New voting laws around the country are not a response to voter fraud. How do we know? Because there is no credible evidence of consequential voter fraud anywhere in the country.
The new voting laws respond to voter turnout, especially turnout of the "wrong kind" of voters. The laws do not mention ethnicities in their explicit language, but the voting barriers are made more significant for minorities. This brings us to Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory looks at how racism has, directly and indirectly, influenced the legal system to perpetuate racial disparity – like maybe rigging the voting system in favor of white people without saying so. And now you know why one political party, which I used to call home loosely, is so animated in its opposition to Critical Race Theory.
Alongside life expectancy, a second measure of prosperity demographers frequently use is the child mortality rate. The child mortality rate is the number of children that die between birth and their fifth birthday per 1,000 live births. Because the first years of life are when human beings are most vulnerable, their ability to survive the first years of life says a lot about the state of their society; thus, the significance of the child mortality rate.
So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of the infant mortality rate (deaths by age one) typical of social scientists and economists who study these issues:
In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third died in the first year of life. Hunger and epidemic disease ravaged the survivors. By 1820, life expectation had risen to 36 years in the west, with only marginal improvement elsewhere. (Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, 69)
Before industrialization, at least one out of every five children died before reaching his or her first birth day; that is infant mortality measured as the number of children dying before the age of one, typically exceeded 200 per 1,000 live births. … In the United States, as late as 1900, infant mortality was 160; …” (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 27)
Estimates are that child mortality was over 40% before 1800.
Let's look at the change in the child mortality rate for the last 200 years:
Globally, that is a drop from forty children per 1,000 to four children per 1,000. This graphic compares nations in 1800, 1950, 1990, and 2013.
Note that the 2013 child mortality rate for all but a few small lagging countries is lower than the rate for all but a few of the wealthiest countries in 1950. The worst country in 2013 has a rate of half that of the best country in 1800.
This is not to say that every nation, every region within a nation, or every subgroup within a nation, has prospered equally well. Still, there is a dramatic improvement in all regions of the world.
During the 1990s, there was a small increase in the rate for the former Soviet nations, but that trend has turned positive again. There are disparities between Anglos and non-Anglos in the United States. The African AIDS epidemic has been harmful. Other regions face other challenges. Yet the overall trend is dramatically downward.
Using child mortality as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than ever, and the gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global social ladder. Again, most of this change occurred when the world population grew sixfold, from less than one billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!
So as we look at the trajectory of change in the world, we find an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is an uneven improvement, but every corner of the planet has improved, and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.
Next, we will look at economic issues.
Alice Dreger's "Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science," is one of the most refreshing books I have read recently. Dreger is a clinical medical humanities and bioethics professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Nearly twenty years ago, Dreger became an activist for the rights of intersex persons. She fought to change the prevailing practice of surgically altering babies to "rectify" ambiguous genitalia, which science suggested was too risky relative to the outcomes, raising many ethical questions. Motivated by varying convictions, surgeons were ignoring science. But before long, Dreger found herself advocating for scientists against activists on another intersex issue. The activists ignored science and attacked scientists when research potentially contradicted activists' strongly held convictions. This book is Dreger's reflections on what she learned from these experiences. I expect to publish a review of the book shortly. For now, I want to post three power sections from the book. (All emphases in the original.)
This quote comes as she is reflecting on her experience talking with researchers at the University of Missouri who had been targeted because of controversial research findings.
The story I had been told about Mike Bailey and Craig Palmer and so many other white straight male scientists accused of producing bad and dangerous findings, the story I had willingly heard as an academic feminist in the humanities, was that these guys were just soldiers of the oppressive establishment against which we good guys had come to fight. They came from old dogma about human nature; we came from progress and social justice, and we had to win. But here I was faced with the fact that not only were these scientists politically progressive when it came to things like the rights of transgender people and rape victims, they were also willing to look for facts that might get them in hot water. They very much cared about progress in social justice, but they cared first about know what was true.
That didn't mean that these scientists (or I, or anyone else) existed without bias. It didn't mean their work wasn't shaped and sometimes tainted by politics, ideologies, and loyalties. But it did mean they tried to adhere to an intellectual agenda that wasn't first and only political. They believed that good science couldn't be done by just Ouija-boarding your answers. Good scholarship had to put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.
In Missouri [University of Missouri, Columbia], I realized that there's a practical reason for this order: Sustainable justice couldn't be achieved if we didn't know what's true about the world. (You can't effectively prosecute and prevent rape if you don't understand why, where, and how rape happens.) But there was also a more essential reason for putting the quest for truth first: it was who we scholars were supposed to be. As the little prop plane flew from Columbia, Missouri, toward the sunrise, of this I was sure: We scholars had to put the search for evidence before everything else, even when the evidence pointed to facts we did not want to see. The world needed that from us, to maintain – by our example, by our very existence – a world that would keep learning and questioning, that would remain free in thought, inquiry, and word.
Nevertheless I knew many of my colleagues in the humanities would disagree. I could practically hear them arguing against me, as if they were seated all around me in those cramped fake-leather seats, yelling to be heard above the churning propellers. We have to use our privilege to advance the rights of the marginalized. We can't let people like Bailey and Palmer say what is true about the world. We have to give voice and power to the oppressed and let them say what is true. Science is as biased as all human endeavors, and so we have to empower the disempowered, and speak always with them.
Involuntarily shaking my head, I argued back: "Justice cannot be determined merely by social position. Justice cannot be advanced by letting 'truth' be determined by political goals. Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what it true. Only insanely privileged people like us, who never fear the knock of a corrupt police, could think guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than facts. It isn't perfect, but look what it has gotten us: antibiotics, an explanation and a treatment for AIDS, reliable histories of the Holocaust, DNA-based exonerations of those falsely accused of crimes, spaceships on the surface of Mars – hell, the plane we're flying in now.
Where would we be, I wondered, if the pope had ultimately won out over Galileo, if he succeeded in using his self-serving Catholic identity politics to forever quash Galileo's evidence that the ancients and the Bible were wrong about the Earth? Power plays as morality plays, whether by popes or feminists, are just that – plays. I longed for the real world, longed to pick apart each history to know what's true, to have my work judged by others, to find evidence that an idea is right or wrong. (136-138)
This passage comes from the end of the last chapter.
I want to say to activists: If you want justice, support the search for truth. Engage in searches for the truth. If you really want meaningful progress and not just temporary self-righteousness, carpe datum. You can begin with principles, yes, but to pursue a principle effectively, you have to know if your route will lead to your destination. If you must criticize scholars whose work challenges yours, do so on the evidence, not by poisoning the land on which we all live.
To scholars I want to say more: Our fellow human beings can't afford to have us act like cattle in an industrial farming system. If we take seriously the importance of truth to justice and recognize the many forces now acting against the pursuit of knowledge – if we really get why our role in democracy is like no other – then we really ought to feel that we must do more to protect each other and the public from misinformation and disinformation. Doing so means taking on more responsibility to police ourselves and everybody else for accuracy and great objectivity – taking on with renewed vigor the pursuit of accurate knowledge and putting ourselves second to that pursuit.
I know that a lot of people who met me along the way in this work thought I'd end up on one side of the war between activists and scholars. The deeper I went, however, the more obvious it became that the best activists and the best scholars actually long for the same kind of world – a free one.
