

The researchers at Gapminder have constructed this informative chart showing anticipated improving economic status over the next twenty years. (These numbers attempt to account for changes in the value of "a dollar" over time and across national borders.) Each block equates to 100,000 people. As you can see, the population is larger in twenty years, but a higher percentage of people have moved rightward on the continuum to greater prosperity. Many people find these numbers too abstract. What does this mean in practical terms? Gapminder has constructed this helpful chart to describe what life is like at the four levels. 

You can learn more about these four levels here. 

Three truths. The world has become profoundly better in recent generations and is improving. There is much suffering and injustice as vast room for improving our world. We can make the world a better place.

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.)

A Richer World... but for whom?

BBC: A Richer World... but for whom?

We are getting richer. Not every human being on the planet and not every country. But the average person has an economic standard of living that's far better than it used to be.

One way of measuring it is to look at the amount of goods and services produced per person - gross domestic product or GDP per capita.

For the global population that rose almost fourfold in the 60 years up to 2010.

There were some marked divergences between countries. In China the increase was a stunning eighteen-fold. South Korea and Taiwan managed even more. On average, they are 25 times richer than in 1950.

A few countries, mainly in Africa, lost ground. In the Democratic Republic of Congo average living standards fell by more than half in the same period. ...

... One benefit from that is that we are living longer. In the middle of the last century a new-born baby could expect to live 50 years. Now the figure is 70. Once again there are large variations between countries but the favourable trend in that period is present in almost every nation - Botswana is the only one where life expectancy declined (by a few months). ...

... There is of course a debate, a rather vigorous one, to be had about just how bad a thing rising inequality really is. That is even more true of the question of what, if any, government policies should be employed to tackle it.

Rising inequality is a reminder that, richer though the world is, some people don't feel it.

This article does a good job of highlighting positive trends while also recognizing that improvements are uneven. The article touches on concerns about inequality, but the environmental impact and resource depletion issues must be raised. The key to wisdom is understanding that these positive and negative trends are all interconnected.

Is the greater concentration of wealth at the top (to the degree it is really happening) a by-product of the same forces lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty? If so, blindly attacking wealth inequality may thwart the progress of millions climbing out of poverty.

Is global economic growth improving the living standards of so many people also causing damage to the climate and environment to the point that one day soon, we will all see our living standards diminish? If so, blindly pursuing economic growth may diminish our quality of life.

The key is to think holistically. Populist movements usually take us in the opposite direction.

Why I Won't Shut Up About Positive Changes in The World

Most people are exceptionally illiterate about the trajectory of demographic and economic changes in the world, believing the world is decaying. That leads many to disengage in hopelessness. Globalization combined with investment in human capital and infrastructure has put extreme poverty in rapid retreat. The global poor are not getting poorer. The world is getting better!

I have continuously pointed to evidence of these developments through social media for more than a decade. Not infrequently, posts about positive trends are met with incredulity and even anger. How can I speak of an improving world when so many are suffering? It is as if nothing positive may be acknowledged until total success is achieved. Yet the relentless focus on the negative, attempting to shame and guilt people into action (often with distorted and exaggerated data) drives people away from action into donor fatigue and hopelessness. There must be hope that things can get better.

A recent guest preacher recounted a scene from the end of Schindler’s List. Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jews from the Nazis, reproofs himself as he realizes that he might have saved at least one more person if he had sold his car or other possessions. He finds himself in a difficult place. How can he celebrate the lives saved when so many still died? But how can he not celebrate 1,200 lives that were indeed saved?

Endless fixation on the negative leads to despair and diminishes the value of lives that have improved. Such fixation is unwarranted and counterproductive, so I will continue with stories of hope and improvement. We need balance. We need hope. And based on the Barna data below, there is much work to do.

GDP Growing Fastest in Poor Countries

The world's poorest regions have been growing the fastest for at least twenty years. The Economist forecasts world GDP to be 2.9%, Asia and Australasia (less Australia) at 5.7%, and Sub-Saharan Africa at 4.5%. These rates indicate a considerable slowing of growth from recent years. The US forecast is 3.2%. This is more evidence that global inequality is shrinking, even though inequality within many nations is increasing. As the bottom of the economic ladder rises, so does the distance between the bottom and the top. A recent article forecasted that there would be no poor nations by 2050. I think that is likely. See: Gauging growth in 2015

The World is Not Falling Apart

Slate: The World is Not Falling Apart

Never mind the headlines. We've never lived in such peaceful times.

I've repeatedly revisited the theme in my blogging that the world is improving in many ways. That is routinely met with skepticism, even outrage. How can I be so insensitive as to say the world is getting better while millions are suffering and dying? Of course, the short answer is that I didn't say that the world has achieved perfection but only that it has gotten better.

I love these five paragraphs in the intro to this lengthy article:

... How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don't happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, "Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out"—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world's population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Amen!

We also have to avoid being fooled by randomness. Cohen laments the "annexations, beheadings, [and] pestilence" of the past year, but surely this collection of calamities is a mere coincidence. Entropy, pathogens, and human folly are a backdrop to life, and it is statistically certain that the lurking disasters will not space themselves evenly in time but will frequently overlap. To read significance into these clusters is to succumb to primitive thinking, a world of evil eyes and cosmic conspiracies.

Human beings are natural pattern seekers. Psychological studies show we often identify patterns where none exist.

Finally, we need to be mindful of orders of magnitude. Some categories of violence, like rampage shootings and terrorist attacks, are riveting dramas but (outside war zones) kill relatively small numbers of people. Every day ordinary homicides claim one and a half times as many Americans as the number who died in the Sandy Hook massacre. And as the political scientist John Mueller points out, in most years bee stings, deer collisions, ignition of nightwear, and other mundane accidents kill more Americans than terrorist attacks.

The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down? As Bill Clinton likes to say, "Follow the trend lines, not the headlines." We will see that the trend lines are more encouraging than a news junkie would guess.

I love the distinction between trend lines and headlines! Consider that adage stolen.

To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it. Let's examine the major categories in turn. ...

The quantitative mindset is indeed the most morally enlightened. It compensates for the human tendency to privilege information on what is happening to those geographically and culturally nearest to us. But it also counters a "parochialism of the present," where we discount the often greater suffering of those in the past relative to those who suffer in the present because the present is our context.

Be sure to read the whole thing. Here are just a few charts:

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.

People in Emerging Markets Catch Up to Advanced Economies in Life Satisfaction

Pew Research: People in Emerging Markets Catch Up to Advanced Economies in Life Satisfaction

People in emerging economies are considerably more satisfied with their lives today than they were in 2007. A Pew Research Center survey finds that publics in emerging nations now rival those in advanced economies in their self-reported well-being. The rise in happiness among middle income countries is driven in large part by attitudes in Asian nations, such as China, Indonesia and Malaysia. People in developing economies are also happier today than they were seven years ago, though the improvement has been more modest. ...

Here are graphs that summarize key findings:

It's Time To Admit It: The World Is Becoming A Better Place

Business Insider: OK, Haters, It's Time To Admit It: The World Is Becoming A Better Place

The article includes this graph:

Then this one about poverty:

Many other graphs could be shown about a host of important social indicators, but the article closes with the most important one: life expectancy. Improvements in life expectancy require that a wide range of variables move in a positive direction. For that reason, improving life expectancy is often a proxy for overall well-being.

The author closes with the following:

So complain all you want about how horrible everything is. There's certainly a lot left to fix. But as you complain, remember:

The world is getting better all the time.

Preach it!

23 Charts That Show Why This Is The Best Moment In History To Be Born

Business Insider: 23 Charts That Show Why This Is The Best Moment In History To Be Born

Here are a few of my favorites. Click through to see the rest. The big question is not how to stop the world from spiraling into chaos. The big question is how we get an improving world to improve more quickly and broadly. We have challenges ... climate and ecosystem impacts, evolving energy challenges, shift to renewable/recyclable resources ... but we have always had challenges. This is the golden era of humanity as it relates to material, physical, and political well-being. We just have to keep pushing to make it golden for everyone.

 

How not to be ignorant about the world - Hans and Ola Rosling

Hans Rosling, and his son Ola, nail it again. Excellent video. I have more to say about this in a coming post.

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.

GM scaremongering in Africa is disarming the fight against poverty

The Guardian - Poverty Matters Blog - GM scaremongering in Africa is disarming the fight against poverty

Transforming agriculture is central to sub-Saharan Africa's development prospects. Three-quarters of people in extreme poverty – existing on less than $1.25 a day – live in rural areas, and crop yields across the region are often a fraction of those in developed countries.

Increasing productivity could help close that gap and increase farm incomes and food availability, in turn reducing hunger and poverty. But the transformation must go beyond raising farm productivity – it must also build resilience to climate change, which, in the absence of significant investment and adaptation, threatens to devastate African crop yields.

Biotechnology offers an important opportunity to improve crops. In particular, genetic modification (GM) enables plant breeders to increase the potential of crops and reduce the timescales involved. It is especially useful in the case of African staples that have narrow gene pools or are slow-growing or difficult to cross.

Governments, donors and philanthropic foundations have invested considerable resources in the development of GM varieties of staples such as sorghum, cassava, matoke and cowpea in an attempt to bolster nutrient content and resistance to pests, disease and drought. These crops are crucial to the food security and livelihoods of millions of sub-Saharan Africans, but are shunned by private-sector researchers, mainly because of the small market opportunity they offer.

This investment has yet to translate to anything more than successful field trials: no GM trait developed for African farmers has been cleared for release by a government. There are many reasons why this is so, but chief among them is the polarised debate about GM crops. ...

... But what typically determines whether a GM crop is approved for release in Africa is not a balanced, independent assessment of risks and benefits, but a political judgment shaped by distrust and suspicion of the technology. ...

...  As a result, GM crops are stuck on a treadmill of continual field trials. Governments are in effect attempting to balance the demands of pro- and anti-GM lobbies: proponents have a pipeline of technologies; opponents are appeased by the failure of any to gain approval.

This balancing act may be politically expedient, but it represents poor value for money for the public bodies and foundations funding research and does nothing for the farmers and consumers who could potentially benefit from GM crops.

The Hockey Stick of Human Prosperity

From MRUniversity, Everday Economics:

"We are pleased to announce a brand new course at MRUniversity, Everyday Economics. The new course will cover some of the big ideas in economics but applied to everyday questions. The first section, premiering now and rolling out over the next several weeks, features Don Boudreaux on trade. Tyler will appear in a future section on food. You can expect more from me as well. Indeed, you may spot both Tyler and I in some cameos (ala Stan Lee) in some of Don’s videos!

Here’s the first video on trade and the hockey stick of human prosperity."

Why the West Progressed in Ways No One Else Had

I just read Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages by Frances & Joseph Gies. The book focuses on technological development during the 1,000 years from 500-1500 C.E. The Middle Ages was once cast as an age of regression from the golden age of Greece and Rome until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment saved the day. Furthermore, capitalism is often seen as a product of the last two or three centuries. Modern scholarship debunks these characterizations. This book does a great job at showing the cultural and technological ferment of the Middle Ages, as well as showing how many of the key components of the modern economic world (companies, risk management, double-entry bookkeeping, finance, technological innovation, labor specialization, factories, to name a few) were already coming to flower by 1500. Here are two insights from the end of the book:

… "Asian priority in a wide range of [technological] innovations is established. Asia, however, showed little inclination to borrow, and so, after giving much to others, allowed its own technology to wither, as demonstrated in the history of the two epoch-making inventions of printing and firearms. Each originated in China, but each was allowed to languish, while Europe seized them in both hands to make them major instruments of change. An authority [Timo Myllyntaus] on technology transfer in the modern world asserts that the process 'is not just a matter of moving some piece of hardware from one place to another… A material infrastructure is not enough. There must also be sufficient nonmaterial infrastructure.' In the 'nonmaterial infrastructure' of medieval Europe was a spirit of progress whose ingredients included intellectual curiosity, a love of tinkering, an ambition 'to serve God' and also 'to grow rich as all men desire to do.'