Here's the one thing I now know for sure after this every long trip: Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice. (261-262)
These two paragraphs are near the end of the epilogue.
The problem is an old one: People don't really get that good intentions can't save you from hell. So long as we believe that bad acts are committed only by evil people and that good people do only good, we will fail to see, believe, or prevent these kinds of travesties. Nowadays I feel as though 90 percent of my time talking to academics and activists is spent trying to convince them of this: The people who are against you are not necessarily evil, and your own acts are not necessarily good. That's why we still need scholars and activists. It's not easy to see what's what in the heat of the moment, and we need people pushing for the truth and justice if we're going to get both right.
But most people I run into aren't like us humans. Most people I meet seem convinced that the goodness of their souls will keep them from committing bad acts. When they look back at history, they don't see what we historians see – dumb tragedies. They see simple moral dramas, with predictable characters enacting easy stories of good and evil. They don't understand that the Nazis probably didn't think they were "Nazis." (275-276)
Powerful food for thought.
Were Slaves Immigrants? Yes. If that answer troubles you, please hear me out.
This week, Ben Carson touched off a firestorm when he referred to slaves as immigrants. (Barak Obama has done the same several times.) The uproar has been that equating slavery and immigration minimizes the horrors of slavery. I have engaged in several social media discussions on this topic. At the crux of the matter is volition. Are people brought to a place against their will immigrants? Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Immigrant - “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.”
Volition is not part of the definition. As any demographer will tell you, populations grow (or decline) via three factors: births, deaths, and migration. When looking at a particular locale, people who come to that locale are immigrants. People who go from that locale to another are emigrants. Births and immigration grow the population. Deaths and emigration shrink it. It is a closed system. Volition is not part of the equation.
I agree with concerns about minimizing slavery, and I worry that statements by Carson and Obama risk doing that. As Jemar Tisby writes, a generous reading of Carson’s characterization is that “African slaves endured unimaginable hardship to carve out a life for themselves and their descendants.” I think that was indeed the intent, but it is challenging. Framing slaves as rough equivalents of people who bought a ticket on a boat to come to America in search of a better life minimizes slavery. Both were immigrants but with very very different stories. The desire to present African Americans as other than simply victims while embracing the horrors of slavery is a tough needle to thread in the space of a few words, as both these men were trying to do.
The following quote comes from Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. It was written in 1998, by British sociologist, Anthony Giddens.
What Globalisation is, and whether it is in any way new, are the focus of intense debate. I discuss this debate in Chapter I, since much else hangs upon it. Yet the facts of the matter are actually quite clear. Globalisation is restructuring the ways in which we live, and in a very profound manner. It is led from the west, bears the strong imprint of American political and economic power, and is highly uneven in its consequences. But globalisation is not just the dominance of the West over the rest; it affects the United States as it does other countries.
Globalisation also influences everyday life as much as it does events happening on a world scale. That is why this book includes an extended discussion of sexuality, marriage and the family. In most parts of the world, women are staking claim to greater autonomy than in the past and are entering the labour force in large numbers. Such aspects of globalisation are at least as important as those happening in the global-market place. They contribute to the stresses and strains affecting traditional ways of life and cultures in most regions of the world. The traditional family is under threat, is changing, and will change much further. Other traditions, such as those concerned with religion, are also experiencing major transformations. Fundamentalism originates from a world of crumbling traditions.
The battleground of the twenty-first century will pit fundamentalism against cosmopolitan tolerance. In a globalising world, where information and images are routinely transmitted across the globe, we are all regularly in contact with others who think differently, and live differently, from ourselves. Cosmopolitans welcome and embrace this cultural complexity. Fundamentalists find it disturbing and dangerous. Whether in the areas of religion, ethnic identity or nationalism, they rake refuge in a renewed and purified tradition – and, quite often, violence.
We can legitimately hope that a cosmopolitan outlook will win out. Tolerance of culture diversity and democracy are closely connected, and democracy is currently spreading world-wide. Globalisation lies behind the expansion of democracy. At the same time, paradoxically, it exposes the limits of democratic structures which are most familiar, namely the structures of parliamentary democracy. We need to further democratize existing institutions, and to do so in ways that respond to the demands of the global age. We shall never be able to become the master of our own history, but we can and must find ways of bringing our runaway world to heel. (3-5)
This short collection of essays has stuck with me ever since I first read it years ago. As I have reflected on the past two years American political scene, this book's insights have become ever more prescient. I see the rise of Trump nationalism as a reactionary response to globalization. (This is not conservatism vs. progressivism, as we have recently understood them.) It is the death throes of the twentieth-century world order. It may be short-lived. It may last a generation. But I suspect that it is ultimately doomed. Over the long haul, globalization is an inescapable dynamic. However, that does not mean that significant harm to human well-being and the planet will not happen during these death throes.
Since at least the eighteenth century, we have seen an unprecedented improvement in human well-being, accelerating through the nineteenth century down to the present and spreading around the world. But we should not forget that this improvement was punctuated by a retreat from globalization, resulting in two destructive world wars bracketing a global depression. One hundred years from now, I suspect global human well-being will have made substantial strides over our present living standards. I think globalization is virtually inevitable because we have amassed enough information and experience to see that a globalized world, for all its present vagaries and challenges, is the path to the mutual common good. What is much less clear is what happens in the short term. I suspect this is the most significant turning point in the world that most of us will ever experience.
“Increasing mobility has left us uprooted and disconnected from communities in America.” This is a common refrain going back at least 100 years. Think of the song following World War I that asked how are you going to keep them down on the farm once they have seen gay Paree’? The lament of increasing mobility is a compelling narrative except for one minor problem: Mobility has declined for decades.
Sociologist Claude Fischer writes:
The evidence that mobility has declined is more robust for roughly the past 65 years, thanks to annual census-bureau mass surveys. Around 1950, about 20 per cent of Americans changed homes from one year to the next. In the 1980s, under 18 per cent did. By the 2000s, under 15 per cent – and now we are approaching annual moving rates of only 10 per cent. About two-thirds of movers do not go far, relocating within the same county, and the frequency of such local moves has dropped by about half since the Second World War. The proportion of Americans who move across county and state lines is considerably lower, but that rate, too, has dropped substantially, from about 6.5 per cent in the 1950s to under 4 per cent now.
This trend toward staying in place has accelerated since 2001. … (The Great Settling Down)
Why the decline in mobility?
So what is the cause? My best guess is that the greatest single factor in the great settling down was the increasing physical and economic security of US life.
Thanks to a growing and stabilising economy, spreading affluence, vastly improved public health, the establishment of government institutions from policing to business regulation, and all sorts of ‘safety net’ programmes over several generations – from Social Security to federal disaster assistance – fewer and fewer Americans have been forced to move because of unemployment, floods, the death of a breadwinner, and so on. Greater security also helps account for an apparent shift from the 19th to 20th centuries in who was likeliest to move.
I have done extensive work on tracing my ancestors. I have traced every line back to at least my third great-grandparents, most of whom were born in the early 1800s. I know more about some than others, but the part that has always intrigued me is how much they moved. I would estimate that the majority lived in at least three different states and in more than five counties over their lifetimes. I suspect most people who have identified American ancestors this far back have similar stories. But I have also noticed one anomaly.