A sense of progress implies a sense of history, something missing among the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. 'Lacking any objective understanding of the past – that is, lacking history,' says [D. S. L.] Cardwell, 'the hierarchical and slave-owning societies of classical antiquity failed to appreciate the great progress that had been achieved by and through technics.' On the contrary, the ancients were fond of looking back to what they conceived as a vanished 'golden age,' a conception the reverse of progress. The Christian Church, whose pioneering monastic orders made many practical and material contributions to medieval technology, also supplied a noncyclical, straight-line view of history that allowed scope for the idea of progress." (287-288)

The book concludes with this paragraph:

"' Technology,' says Melvin Kranzberg, founder of the Society for the History of Technology, 'is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.' It is what each age and each society make of it. The Middle Ages used it sometimes wisely, sometimes recklessly, often for dubious purposes, seldom with a thought for the future, and with only a dim awareness of the scientific and mathematical laws governing it. But operating on instinct, insight, trial and error, and perseverance, the craftsman and craftswoman, the entrepreneurs, the working monks and the clerical intellectuals, and the artist-engineers all transformed the world, on balance very much to the world's advantage." (291)

I've read a number of books on the history of technology. This is one of the best short surveys I have read, reading more like a novel than a history book.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repackaging Climate Action

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

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

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

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. ...

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. ...

Limits to Growth: Still Wrong, Still Influential - Bjorn Lomborg

Below is a presentation by Bjorn Lomborg at Creative Innovation 2013: Asia Pacific. I think this is a remarkable presentation. First, a few remarks.

How much can the global economy grow? That is a big issue in economics and environmentalism. Clearly, the earth has a fixed quantity of resources. If the economy grows exponentially, then one day, we run out of resources, and the world system collapses. We must limit growth if we are to survive. It seems so plainly obvious. Limits to Growth was an attempt to quantify how this all played out and advocate for changes.

My Dad was a professor and research chemist during my childhood. He was intensely focused on energy. Limits to growth conversations were in the ether all around me during my junior high, high school, and college years in the 1970s. I volunteered in the 1980 John Anderson presidential campaign, partly because he wanted to impose a $.50 a gallon gas tax to get us off of petroleum and move toward nuclear and renewable fuels. Limits to Growth (LTG) was very much a product of the thinking of the 1970s mindset, but its influence is still very strong today.

But the problem is that the LTG framing is spectacularly wrong! In the video below, Bjorn Lomborg unpacks why this is so. LTG focused on five factors:

• Population
• Agricultural Production
• Natural Resources
• Industrial Production
• Pollution

Each of these was believed to be growing exponentially. Population was growing exponentially. It requires a certain amount of acreage to generate enough food to feed each person. Feeding this growing number of people will mean cultivating evermore acreage. Supplying basic goods to these people will mean an exponential growth in industrial production, with an attendant rise in resource consumption and pollution.

What the scenario spectacularly overlooks is human innovation and substitution. For example, population growth is slowing and will likely stop at between ten and eleven billion, maybe less, in the second half of this century. The increase directly resulted from the life-enhancing technology that caused a sharp decline in death rates. But birth rates took far more years to adjust. Thus, millions of children that would have died young in past eras were now becoming adults and having children. But over time, the fertility appears to drop back down to the replacement rate and even lower in some places. People innovated.

Another example. The agricultural land required to feed one American stayed constant until about 1910, when three hundred ten million acres were in production. Now if you went back in time and told Americans that the population would triple during the next century and asked them how much agricultural land would be needed, they could easily tell you. An additional six hundred million acres, or most of the land area east of the Mississippi. How many acres are in production today? Three hundred ten million acres, the same as in 1910. Innovation and technology allowed us to become magnitudes more efficient in agriculture to the point that we are not only able to feed the additional Americans but also export food. This is called decoupling because the two variables of population and agricultural land use no longer move in tandem. Americans innovated.

One chart from the video below shows a similar development in world agriculture.

 

Even with population growth, the land needed for agriculture is projected to remain about the same or a little higher by other estimates. More decoupling through innovation.

Then there is this recent chart. It suggests that energy consumption may be decoupling from economic output:

 

Source

As Lomborg notes, innovation is the missing element in LTG. By recycling some non-renewable resources, using nanotechnology to redesign materials at the molecular level, and eventually substituting renewable materials for non-renewables, the possibilities for growth are inestimable.

There is a caveat here. As we innovate, it is possible that we may not find it possible to innovate quickly enough on a particular challenge to avoid creating considerable hardship for segments of the human race at a particular time. I’m not suggesting we should be without caution, just that the idea of the limits is very flawed.

Here is the video. Enjoy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economic Development Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABSTRACT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not sure I agree, but some interesting thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ...

 

Why The Washing Machine Was The Greatest Invention Of The Industrial Revolution

Business Insider: Why The Washing Machine Was The Greatest Invention Of The Industrial Revolution

"I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the first time ever. That was a great day for my mother," Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, said in one of his many TED talks.

Unfortunately, about five billion people around the world still heat water and scrub their clothes by hand. And because of growing energy concerns, some (the few with washing machines) don't mind the inequality.

Rosling, however, believes washing machines foster education and democracy. He doesn't think the "haves" should tell the "have-nots" how to spend their days either.

This is a good summary of Rosling's TED presentation about the impact of the washing machine. But as good as it is, you need to see the full 10-minute presentation.

Proof Jesus Was Not a Capitalist: The Richest 1 Percent Own Half the World's Wealth - My Response

Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite has a post at the Huffington Post today titled Proof Jesus Was Not a Capitalist: The Richest 1 Percent Own Half the World's Wealth. Here is my response.

She writes:

...Biblically speaking, probably not. As Jesus warned, you have to choose. Either money rules you, or your highest values rule you. There's no middle ground. "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." (Luke 16:13)

Jesus was not a capitalist.

God's rules on economics, as articulated both by the prophets and Jesus of Nazareth, are strikingly clear. Not small concentrations of great wealth and the vast majority of people in poverty, but 'each under their own vine and fig tree, living without fear.' (Micah 4:4) Jesus announces his ministry as "good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18), that is, the "Jubilee," the really radical redistributive economic strategy of ancient Israel.

So, is it likely the leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos serve that vision, a vision of a reasonable abundance shared by all, or are they in service to the vast accumulated wealth of the 1 percent? Is it going to be possible for people at that meeting to enact policies that start to close this disastrous economic gulf between the rich and the poor? ...

First, advanced agrarian societies of the Near East and Rome are the contexts of the Bible (Hebrew and Christian Testaments.) To the limited degree they thought in macroeconomic terms, the economy was a zero-sum game. Land and labor were the two inputs for production. Both were relatively fixed. There was little you could do to alter land productivity, and one person's labor was not substantially different from another's. Consequently, with variable productivity off the table, economics was constrained to considerations of consumption and distribution. Both personal and societal abundance was cyclical, and sharing the fixed pie was essential for community survival.

The great divergence of the past two centuries is the realization that productivity can be radically altered. Productivity can be altered radically by applying technology, energy, exchange, stable institutions, and improving human capital. But these changes have included concentrating wealth into productive assets and assuming larger risks to achieve greater productivity effectively. We live in a different world from advanced agrarian societies, and applying morals from their context directly to ours is useless.

Second, the Jubilee was categorically not a "radical redistributive economic strategy." Land was to revert to its perpetual owners every 50 years. Jubilee stated that if someone needed to "sell" their land, the price would be determined based on the number of crops gathered between the "sale" date and the next Jubilee. Then the land would revert to the perpetual owner. In other words, it was a lease. A person could "sell" their labor under the same conditions. These provisions only applied to agricultural land and had nothing to do with non-agricultural land or other private property. Significantly, it ensured that everyone had access to at least a minimal level of capital (land and labor) to provide for themselves and to produce goods for exchange, living individually and corporately as God's stewards. That has interesting theological implications for economics, but it was not radical redistribution.

Third, from where does abundance come? Apart from air and sunlight, name one thing humans use that does not require human action to transform matter, energy, and data from a less useful form to a more useful form. Absent human action, there is near absolute scarcity of the things that humanity uses. If we each had to provide for ourselves and our families alone, our days would be precarious, doing little else but hunting and gathering our way through life. But we achieve high productivity levels through specialization, technology, the concentration of wealth in productive enterprises, and trade (i.e., capitalism), resulting in unprecedented abundance. Had Jesus known that productivity could be radically altered, I suspect he may have offered different guidance (and I don't mean a blanket blessing of the American economic system.)

Fourth, just what is the negative impact of inequality that should give us pause? The article doesn't say, but it is strongly implied: If wealth is becoming concentrated at the top, then it must be that it is being taken from others, making them poor (1% are wealthy while 99% are in poverty) ... the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. She is not alone in this thinking. A recent survey of Americans showed that 66% of respondents think that the proportion of the global population living in poverty has doubled in the past twenty years and another 29% think there has been no change (total of 95%), when in fact the proportion has been halved:

Source: Brookings

Furthermore, the number of well-paying jobs is expanding around the world. Life expectancy at birth, the most holistic measure of human well-being, is now at seventy years and closing in on the eighty-year mark enjoyed by the wealthiest nations. Studies show that inequality within nations is increasing, but inequality between nations is falling.

Now none of this is to say that rising inequality is good or bad. We have to be specific about what metric we use. If the metric is that inequality means more poverty and is therefore bad, then the assertion that inequality is "bad" isn't true. People are not getting poorer. That doesn't mean inequality isn't problematic for other reasons, but we must be specific about what we are tackling.

Finally,

"Unregulated market capitalism has only one master, and that is money. And that is why 85 people control half the wealth of the whole world."

Dr. Thistlethwaite, if you identify one nation on the face of the earth with "unregulated market capitalism," I will write you a check for $1,000 here and now. They don't exist! This issue is not unregulated market capitalism but corporatism. If there is a governance problem, it is that the biggest corporate entities and government have joined together to stack things in favor of their mutual interests over and against market forces that might threaten them. That is corporatist business capitalism and antithetical to market capitalism. Furthermore, economists have not reached a consensus on why there has been an increasing concentration at the top, but the idea that it is summed up in "unregulated market capitalism" is just absurd.

With all that said, I'm not saying that growth in inequality isn't a problem and isn't worthy of theological and moral reflection. I am asking for a more responsible discussion.

I will also agree that change begins from the bottom up. Muhammad Yunus uses the image of a bonsai tree. The seed that grows into the tiny bonsai tree is the same seed that grows into the tall tree in the forest. The difference is that the bonsai grows from the limited foundation of the flowerpot, while the tall tree has the rich foundation of the forest bed. The poor are bonsai people. By improving the soil in which they grow, instituting property rights and the rule of law, and including them in networks of productivity and exchange, they too can flourish as people in wealthier nations have. Trickle-up capitalism is a promising strategy. It is already at work around the world. Let's join them and support them. Populist ideological warfare about poorly defined issues and remedies is nothing but a moralistic distraction. The world deserves better from Christian thinkers.