My great-grandmother, Augusta (Holmes) Kruse was born in Dekalb County, Missouri, in 1870, the year after her parents had moved there from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her ancestry goes back to seven Mayflower passengers and includes many others who arrived shortly after that. Her family had stayed in place for nearly 250 years. Her maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Pierce, was a seaman who owned ships and sailed the world. Her mother had been to finishing school in Boston. Her grandfather Holmes was an accomplished carpenter. These were not exceptionally wealthy, but they had stable, comfortable lives. Her parents moved west because of her father’s health. Augusta married my great-grandfather, Carl P. Kruse, who had emigrated from a small town in Denmark where his family had lived for generations and his father had served in the Danish Parliament. Because of the population explosion in Denmark, farmland was scarce, and Carl came to America wanting to farm.
Most of my other family lines consist primarily of farmers, miners, and laborers. Ancestors in these families seemed to be constantly on the move. This anecdotal analysis of my family history seems consistent with what the author is describing.
Demographers talk of migration in terms of push and pull factors. Push factors are those that make the status quo more unbearable to maintain. Pull factors are those that promise relatively better circumstances than the status quo. In past generations, push factors might have played a bigger role, like war, drought, local economies gone wrong, etc. However, as America has become more prosperous, fewer pushes have pushed fewer of us. Migration is more about positive pulls.
The “settling” of America is another piece of evidence about an improving world regarding material well-being. But as the author notes, we still have challenges to social cohesion. While improved transportation and communication may not have made us more inclined to move, it may have reshaped who we interact with in our communities. And as the global economy reshapes our work, the trauma of regional job loss is more traumatic because we are less and less accustomed to uprooting and relocating. Focusing on increasing mobility as a cause of rootlessness takes us in an unproductive direction.
Life expectancy at birth is one of the single best indicators of societal well-being. So many things have to work well for the great majority of people to live long lives that the high life expectancy is a proxy for holistic well-being. The measure is of particular value in that it measures something relatively concrete, as opposed to income (which has varying impacts relative to local living standards and exchange rates) or happiness (a highly subjective term.)
Throughout human history, global life expectancy at birth was about 30 years. This does not mean that everyone died before age thirty. It is an average age of death. One in four children died before their first birthday (it is less than 1% in developed nations today). Some people lived to be quite old. But on average, people lived to be thirty.
Over the past two hundred years, something has changed. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled and is still improving. I won't give a dissertation on why that might be but rather invite you to realize that contrary to our intuitions, news reports, and personal biases, we are living through the most astonishing improvement in human flourishing in human history.
Here is a chart showing the trend.
This chart offers an animated presentation of the improvement by nation.
Bloomberg had an excellent piece by science journalist Faye Flam titled It's an Outrage! See? Look How Outraged I Am! Her lead is "Science is starting to shed some light on the curiously continuous cycle of moral outrages." Expressions of collective outrage are not particularly new, but it does seem to me that the frequency of expressed outrage, and outrage over more trivial events, has increased. Why? Psychologists offer this thought:
Psychologists say it all starts to make sense if you think of outrage as a form of display. Expressing it advertises a person's views and allegiances to potential allies. And the more popular a victim's cause, the less risky it is to join in displaying your umbrage.
Why do some incidents provoke almost universal outrage and others set off only those in certain age groups or of particular political leanings? One of the most universal sources of outrage is stealing or hoarding resources, said psychologist Eric Pederson. The theory is that this is ingrained in humans because our ancestors' foraging cultures survived by sharing; if Joe helped himself to what others hunted and gathered, but then did not share his good fortune when he found berries or killed a wildebeest, he'd get in deep trouble.
Humanity's deeply rooted antipathy for cheaters helps explain the outrage over the tax evaders revealed by the Panama Papers. But in other cases, said psychologist Robert Boyd, the definition of what's outrageous is dictated by less objectively obvious cultural norms. Humans are wired to pick up cultural rules and norms, and to aim outrage at violators, he said. Cultural norms vary by political leanings, geography and other factors. Often there's a large generation gap.
Harvard's Krasnow said it all comes back to the fact that displays are aimed at potential allies. An outraged person may have no personal tie to a given issue, but outrage can signal sympathy with those who do. This can be quite noble and selfless, not entirely self-serving; the two blur together in ways that allow human civilization to work to the extent that it does.
According to an anthropologist I read, human reason evolved in the context of communal survival. People observed patterns in events around them and developed heuristic models for survival. They fashioned stories to make sense of events and their place in them. Reason developed as a way to reinforce stories and strengthen societal cohesion. This is also to say reason that challenged societal narratives and cohesion was a threat. We are not naturally wired for objectivity.Many Americans, especially progressives, are now "socialists." The rise of Bernie Sanders has had much to do with it. Yet, when I hear them talk, I keep hearing Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
According to Marxian theory, socialism is a transitional economic system between capitalism and communism. Capitalism (i.e., private property ownership and the distribution of goods and services through market exchange) will run its course. One day, a classless society with no private property will evolve. The workers will hold things in common, and goods will be distributed according to need.
Some Marxists believed they could accelerate this evolution through violent revolution and the imposition of communist principles. We saw that tactic attempted several times in the last century. Others believed economic evolution should run its course. People could work for greater social justice within the system as they methodically brought every aspect of the economy under the control of the government, eventually ending private ownership of the means of production. From there, it would be just a few more steps to communist utopia. This transitional system is socialism.
Socialists called themselves "social democrats" or "democratic socialists," advocating "social democracy." The emphasis here is democracy. Since communism is inevitable, there is no need to short-circuit the process through violent revolution. People will choose their way into communism.
During the last century, it certainly became clear that relying on markets and philanthropy alone was not an optimal strategy for a just and flourishing society. Government has assumed control of some functions to ensure the broader welfare of citizens in all of today's capitalist societies. These functions have been "socialized." But the broader context is still private property and market systems. "Socializing" selected functions is not a tactical progression toward communism. This is welfare capitalism.
However, a funny thing happened to socialism along the way through the last century. It was mugged by reality. It has become clear that socialism is fatally flawed. Market systems provide a real-time information feedback loop, matching ever-changing demands with an ever-changing supply. Markets empower countless strangers to benefit each other through specialization and exchange. There is simply no way a centralized entity can manage the production of goods and services. Assuming those with sufficient information could be trusted to have the wisdom and ethical courage to make optimal decisions, the endless churn of supply and demand makes sufficient information utterly impossible. (Other insurmountable barriers exist, but that is for another day.) The "inevitable" road to communism was wrong.
Most political parties, variously named "democratic socialists" or "social democrats," have become advocates for expanding welfare capitalism. For precisely this reason, the word "socialist" has fallen out of favor in many regions. So, in short, we have learned that neither pure libertarianism nor socialism is workable. We are all welfare capitalists now: We rely primarily on private ownership and market exchange and quibble about what societal functions might be better if socialized.
So let us look for a minute at Bernie Sanders, the "socialist" icon for hipster intellectuals. Sanders talks of making America more like Denmark – or the Nordic economic model. Are Nordic countries socialist? Finnish-American journalist Anu Partanen, author of The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life, recently noted:
The problem is the way Sanders has talked about it [Nordic economic model.] The way he’s embraced the term socialist has reinforced the American misunderstanding that universal social policies always require sacrifice for the good of others, and that such policies are anathema to the entrepreneurial, individualistic American spirit. It’s actually the other way around. For people to support a Nordic-style approach is not an act of altruism but of self-promotion. It’s also the future.
In an age when more and more people are working as entrepreneurs or on short-term projects, and when global competition is requiring all citizens to be better prepared to handle economic turbulence, every nation needs to ensure that its people have the education, health care, and other support structures they need to take risks, start businesses, and build a better future for themselves and for their country. It’s simply a matter of keeping up with the times.
In a recent address at Harvard University, Denmark's prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, made this observation:
I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. … The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.
Are you getting that? A robust welfare system is a means to a robust market economy! And that raises another issue: markets.
Paraphrasing Partanen, progressive Americans see Nordic social policies as anathema to market capitalism. They argue that allowing corporations to rig the system in favor of a few, allegedly an inherent feature of capitalism, is social injustice. It makes no sense. If corporations are rigging the system, then it is not truly a market! The socialist answer would be for the government to assume ownership of corporations. If you just want to end inordinate privilege for big business, then what you are advocating is – wait for it – freer markets!
In reality, there is no such thing as "free markets." Market economies are based on the premise that absent fraud, misinformation, and externalities, people will make the best and most efficient decisions about what to consume and produce for their own needs, mediated through price information generated by supply and demand. Producers who produce well will be rewarded, and those that do not will eventually fold. The reality is that there is always incomplete information, and there are nearly always some externalities inherent in trade. Taxes and regulations are also necessary. But generally speaking, trade unencumbered by planners or by gamers of the system leads to higher living standards.
Big-business capitalists use political power to block competition and preserve economic power. They constrain markets. Writing 240 years ago, Adam Smith wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Free markets are the answer to powerful economic players conspiring with the government to choke off competition and preserve their privileged status through subsidies, tariffs, and onerous legislation.
Socializing some aspects of society is not antithetical to market economics. We cannot deliver some social goods through markets, or at least not deliver them well. But we must have a robust market economy to generate tax revenue and sustain socialized services. Denmark is the top-rated country in the world for business and trade. The other Nordic countries are right behind them. This is not the Sanders model.
Sanders wants to institute protectionist policies, raise taxes on corporations (the USA is already on the high side), set a minimum wage 50% higher than other developed countries, and do a host of other trade-unfriendly measures. Meanwhile, taxes for all but the wealthiest will stay low (taxes in Nordic countries are high for everyone.) He wants to expand the safety net golden egg while strangling off the goose that lays it. He thrives on populist anti-market and anti-business sentiment. Curiously, Clinton is probably closer to the Nordic model, embracing an expanded and smarter welfare model while championing (at least in the past) trade and business. Yet she dismisses Denmark as contrary to this vision. Partanen speculates Clinton knows her plans are more like Denmark than are Sanders' but avoids association with the Nordic model because of public misconceptions. I think that is true.
So why are so many supposedly well-educated people now calling themselves socialists? One big reason is surely economic illiteracy. Going back to at least the 1930s, conservatives warned of "socialism" with the advent of Social Security. Same with Great Society programs in the 1960s - now with ACA and talk of single-payer healthcare. To some degree, left leaners just decided to own the moniker. Simultaneously, enough libertarian-leaning folks falsely used free markets to rationalize away ANY government involvement in anything; so many lefties just owned this misconception of "free market." They want a more robust version of welfare capitalism and less big-business domination. Economic illiteracy is my generous reading of why people call themselves socialist. But I have a less generous reading as well.
Partanen writes:
Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets. But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government. …
Like the Finns, countless Americans fought to free America from the totalitarian ideologies that emerged in the last century. They largely won. They considered it a legacy to pass on to future generations of America and the world. Rightfully so. So why would people seeking a more robust welfare state and less big-business domination call themselves socialists?
Inigo Montoya is wrong about many of the new "socialists." They know exactly what the word means! They know the emotion it stirs. The misuse is intentional. Calling yourself "socialist" is the left's version of Trumpist politics: Stir up tribal rivalry with incendiary language. Raise your verbal middle finger to your opponents. When they call you on it, roll your eyes incredulously that people would accuse you of advocating totalitarianism. "After all, we just want to improve the safety net and end rein in corporate greed like any good social democrat." So, to my "socialist" friends who cannot fathom the origins of anger in Trump voters, part of the answer is staring at you in the mirror. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
If your sole concern is fomenting tribal political battles, then the above is mostly irrelevant to you. Calling yourself a socialist is effective for your purposes. If you care about clarifying the truth to pursue a greater good for humanity, you will use language faithful to what is being described. Whether through illiteracy or insolence, "socialism" fails that standard. You really need to stop using that word.
The world is becoming a better place. It is not a utopia. We are not without substantial challenges. But we are becoming (as in movement along a trajectory) better (as in measurably improved according to a standard.)
The Human Development Index is a United Nations measure of well-being combining income, literacy, education, and life expectancy data. Here is the index for the world nations in 1980 and 2012. The reality is that we are living through the most astonishing transformation toward human well-being in all of history. You can find the interactive version of the chart at Our Data.
Are you smarter than a chimp? There is a good chance you are not when it comes to knowledge about global socioeconomic trends. For years, Swedish global health expert, Hans Rosling, has been giving Ted talks and making presentations about global trends. One of his favorite teaching tools is to ask people a question like this:
Globally, over the past 20 years, the rate of extreme poverty has:
Now chimps will randomly select, giving each answer a 33% chance. Yet when Rosling asks audiences, at least half will say A, a sizable percentage will say B, while a few will say C. Yet C is the correct answer! This is the case with one variable after another. Audiences routinely score worse than chimps, choosing the most negative option.
An old adage states, "It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know that ain't so." That we routinely pick the wrong answer more often than chimps shows that we have bias.
In the Ted talk, How not to be ignorant about the world, Hans' son Rosling notes that part of the problem is our education system. Teachers go to college at a particular point in time and learn the state of the world at that time. But they tend not to learn about ongoing developments. The data has often been hard to come by and hard to interpret. So teachers are biased by what they learned years ago. (Reporters have the same problem.) But there are other factors.
During our evolutionary history, our brains became wired to notice threats. Hunters walking through the brush who were attentive to the possibility of tigers lying in wait likely survived those who went about carelessly enjoying a beautiful day. So when we reflect on broad human trends, we fixate on perceived threats. What was useful for us in the wild is counterproductive as we try to interpret socioeconomic trends. If you want to outscore a chimp on an exam about global well-being, Ola Rosling suggests that you must drop your predispositions and adopt these four rules of thumb:
1. Assume most things are improving.
2. Assume most people are in the middle of a distribution, not a binary of rich and poor.
3. Assume social development precedes becoming wealthy. (Don't assume that a population must be rich before meeting basic social needs.)
4. Assume you are exaggerating the threat if the topic is something you personally fear.
Additionally, Hans, Ola, and others have been working to build the Gapminder website to provide you with data that can be presented in meaningful ways. But one of the most important contributions the Roslings have made is their collection of entertaining and informative videos. In this post, I include every video I can find with a brief annotation. (I'll add more as I find any.) Many videos overlap or cover similar data but are all well worth viewing. So here is your resource for becoming smarter than a chimp. Don't say I never gave you anything.