A 200-Year Look At Automation And How It Has Improved Our Lives

Will There Be Any Poor Countries Left in the World in 20 Years?

Atlantic: Will There Be Any Poor Countries Left in the World in 20 Years?

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

We hear these myths raised at international conferences and at social gatherings. We get asked about them by politicians, reporters, students, and CEOs. All three reflect a dim view of the future, one that says the world isn’t improving but staying poor and sick, and getting overcrowded.

We’re going to make the opposite case, that the world is getting better, and that in two decades it will be better still. ...

... By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer. Countries will learn from their most productive neighbors and benefit from innovations like new vaccines, better seeds, and the digital revolution. Their labor forces, buoyed by expanded education, will attract new investments.

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.

 

How far you could get from New York in one day—back in the day

Quartz: How far you could get from New York in one day—back in the day. (1800 vs. 1934)

We like to think of the 20th century as a time of unprecedented change. But was the change of the 19th century even more profound? Geology and evolution changed our perception of deep history. People and information were liberated to move across the land at speeds faster than a horse. Human productivity exploded. Some would make the case that most change since that time has merely been an extension of nineteenth century changes from the ancient order of things. The map is a great illustration of the radical change that happened in transportation.

 

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.” ...

Why We Need Ghosts of Economic Past, Present, and Future

I watched the 1950 version of "A Christmas Carol" on Christmas Eve. There is an interesting part of the story that I suspect few even notice. In the exchange between Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past, it comes out that both Scrooge's mother and sister died giving birth. Can you imagine a case in our society where both mother and daughter die in childbirth? Such a thing would be so strange that we might look for some hereditary or environmental connection between the events.

Scrooge's mother likely died in the 1780s and his sister in the early 1800s, based on Scrooge's age and calculating back from 1843 (when the book was written.) While certainly tragic, you get no sense that this was especially odd. That's because in 1843 and prior, it wasn't odd. Throughout history, many women died in childbirth, and upwards of one in four children born alive died before their first birthday. The average life expectancy at birth was around 30 years old. (That doesn't mean that some people did not live much longer, but so many died so early that the overall average from birth was quite low.) Today it is nearly 70 years globally and 80 years in advanced nations.

The interesting thing to me is how people of Scrooge's day would have seen our life expectancy today as miraculous. Yet once society moves into the "new normal" of high life expectancy, the miracle is quickly forgotten and seen as the natural order. We are entitled to the new normal, and we come to see those not living in the new normal as victims of some injustice or malady that caused their abnormal plight.

I see this over and over with a range of socio-economic problems. For instance, I've seen countless books that examine what "causes" poverty. Yet, if you were to go back 300 years, you would see that the norm was the overwhelming majority of people living just below or just above subsistence levels. By today's standards, the difference between those below and above was marginal. Someone looking forward from 300 years ago would have seen many of the poorest communities in Africa or Asia today and not been particularly surprised. Their question would not have been what causes poverty. They would have wanted to know what caused the astounding rise in prosperity in other parts of the world.

As I see it, the human propensity to cocoon within "new normals," losing all perspective on how change occurred, is one of the biggest challenges to creating a better world. It causes us to be ungrateful for the good we have inherited and to ask bad questions as we seek the welfare of others. Maybe we need ghosts of the economic past, present, and future to help us see more clearly.

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. ...

Bjorn Lomborg: The Improving State of the World

Bjorn Lomborg at TED.

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%.]

The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel

The Atlantic: The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel

1. The printing press, 1430s

The printing press was nominated by 10 of our 12 panelists, five of whom ranked it in their top three. Dyson described its invention as the turning point at which “knowledge began freely replicating and quickly assumed a life of its own.”

2. Electricity, late 19th century

And then there was light—and Nos. 4, 9, 16, 24, 28, 44, 45, and most of the rest of modern life.

3. Penicillin, 1928

Accidentally discovered in 1928, though antibiotics were not widely distributed until after World War II, when they became the silver bullet for any number of formerly deadly diseases ...

Economics Links

1. Your personality type determines your paycheck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Does Studying Economics Breed Greed?

... Consider these data points: 

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

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

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

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

The author offers some remedies.

6. Six signs you’re reading good criticism of economics

1. The criticism is by an economist ...

2. They know the difference between academic economists, economic consultants, business, bureaucrats and politicians ...

3. They distinguish “good for business” and “good economics” ...

4. They criticise a particular, clearly defined area or use of economics ...

5. They criticise a specific economist ...

6. They recognise that economics and values cannot be untangled, no matter who is doing the analysis ...

5. We Don’t Need a ‘Third Way’, We Need More Non-Profits

The problem with advocating for third way economic system between capitalism and socialism is, as Matt Perman notes, there is no realistic third way. Fortunately, a third way isn’t needed since capitalism can do everything that so-called “third alternative” (e.g., distributism) want their system to do. For instance, one aspect of how capitalism can create a more “people-centered economy” is to increase the amount of capital that is dedicated to non-profits. ...

6. Deficits have fallen to 4% of GDP: Source

7. So why, exactly, is labor’s share of income on the decline?

... But e21′s Scot Winship trots out a differently theory (as seen below in a reverse-order Twitter exchange). He theorizes that the labor share of income used to be artificially high, reflecting overpayment to workers during the strong union era so wives could stay at home and raise the kids. Then as women entered the workforce, there was a “Great Correction” where male compensation stagnated, female compensation rose, and the labor share fell. Looking forward to Winship’s extended essay and research on the topic.

8. 1 In 8 Suffers From Chronic Hunger Globally, U.N. Report Says

Worldwide, roughly 1 in 8 people suffered from chronic hunger from 2011 to 2013, according to a new report from three U.N. food agencies.

They concluded that 842 million people didn't get enough food to lead healthy lives in that period, a slight drop from the 868 million in the previous report. ...