(This link also has links to most of these videos, including some shorts not listed here: Gapminder Video)
Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes (2010)
If you are just getting acquainted with Rosling, I'd begin here. This four-minute presentation gives you a quick sense of what he is talking about.
Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world. TED June 2014
This is the second video to watch. The front half is Hans making his case that the world is improving, and the back half is Ola explaining, as I recounted above, why we are so disinclined to see positive change.
Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine. TED December 2010
This is the third one to watch. This is one of my favorites. While fully embracing the concern about the environmental impacts of economic growth, Rosling shows the importance of economic growth through the story of the washing machine.
THE REST ARE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen. TED February 2006
The TED presentation that kicked it all off. He focuses on the positive changes underway in the world. He points to his efforts to liberate, integrate, and animate data and to find ways to present data the public finds understandable.
Hans Rosling: New Insights on Poverty. TED March 2007
Rosling shows that social development tends to precede economic development. He addresses the issue that, unfortunately, economic development has always been based on fossil fuels. Higher yields, technology, and markets are key to ending poverty, but more dimensions like human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health, and culture need our attention. The ending has a great surprise!
Human Rights and Democracy Statistics- Gapminder c. 2008
Rosling describes why human rights are so hard to describe and evaluate.
Yes they can! - Gapminder c. 2008
Rosling explains that poor nations will one day become prosperous, and we should welcome that.
Poor Beats Rich in MDG Race - Gapminder c. 2008
Rosling shows that countries that have developed from poverty to well-being have done so faster than Western nations. Poor countries today can make the transition much quicker because of what previous countries have learned.
What stops population growth? - Gapminder c. 2008
Small families are the key to ending population growth, and the key to small families is childhood survival.
Hans Rosling: Insights on HIV, in stunning data visuals. TED February 2009
Uses Gapminder data to show nuances in how AIDS has spread and what it takes to defeat it.
Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset. TED June 2009
This is the third video you should watch. Rosling deconstructs the dichotomy of wealthy and developing nations and challenges the idea of thinking in sweeping terms like "Africa."
The Joy of Stats with Professor Hans Rosling - Gapminder c. 2010
Rosling shows how making data available and animating empowers people to make better decisions, sometimes without realizing they are using statistics.
Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when. TED Nov 2009
Rosling forecasts when China and India will catch up with the USA and UK.
Hans Rosling: Global population growth, box by box. TED June 2010
Rosling says that child survival is the new green. This video explains why.
Hans Rosling: The good news of the decade? We're winning the war against child mortality. TED September 2010
Rosling breaks down the remarkable trends in child mortality. Education of women accounts for at least 50% of the drop.
Hans Rosling: Religions and babies. TED April 2012
Religion is not a factor in family size. There is no significant difference between Islamic and Christian countries regarding births per woman. The defining difference is economic well-being.
DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population. BBC November 2013
A one-hour investigation into the dynamics of population growth using stories about real live families interspersed with Rosling's entertaining presentation of data.
Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years. BBC September 2015
No embed is available.
Here is a link to a series of short videos on how to use development data visually.
An introduction to visualising development data
Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling are truly brilliant and entertaining. The first part of this video highlights how poorly we assess what is happening in the world. The back half gives some simple tips on how to avoid developing false perceptions and suggests why it is important that we do so. Enjoy!
It’s the end of the world as we know it – because it is improving remarkably! Almost every indicator of human well-being shows improvement on a global basis. We live in the best era in human history. How does that make you feel? Like the old REM song, does it make you feel fine? Or does it maybe make you feel incredulous? Defensive? Offended?
I’ve been writing and linking stories about global improvements on social media for at least ten years. I’ve learned that people usually respond with a sad acknowledgment of a problem if I point to a negative trend. But if I mention a positive trend, I routinely get pushback. I get everything from personal anecdotal evidence to accusations of callousness toward those who continue to suffer from some particular problem. This becomes particularly true if a strong political agenda is connected with a trend. Conservatives don’t want to hear that crime is in steady decline. Progressives don’t want to hear there is a steady decline in church arson, race motivated or otherwise.
Why is it so hard for us to see and accept that the overall state of the world is improving? A recent article at Slate again documents the improving state of our world, The World Is Not Falling Apart: Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times. (Now I know that it is because the article is from Slate that my conservative readers already have their defenses up. When the exact same information gets presented by groups like CATO, progressives go into the same mode. That is yet another feature of the problem.) The data is interesting and well worth reading, but I think the following four paragraphs are particularly insightful. It goes a long way to explaining why it’s the end of the world as we know it and we don’t feel fine.
How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.
We also have to avoid being fooled by randomness. [Roger] Cohen laments the “annexations, beheadings, [and] pestilence” of the past year, but surely this collection of calamities is a mere coincidence. Entropy, pathogens, and human folly are a backdrop to life, and it is statistically certain that the lurking disasters will not space themselves evenly in time but will frequently overlap. To read significance into these clusters is to succumb to primitive thinking, a world of evil eyes and cosmic conspiracies.
The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down? As Bill Clinton likes to say, “Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.” We will see that the trend lines are more encouraging than a news junkie would guess.
To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn.
Denmark became a central topic during the Democrats' debate last week. Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist. Hillary Clinton loves Denmark but dismisses the idea that America can be Denmark. This inspired several articles by various commentators about the truth behind Denmark's economic model (or the Nordic model more generally.) Progressives like the high taxes, low inequality, and high government spending. Conservatives counter by noting that the Nordic countries rank among the countries highest in free trade and low corporate taxes. I've been linking articles on Facebook, but I thought this piece in Niskanen was the best. Double-Edged Denmark
Right-leaning arguments about the free-market marvel that is Denmark cut both ways. Denmark shows us that a much larger public sector and a much more robust social-insurance system need not come at the expense of a dynamic market economy. In other words, Denmark shows us that capitalism and a large welfare state are perfectly compatible and possibly complementary.
The lesson Bernie Sanders needs to learn is that you cannot finance a Danish-style welfare state without free markets and large tax increases on the middle class. If you want Danish levels of social spending, you need Danish middle-class tax rates and a relatively unfettered capitalist economy. The fact that he's unwilling to come out in favor of either half of the Danish formula for a viable social-democratic welfare state is the best evidence that Bernie Sanders is not actually very interested in what it takes to make social democracy work. The great irony of post-1989 political economy is that capitalism has proven itself the most reliable means to socialist ends. Bernie seems not to have gotten the memo. But Bernie Sanders isn't the only one failing to come to terms with the implications of Danish social-democratic capitalism.
The lesson free-marketeers need to learn is that Denmark may be beating the U.S. in terms of economic freedom because it's easier to get people to buy in to capitalism when they're well-insured against its downside risks. That's the flipside irony of free-market "socialism. ...
... the reason the U.S. is lagging so far behind big-government Denmark on free trade, corporate taxation, ease of doing business, and more may very well be that the American safety net isn't good enough, and economic insecurity at the bottom and middle makes free-market policies a tough sell to anxious American voters.