 9. BBC: Economy woes pile up for Latin America's leftists

Since the start of the global economic crisis, left-leaning Latin American politicians and pundits have been foretelling the end of economic "neo-liberalism" in their part of the world.

But now, five years after the collapse of US bank Lehman Brothers, we may instead be witnessing the twilight of economic "neo-leftism" in Latin America. ...

10. Why China’s middle class supports the Communist Party

... The common belief of the last 20 years outside China is that economic growth, a growing middle class, and the rise of entrepreneurs inevitably lead to democracy. Everyone knows democratic countries do not go to war with each other, and that a democratic China means thereby less of a "China threat."

The China threat may indeed disappear, but this is unlikely to be because of a rising middle class. The problems with these various equations are that different meanings of the middle class have been elided, even though they may have nothing in common. However it is conceptualized, the middle class in China is actually small despite the current rhetoric. And last but by no means least, China’s socio-political experience is not that of Europe or North America. The middle class in China remains an essential part of the state from which it has emerged and is not very likely to be the Chinese equivalent of the European or North American bourgeoisie with whom it is often equated. ...

11. How to Cut the Poverty Rate in Half (It's Easy)

... Using the dataset from the latest Census poverty report, I determined that if we cut a $2,920 check to every single American—adults, children, and retirees—we could cut official poverty in half. Economists consider this sort of across-the-board payment a “universal basic income.” You can think of it as Social Security for all, not just the elderly. 

The upside of giving everybody about $3,000 is that it’s a very easy policy to run and a surefire way to cut poverty in half. But it's a large program: it would require about $907 billion in 2012, or 5.6 percent of the nation’s GDP. (In a real implementation, we might exclude the more than 45 million Americans receiving OASI Social Security benefits from a basic income, bringing the cost down substantially.) ...

A challenge with this model is that as someone's income rises to the top of the poverty line, they will lose the $3,000 payment as they move past that line. They need a jump of $3,000 over the line to break-even. Some method is needed for the transition out of poverty if people are not to be trapped there.

12. NPR: Debate: For A Better Future, Live In A Red State?

13. Adam Smith on Self-Interests, Not Greed

... Smith’s views were clear: we are in “almost constant occasion for the help of[(our]brethren, and it is in vain for [us] to expect it from their benevolence only. [We] will be more likely to prevail if [we] can interest their self–love in [our] favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for [us] what [we] require of them”. 

Of course the same is true for solely self-interested greedy “butchers, brewers, and bakers”!  They will prevail only if they “lower their” price demands to what their customers “can go along with”.  For both self-interested buyers and for self-interested sellers they must mediate their self-interests to arrive at successful transactions.

The process by which they mediate their self-interests is by persuasion, as outlined by Adam Smith in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” and how that is best achieved in negotiations or bargaining exchanges is explained in the sentence immediately before the “butcher, beer, baker” example: “Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.” (Wealth Of Nations, above).

I hope this is made clear by tutors at Harvard University and that you also make it clear in your classes too.

Greed is not good!  That is the opposite of what Adam Smith taught.

 14. PBS: The Three Reasons Countries Get Rich: Location, Location and Location (I'm not endorsing this view. It is much too deterministic. But it makes for interesting discussion.)

 15. Emerging Economies Nearing Half of Global Warming Emissions

... Developing nations' emissions are rising fast and the report predicted that their share of cumulative emissions would reach 51 percent by 2020. ...

Explaining the steep decline in the frequency of fires

Matt Ridley: Explaining the steep decline in the frequency of fires

... In my case, as somebody always on the look-out for under-reported good news stories, it also served to alert me to just how dramatic the fall in “demand” for firefighters has been. Intrigued by the strike, I looked up the numbers and found to my amazement that in 2011, compared with just a decade before, firefighters attended 48 per cent fewer fires overall; 39 per cent fewer building fires; 44 per cent fewer minor outdoor fires; 24 per cent fewer road-traffic collisions; 8 per cent fewer floods — and 40 per cent fewer incidents overall. The decline has if anything accelerated since 2011.

That is to say, during a period when the population and the number of buildings grew, we needed to call the fire brigade much, much less. Most important of all, the number of people dying in fires in the home has fallen by 60 per cent compared with the 1980s. The credit for these benign changes goes at least partly to technology — fire-retardant materials, self-extinguishing cigarettes, smoke alarms, sprinklers, alarms on cookers — much of which was driven by sensible regulation. Fewer open fires and fewer people smoking, especially indoors, must have helped too. There is little doubt that rules about such things have saved lives, as even most libertarians must concede.

But this is not the whole story. I was stunned to find that the number of deliberate fires has been falling much faster than the number of accidental fires. The steepest fall has been in car fires, down from 77,000 in 2001-2 to 17,000 in 2010-11. This echoes the 60 per cent collapse in car thefts in G7 countries since 1995. Deliberate fires in buildings have more than halved in number; I assume this is also something to do with crime detection — CCTV, DNA testing and so forth, which make it much less easy to get away with arson. Only deliberate outdoor fires show little trend: perhaps because not until he is deep in the woods does an arsonist feel safe from detection.

Behind the firefighters’ strike, therefore, lies a most unusual policy dilemma: how to manage declining demand for a free public service. NHS planners would give their eye teeth for such a problem, since healthcare demand seems to expand infinitely, whatever the policy. ...

... Fire was an abiding terror to our ancestors, consuming not just many of their lives, but much of their property. Almost all of us have family stories of devastating fires. Although we will always need this essential service , thankfully, that experience is becoming steadily rarer. Sir Ken Knight found it likely that this decline would continue, remarking: “I wonder if anyone a decade ago would have predicted the need for fire and rescue services to attend 40 per cent fewer emergency incidents.” The fire service will undoubtedly have to shrink. ...

Extreme Poverty is in Retreat

New York Times: Nicholas Kristoff - A Way of Life Is Ending. Thank Goodness.