I don't know that this is true. But, then again, libertarians and free-market conservatives don't know that it's not. Mostly, ideological American capitalists really badly want to believe it's not true that we're falling behind Denmark as capitalists because we're not redistributive enough. (I mean, the previous paragraph made me feel like I was channeling E.J. Dionne, which was … unsettling. But let us put away childish things.) Because if it is true, and social insurance and capitalism are complementary in this way, then champions of economic liberty will be forced to face up to the possibility that attacking the welfare state undermines support for laissez faire economic policy. Some of us might even be forced to choose between our love of capitalism and dislike of the welfare state. Awkward. ..."
Economic development always includes, in some broad sense, an embrace of trade and freedom from arbitrary interference in market activity. Yet when you look at the various nations that rose to affluence in the last century, diverse paths were taken to get there. The particular way toward trade and freedom seems less important than the stability issue. When the various players in the economy and society behave in predictable patterns, they can better predict and coordinate their behavior, even if the patterns are not optimal regarding trade and freedom. The imposition of trade and freedom that generates too much instability may be worse than simply staying with less effective economic models in the short run and letting things evolve.
This need for security and stability is a piece that most libertarians frequently undervalue at both the macro and micro levels. Economic historians will tell you that one of the pivotal developments in history (among several) was the emergence of limited liability. People could pool their resources and form joint ventures without risking their entire assets. Bad choices or unforeseen developments would not leave you destitute.
If the aim is a dynamic, risk-taking economy leading to high productivity and economic growth, then we need security and stability for citizens. With a basic safety net in place (here, I'm thinking mostly of a guaranteed minimum income as opposed to our wasteful welfare industry), people would become less risk-averse, knowing that trying new stuff doesn't lead to destitution if you fail.
But if libertarian conservatives are blind to security issues, progressives are blind to productivity and economic growth. Take the living wage debate. It is said that Walmart's low wages are possible because taxpayers subsidize the workers through the welfare system. Nonsense. Welfare support drives up wages. If the wages aren't at least comparable to welfare options, then why work?
Furthermore, while each business should have the aim of helping their employees flourish (improving their skills and providing opportunities to gain more responsibility in a safe environment), businesses are neither benefactors nor aid agencies. They are the institutions responsible for transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful forms to more useful forms on a sustainable basis. Sustainability means creating more value than the value of resources being used. Wages artificially set above the economic value contributed by labor are unfavorable to productivity and sustainability.
I know of no country, including the Nordic countries, which presumes that every job in every circumstance should provide a "livable" income "unsubsidized" by the government. The minimum wage is a temporary introductory wage people earn as they develop skills and experience. Few earn it for more than a period of a few months. Excessively high introductory wages compel businesses to adapt in ways that reduce the amount of this labor they use and decrease the opportunities for the least-skilled to find an on-ramp into the economy.
So while precisely replicating the Danish or Nordic model in a large, diverse nation like the United States may not be feasible, there are lessons here. To the degree the Nordic models have worked, they have done so because they have successfully married security and growth. This is a managed polarity for them, like breathing embraces both inhaling and exhaling. In America, our partisan factions grasp one polarity pole and demonize the other. To the degree they succeed, we are in deep trouble. That is the lesson I learn from double-edged Denmark.
Business Insider: 20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions
A great infographic from Business Insider.
Interesting graph from the Economist.
Business Insider: This map shows the US really has 11 separate 'nations' with entirely different cultures
"In his fourth book, "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures in North America," award-winning author Colin Woodard identifies 11 distinct cultures that have historically divided the US.
"The country has been arguing about a lot of fundamental things lately including state roles and individual liberty," Woodard, a Maine native who won the 2012 George Polk Award for investigative reporting, told Business Insider.
"[But] in order to have any productive conversation on these issues," he added, "you need to know where you come from. Once you know where you are coming from it will help move the conversation forward."
Here's how Woodard describes each nation: ..."
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!
1.The Drinkable Book - Water is Life. An innovative approach to create more drinkable water.
2. TED: Are insects the future of food?: Megan Miller at TEDxManhattan
3. Eco-Business: In future, clothes could be made from sugar
Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have discovered a new chemical process that can convert adipic acid directly from sugar.
Adipic acid is an important chemical used to produce nylon for apparel and other everyday products like carpets, ropes and toothbrush bristles.
Commercially, adipic acid is produced from petroleum-based chemicals through the nitric acid oxidation process, which emits large amounts of nitrous oxides, a major greenhouse gas that causes global warming. ...
4. Business Insider: Want To Make $1 Billion? Just Solve One Of These Huge Tech Problems
5. Huffington Post: 11 Ways Technology Has Changed Since We Were Kids
6. Pew Internet: U.S. Views of Technology and the Future
7. Real Clear Technology: We Say We're Optimistic About the Future, But Don't Want Anything to Do With Future Innovations
... What's interesting about the Pew poll is that while the survey reported a general optimism about the trajectory of technological development over the next 50 years (59 percent said it would be positive vs. just 30 percent who felt it would be negative) very few specific technological breakthroughs seemed either possible to the general public, or desirable. In fact, just lab-grown organs and computer-generated art seemed both possible and desirable.
By contrast, here are the technologies we don't think are likely or aren't interested in if they do come to pass: ...
8. Huffington Post: Disrupting the World Now: Technology That Will Change Your Life
Can you imagine life without the Internet?
There are equally revolutionary technologies that are emerging today. When we look back 20 years from now, what things will be impossible to imagine living without?
Here are a few technologies to follow as our advancement continues to accelerate: ...
9. Business Insider: How A Chinese Company 3-D Printed 10 Houses In A Day
10. Real Clear Technology: 3D Printing Possibilities Are Beautiful but Not Limitless
... There’s no doubting that these technologies are exciting but the hype is leading us to think our future homes will all feature machines suspiciously similar to the Replicator in Star Trek, probably alongside a robotic housemaid and hoverboard.
The use of 3D printers in industry will definitely continue to grow, and will have a major (if often unnoticed) impact on our consumer choice but those of us who don’t make things for a living will not suddenly become digital artisans. ...
11. Wired: A 3-D Printing Startup’s Plan to Bring Manufacturing Back to Cities
"... But according to founder and CEO Peter Weijmarshausen, the longterm goal for the New York City-based outfit is to bring manufacturing back to America’s cities.
“We believe manufacturing should be local,” Weijmarshausen said on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York on Wednesday. “Our view is, over time, more and more Shapeway factories will appear in places all over the world, and in those places, not only will we get products to you faster and at a lower cost, but we’ll have lower impact on the environment for transportation. ...”
12. Conversable Economist: When Technology Spreads Slowly
...But in the real world, new technologies often take time to diffuse. They note that surveys of dozens of new technologies often find that it takes 15-30 years for a new technology to go from 10% to 90% of the potential market. But some major inventions take longer.
Here's how the tractor slowly displaced horses and mules in the U.S. agricultural sector from 1910 to 1960. Horses and mules, shown by the black dashed line and measured on the right-hand axis, declined from about 26 million in 1920 to about 3 million by 1960. Conversely, the number of tractors, shown by the blue solid line, rose from essentially zero in 1910 to 4.5 million by 1960. ...
Also this ...