... For thousands of generations, a vast majority of humans have lived brief, illiterate lives marked by disease, disability and the loss of children. As recently as 1980, a slight majority of people in the developing world lived in extreme poverty, defined as surviving on less than $1.25 in today’s money.

Yet in a time of depressing news worldwide, about dysfunction and crisis from Syria to our own Congress, here’s one area of spectacular progress.

The share of people in the developing world who live in extreme poverty has been reduced from 1 in 2 in 1980 to 1 in 5 today, according to the World Bank. Now the aim is to reduce that to almost zero by 2030.

There will still be poverty, of course, just as there is far too much poverty lingering in America. But the extreme hanging-by-your-fingernails subsistence in a thatch-roof hut, your children uneducated and dying — that will go from typical to essentially nonexistent just in the course of my adult life. ...

... In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5. Now that figure is down close to 6 million. ...

... Illiteracy is retreating and technology is spreading. More people worldwide now have cellphones than toilets. ...

... When additional kids survive in poor countries, does that really matter? Isn’t the result just a population explosion leading to famine or war, and more deaths?

That’s a frequent objection, but it’s wrong. When child mortality drops and families know that their children will survive, they are more likely to have fewer babies — and to invest more in them. There’s a well-known path from declining child deaths to declining births, which is why Bangladesh is now down to an average of 2.2 births per woman.

Ancient diseases are on the way out. ...

... AIDS is also receding. ...

... Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the United States aid agency, says he is optimistic that extreme poverty will be eliminated by 2030 but notes that increasingly the focus will have to be on lagging countries like Congo. ...

... So let’s acknowledge that there’s plenty of work remaining — and that cycles of poverty in America must be a top priority at home — yet also celebrate a triumph for humanity. The world of extreme poverty and disease that characterized life for most people throughout history may now finally be on its way out.

 

Economics Links

1. Did living standards improve during the Industrial Revolution?

... So, while the Industrial Revolution ultimately led to big increases in wealth, progress was unsteady. For much of the period, the average person was not reaping the benefits of economic change.

So much for wages. Other measures of standard of living should be considered. ...

This a great piece highlighting the methods economic historians use to evaluate standards of living.

2. Annual Food Inflation

3.  Robert Reich on free markets

... In reality, the "free market" is a bunch of rules about (1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); (2) on what terms (equal access to the internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections? ); (3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?) (4) what's private and what's public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); (5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.

These rules don't exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don't "intrude" on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren't "free" of rules; the rules define them....

All true, but the rules were not arbitrarily written yesterday. Centuries of trial and error are reflected in the rules. That doesn't make them all just or above modification, but neither are they a game thrown together at a whim. To claim there are no free markets because government frames elements of exchange is like saying there is no such thing as free speech because government frames elements of public dialog.

4. American Farmers Say They Feed The World, But Do They?

... So I called , an economist at Cornell University who studies international agriculture and poverty.

They're both right," he says, chuckling. "Sometimes the opposite of a truth isn't a falsehood, but another truth, right?"

It's true, he says, that bigger harvests in the U.S. tend to make food more affordable around the world, and "lower food prices are a good thing for poor people." ...

... But Mellon is right, too, Barrett says. The big crops that American farmers send abroad don't provide the vitamins and minerals that billions of people need most. So if the U.S. exports lots of corn, driving down the cost of cornmeal, "it induces poor families to buy lots of cornmeal, and to buy less in the way of leafy green vegetables, or milk," that have the key nutrients. In this case, you're feeding the world, but not solving the nutrition problems. ...

 5. Why the U.S. Needs to Fall Out of Love With Homeownership

... Less developed countries have consistently higher levels of homeownership, while more advanced nations combine higher levels of economic development with substantially lower levels of homeownership.  (The correlation between the two is -.40 overall and it rises to -.58 when she removed outliers Singapore, Norway, Luxembourg and Switzerland). American political rhetoric tends to equate rising homeownership rates with strong economic development. Instead, the opposite is true. The rate of homeownership declines as nations get wealthier.

One reason for this may be because people in less developed nations have fewer options of where to put their money. In agrarian economies, land ownership is the basic source and measure of wealth. In more advanced capitalist economies, people have many more investment options. Many of the places with the highest rates of homeownership are in former Communist nations of Eastern Europe. ...

... And numerous studies have found that excessive homeownership significantly distorts the economy, diverting investment away from much more needed areas like technology and knowledge.

Homeownership continues to make sense for many Americans. But for those whose income is limited or who are still building their careers, a house can be an anchor than limits their ability to move to where jobs are.  ...

6. Household Incomes Remain Flat Despite Improving Economy

7. Brazil's New Middle Class: A Better Life, Not An Easy One

Tens of millions of Brazilians have risen out of poverty over the past decade in one of the world's great economic success stories. The reasons are many: strong overall economic growth, fueled by exports. A rise in the minimum wage. A more educated workforce. And big government spending programs, including direct payments to extremely poor families.

But becoming middle class in Brazil means a better life, not an easy one. The new, lowest rung of the middle class is what in the U.S. would be called the working poor, with monthly incomes of between $500 and $2,000.

Yet this group is driving consumer spending in Brazil as they cobble together enough money to buy a television, a cell phone or pay for their children to go to a private school. ...

What was the Great Divergence?

Economist: What was the Great Divergence?

"A FEW centuries ago it would have been difficult to tell Europe apart from the rest of the world—in economic terms, at least. Indeed, half a millenium ago Europe might justly have been considered a laggard. The three inventions which, in the words of Karl Marx, "ushered in bourgeois society" were not invented in Europe. Gunpowder, the compass and the printing press were probably all invented in China.

But by the 19th century, things were rather different. Western Europe and parts of North America had become fabulously wealthy. Almost everywhere else was horribly poor. Economic historians refer to this as the "Great Divergence". ..."