13. Atlantic: America's Coming Manufacturing Revolution
... But the doomsayers often fail to see the ways in which America is gaining rather than losing global influence. And nowhere is this truer than the manufacturing sector. The combination of lower energy prices, innovative information technologies, and advances in robotics and materials science are powering a manufacturing revolution that will reinvigorate the U.S. economy and make many of its industrial sectors the most competitive in the world. ...
14. Mashable: Scientists Discover Clever Trick Ancient Egyptians Used to Build Pyramids
15. Huffington Post: How Innovation and Technology Are Shaping Libraries of Today
...Technology has changed the expectations of library patrons; people today expect to be able to find and access information from wherever they are. This is why so many public library systems across the country have increased both computers for use inside the library as well as mobile and online access to e-books, audio books, research databases and archives. In 2010, nearly 300 million Americans used library services including onsite computers and onsite Wi-Fi to check out books, to attend workshops, and to consult with reference librarians.
Libraries are now hubs of technology with over 85 percent offering wireless internet services, and many offering state-of-the-art computers for use. But technology available to patrons does not stop there. Surveys show that currently 12 percent of academic libraries have pre-loaded E-reading devices in circulation that patrons can check out. Another 26 percent of academic libraries are considering adding this service. New (even book-free) libraries are popping up around the country, employing technology in ways most never envisioned:
• GPS apps that help locate material inside the library
• Mobile apps that allow patrons to access library services
• Access to 3-D printers, binding services
• Book delivery robots ...
16. Slate: What Will Become of the Library?
How it will evolve as the world goes digital. ...
17. Huffington Post: Battling Psychics and Ghosts: The Need for Scientific Skepticism
... College and university students, from freshmen to seniors, have asked me similar questions, along with queries about aliens, ghosts, and a wide variety of New Age and alternative health and psychological treatments. Through countless questions on these topics, I've realized the need to teach scientific skepticism, and that using examples of pseudoscience -- claims that appear to be scientific but are not -- can be an invaluable resource for helping students become discerning consumers of real-world claims. ...
18. AP: AP Survey On Faith And Science Reveals That Science Is Often Trumped By Religious Belief
WASHINGTON (RNS) Believers don’t buy the Big Bang, God-less evolution or a human responsibility for global warming. Actually, neither do many Americans.
But a new survey by The Associated Press found that religious identity — particularly evangelical Protestant — was one of the sharpest indicators of skepticism toward key issues in science. ...
18. The Big Think: When Evidence Backfires
Don't read this blog post. Definitely don't read it to the end. Didn't I tell you not to read this blog post? You're still doing it... We can laugh at our inherent ability to be contrary, but unfortunately something similar can happen when we give a human being scientific evidence that debunks misinformation. One of the most depressing paradoxes of science communication is that not only can misinformation often spread faster and wider than the truth (just take the ubersuccessful but often not so factual "uberfacts" or the success of the paragons of science misinformation Natural News if you need examples); but even worse, combating misinformation with evidence can often have the complete and utter opposite of the desired effect. This horrifying phenomenon known as the backfire effect was demonstrated once again recently by a study of the responses of parents to various different forms of evidence that vaccines are not dangerous. ...
19. Los Angeles Times: 'Nanobionics' aims to give plants superpowers
... Researchers at MIT have been experimenting with giving plants new powers by placing tiny carbon nanotubes in their chloroplasts — the tiny engine of the plant cell where photosynthesis takes place.
After much trial and error, their efforts have succeeded. Some of the altered plants produced in their lab have increased their photosynthetic activity by 30% compared with regular plants. Others were able to detect tiny traces of pollutants in the air.
And that's just the beginning. ...
20. BBC: Doctors implant lab-grown vagina
Four women have had new vaginas grown in the laboratory and implanted by doctors in the US. ...
21. Carpe Diem: Recommended reading for Earth Day: ‘Recycling is garbage’ from the NYTimes in 1996; it broke the record for hate mail
1. Huffington Post: Financially Speaking -- Are We an Illiterate Nation?
... Champlain College's Center for Financial Literacy released its '2013 National Report Card,' which quantifies what states are doing to promote financial literacy in the classroom. Only seven of 50 states surveyed came away from the study with an "A" rating. That's right, a paltry seven states! Of these seven states, only four have a standalone course -- Utah, Tennessee, Missouri and Louisiana.
Thirteen states received a "B" rating, and the remaining 30 states received a "C," "D," or "F" rating. In fact, eight states received an "F" rating. Ask yourself, as a parent, would you be content to have your children bring home similar grades? ...
2. Huffington Post: 40 Financial Things You Should Know by 40
3. Carpe Diem: World market cap reached record high in March, and is $2.4T above pre-recession, pre-crisis level
4. Businessweek: Why Factory Jobs Are Shrinking Everywhere
... But the U.S. jobs slide began well before China’s rise as a manufacturing power. And manufacturing employment is falling almost everywhere, including in China. The phenomenon is driven by technology, and there’s reason to think developing countries are going to follow a different path to wealth than the U.S. did—one that involves a lot more jobs in the services sector.
Pretty much every economy around the world has a low or declining share of manufacturing jobs. According to OECD data, the U.K. and Australia have seen their share of manufacturing drop by around two-thirds since 1971. Germany’s share halved, and manufacturing’s contribution to gross domestic product there fell from 30 percent in 1980 to 22 percent today. In South Korea, a late industrializer and exemplar of miracle growth, the manufacturing share of employment rose from 13 percent in 1970 to 28 percent in 1991; it’s fallen to 17 percent today. ...
5. Forbes: High Tech And Robots Can Create More Low Skilled Jobs, Not Just Destroy Them
As we all wait anxiously for the robots to come and steal all our jobs an interesting finding in a study on the effect of ever higher technology on the demand for low skilled labour. Contrary to what everyone seems to be assuming it is possible for that higher tech to actually increase the demand for that low skilled labour. For the higher tech enables that lower skilled labour to perform tasks that could only previously be done by highly skilled labour. And as the costs associated with whatever the task is fall then we quite naturally demand more of that task to be done. Thus, in certain cases at least, higher tech increases the number of jobs, not reduces them. ...
6. Business Insider: Why Food Prices Are Surging
... In a new report, Morgan Stanley commodities analysts led by Adam Longson attribute the surge in prices to a number of factors, "from weather (in the case of sugar, soybeans and coffee) to disease (in the case of hogs) to geopolitics (wheat and corn)."
The Morgan Stanley analysts don't believe this will continue. ...
7. Atlantic: How You, I, and Everyone Got the Top 1 Percent All Wrong
8. House of Debt: Measuring Wealth Inequality
9. Conversable Economist: An Inequality Chartbook: Long-Run Patterns in 25 Countries
This is an interesting chart from chartbook of income inequality.
10. Brookings: Income Growth and Income Inequality: The Facts May Surprise You
... The broadest and most accurate measures of household income are published by the CBO. CBO’s newest estimates confirm the long-term trend toward greater inequality, driven mainly by turbo-charged gains in market income at the very top of the distribution. The market incomes of the top 1% are extraordinarily cyclical, however. They soar in economic expansions and plunge in recessions. Income changes since 2007 fit this pattern. What many observers miss, however, is the success of the nation’s tax and transfer systems in protecting low- and middle-income Americans against the full effects of a depressed economy. As a result of these programs, the spendable incomes of poor and middle class families have been better insulated against recession-driven losses than the incomes of Americans in the top 1%. As the CBO statistics demonstrate, incomes in the middle and at the bottom of the distribution have fared better since 2000 than incomes at the very top.