I'll add that failure to seriously wrestle with what is going on here and incorporating that into theological implications for work, addressing poverty, and general ethics, is one of the biggest reasons the church finds itself unable to address current issues constructively. Ideologies of Western supremacy or Western exploitation as the driving features are insufficient.

Saturday Links

I skipped Saturday Links last week due to the holiday weekend. I'm catching up this week.

1. Faith in the Free Market

"... Selke, now 36, is part of a vanguard of young Christians who believe that God uses not only the church and formal ministry but every sphere of society, including business and free markets, to advance his work of shalom. Selke parlayed his experience analyzing companies, creating spreadsheets, and evaluating profitable opportunities for an investment bank into helping social entrepreneurs—people who create organizations in order to benefit society.

In 2010, Selke co-founded Hub Ventures, an accelerator in San Francisco investing in entrepreneurs launching companies that produce a social good. The 12-week program provides up to $20,000 in seed funding, mentorship, workshops, and access to investors in exchange for an average of a 6 percent ownership stake. What separates Selke's program from other business accelerators en vogue in Silicon Valley is the focus on "entrepreneurs building technology solutions for a better world," Selke says. ..."

2. The Global Low Fertility Panic: Just a Phase?

"...Our new book, The Global Spread of Fertility Decline: Population, Fear, and Uncertainty (Yale University Press, 2013) analyzes these trends and the demographic, political and economic consequences and uncertainties as low fertility has become a global phenomenon. Like other facets of globalization, low fertility rates are by no means universal: High fertility persists in sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of the Middle East, but elsewhere low fertility is more the rule than the exception. These underlying trends in childbearing mean that in the near future the rate of population growth both in Europe and Asia are likely to decline. The world is not on a path of unrestrained demographic growth, as some believe. People all over the world have hit the brakes.

Thirty years ago only a small fraction of the world's population lived in the few countries with fertility rates substantially below the "replacement level" - the rate at which the fertility of a hypothetical cohort of women would exactly replace itself in the next generation - normally set at 2.1 children per woman for populations with low mortality conditions. Fast forward to 2013, with roughly 60 percent of the world's population living in countries with such below-replacement fertility rates.

The consequences of these changes are striking. ..."

3. Immigration and Entrepreneurship

According to a Small Business Administration-commissioned report in 2012 by Robert W. Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the business ownership rate is higher for immigrants than the native-born, with 10.5 percent of the immigrant work force owning a business compared with 9.3 percent of the native-born work force.

4. Graft Is On The Rise Around The World

5. Job-Stealing Robots Go Global

Asian workers have scored some victories in rising wages, but many are learning something the West has known for some time: Employers will seek out the cheapest labor on offer, and machines are even cheaper than an underpaid human. In the late 20th century, manufacturing jobs shifted from America to China, then from China to Southeast Asia, and now even those are being automated.

For America, at least, this trend shouldn't be so disconcerting. After all, it's developed economies like ours that are designing the robots Nike is now using. Low-wage manufacturing jobs are drying up, but they're being replaced by jobs in building, operating, and repairing the tech in question. Increasingly, companies will be likely to "onshore" these jobs to America, when shipping and distribution becomes much easier and cheaper. Manufacturing, it seems, will come full circle.

6. Economist Mark Perry with a provocative claim: Yes, the middle-class has been disappearing, but they haven't fallen into the lower-class, they've risen into the upper-class

 

7. Co.exist with what they see as 4 Bogus Claims About Why Walmart Can't Pay A Living Wage (I'm not in full agreement but they make they present their side articulately.)

8. Gallup Has Never Seen So Many Americans Sitting Out Of The Stock Market

9. K-State study: Arguments about money best predictor of divorce

"Results revealed it didn't matter how much you made or how much you were worth," Britt said in the university statement. "Arguments about money are the top predictor for divorce because it happens at all levels."

She said couples should seek a financial planner as part of premarital counseling, and talk about finances.

10. How the Dismal Science Got Its Name (It had nothing to do with Thomas Malthus or scarcity ... or even with students who have suffered through Econ 101 classes.)

 11. Matt Ridley writes I may follow the crowd, but not because it's a crowd

"... My friend objected that I seemed to follow the herd on matters like the reality of evolution and the safety of genetically modified crops, so why not on climate change? Ah, said I, but I don't. I agree with the majority view on evolution, not because it is a majority view but because I have looked at evidence. It's the data that convince me, not the existence of a consensus. ..."

12. Dan Lewis debunks the myth that the end of the telegraph is here: The Spread of a False Fact

13. PC sales see 'longest decline' in history

Global personal computer (PC) sales have fallen for the fifth quarter in a row, making it the "longest duration of decline" in history.

14. Time of 'Incredible Violence': Historian Gives Readers Glimpse of Medieval Life

15. Farming Got Hip In Iran Some 12,000 Years Ago, Ancient Seeds Reveal

Archaeologists digging in the foothills of Iran's Zagros Mountains have discovered the remains of a Stone Age farming community. It turns out that people living there were growing plants like barley, peas and lentils as early as 12,000 years ago.

The findings offer a rare snapshot of a time when humans first started experimenting with farming. They also show that Iran was an important player in the origin of agriculture.

16. LGBT group finds acceptance at evangelical college

"... Fuller's community standards states that "sexual abstinence is required for the unmarried" and marriage is between one man and one woman.

Nevertheless, Fuller's decision not to push back against OneTable is a critical step toward acceptance for gay evangelical students, said Justin Lee, the executive director of the Gay Christian Network, which tracks the burgeoning movement. An increasing number of young people have been coming out on Christian campuses nationwide, whether they are accepted or not, and Fuller's move acknowledges that and provides a touchstone for students who would otherwise keep their sexuality a secret, he said. ..."

17. New generation activists build bridges

A traditional organizing approach makes opponents into 'enemies,' but a new crop of union and other activists is using love and empathy to create alliances and new possibilities.