11. Wall Street Journal: Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families
Intellectuals fretting about income disparity are oddly silent regarding the decline of the two-parent family. ...
12. Mother Jones: What If Everything You Knew About Poverty Was Wrong?
... A sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, Edin is one of the nation's preeminent poverty researchers. She has spent much of the past several decades studying some of the country's most dangerous, impoverished neighborhoods. But unlike academics who draw conclusions about poverty from the ivory tower, Edin has gotten up close and personal with the people she studies—and in the process has shattered many myths about the poor, rocking sociology and public-policy circles. ...
13. Forbes: Thank Goodness We Have Walmart If American Shoppers Are This Poor
... The economic background is that sure, WalMart makes good profits out of what it does. Yes, this includes minimising costs such as the wages they pay out, what they’ll let suppliers charge them. It even includes desiring to put other less efficient retailers out of business, those Mon and Pop stores, and to make those that remain more efficient through that competition with them. But there’s another effect of course: consumers save money through those lower prices.
We call this saving the consumer surplus. It’s not something that ever appears in the normal economic statistics, one good reason being that it’s rather hard to calculate. ...
... A 25% reduction in food expenditures just from the existence of WalMart is an amazingly large sum. It’s also considerably larger than the profits that WalMart makes out of its actions. And that’s from a decade ago recall (the paper is from 2005, the data up to 2003) and it is only recording the consumer surplus from WalMart’s move into food retailing, leaving the impact of the other parts of the company aside. ...
14. Atlantic: How the Rich and Poor Spend Money Today—and 30 Years Ago
15. AEI - James Pethokoukis: No, Walmart isn’t ripping off taxpayers
... I think I’m supposed to be outraged that Walmart isn’t paying some employees enough that they don’t need government anti-poverty benefits. But businesses generally aren’t going to pay workers more than they are worth. If a worker can only generate $8 in value to a company, then the firm isn’t going to pay them $10. Nor should they for some humanitarian reason. If American society thinks some of their fellow Americans deserve higher living standards than their skill set currently warrants, then society should pitch in and subsidize their wages through the Earned Income Tax Credit or even a new, broader direct wage subsidy. ...
16. PBS: How nonprofit workers get squeezed when minimum wages increase
Not everyone who supports raising the minimum wage is in a position to pay their employees more. Nowhere is that more true than in the nonprofit sector. ...
17. NPR: Subminimum Wages For The Disabled: Godsend Or Exploitation?
... Executive Director Gus van den Brink says the Sertoma Centre and other agencies do work to find jobs for disabled people in the community, but the focus should not be on shutting down all sheltered workshops. He says it would be nearly impossible for some people with severe intellectual disabilities to get a job at all. It's sheltered workshops, he says, that give them a chance to work and earn a paycheck.
"Some of the individuals may not even completely understand what the value of that paycheck is," van den Brink says. "But they know they are receiving a paycheck, so they are getting a lot of self-esteem. They are very proud of it."
Even so, Assistant Attorney General Samuels says the Justice Department will work with other states to make sure some workers with disabilities have the opportunity to do their work, as she puts it, at "real jobs for real wages."
18. PBS: What’s the welfare initiative uniting liberals and conservatives?
Some conservatives and liberals are uniting around the idea of a basic income because the current welfare system, they say, is an ineffective bureaucracy that doesn’t respect poor people’s ability to make their own decisions. ...
19. Atlantic: Women's Wages Are Rising: Why Are So Many Families Getting Poorer?
Start by looking at what's happening with men's wages. ...
20. Huffington Post: Gender Inequality in the Labor Market: Don't Call It a Wage Gap
When President Obama announced the Paycheck Fairness Act on Equal Pay Day this week, we applauded his efforts to address the so-called "gender wage gap" but, from a data point of view, mourn the fact that he, like many others before him, is building his case around a flawed number. The oft-quoted statistic that women only earn 77 cents for each dollar earned by a man, is not actually very accurate and distracts legislators and the public at large from coming up with solutions to the real problem -- the gender jobs gap. ...
21. Fortune: Corporate America's foreign cash machine: Signs it may be slowing
As governments coordinate to fix international tax laws on overseas earnings, companies may have to pay more taxes. ...
22. Forbes: How The Wealthiest Families Make And Lose Their Money -- Part 5
... Well-accepted research shows that about one-third of companies in the United States make it to the second generation. Only around 10% reach the third generation. If wealth were preserved during this movement away from the privately held business into the publicly traded markets, we would expect to see a greater portion of overall wealth being inherited. But, the numbers tell us that only about 5% of wealth in the U.S. is inherited. On the other hand, the wealthiest families of Europe hold two-thirds of their wealth in private companies and only one-third in publicly traded securities. When we then look at inherited wealth, approximately 85% of European wealth is in its third or older generation. One-third of European wealth is in its fifth or older generation. This is an astounding result. ...
1. Huffington Post: Understanding Why Americans Seem More Religious Than Other Western Powers
Many Western Europeans think of Americans as hopelessly, bafflingly, and dangerously, religious. Many Americans think of Western Europeans as distressingly, inexplicably, and unrelentingly, secular. In 2009, the German sociologist Hans Joas observed that “it is widely accepted that the United States is far more religious than practically any comparable European state.” And he noted Western European puzzlement: “The more secularized large parts of Europe became, the more exotic the religiosity of the United States seemed to European observers.” So why are Americans, compared with Western Europeans, seemingly so religious? And are we as religious as we seem? ...
2. Business Insider: Countries With More Money Tend To Be More Godless
3. Pew Research: Global Religious Diversity
4. The Atlantic: The Changing Face of Christian Politics
... Christian political engagement is changing in this country as believers seek to untangle their faith from the worldliness of partisan politics and ideology. The melding of Christianity and partisan politics has been 40 years in the making, but the costs of that entanglement have only become clear to Christians over the last decade. ...
... A Christianity that seeks to unilaterally impose itself on the nation is unlikely be fruitful, but it is similarly unrealistic and unproductive to force a secular morality on believers. ...
5. Christian Century: Religious nones may not be who you think they are
... But they may not be who you think they are. Today, nones include many more unbranded believers than atheists, and they show an increasingly diverse racial and ethnic mix.
Researchers say this is already making nones’ attitudes and opinions less predictably liberal on social issues.
A survey of Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute found 21 percent are “unaffiliated” (PRRI’s umbrella term for a diverse group including atheists, seculars, and people who say they still believe in God); 20 percent are Catholic; and 19 percent are white evangelical.
“Nones are dancing on the razor’s edge of leading,” said Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI. ...
6. Huff Post: American Bible Reading Statistics Reveal Who Is Studying The Good Book And Why
... According to a study, “The Bible in American Life," conducted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, 50% of Americans read some form of scripture in the past year, and 48% of those read the Bible. Four in 5 read it at least once a month, and 9% of Americans say they read the Bible daily. ...
7. Religion News Service: Bible study: More people say the Good Book isn’t a God book
The study, conducted annually by Barna Research, finds:
8. Faith & Leadership: Disruption and leadership development in mainline Protestantism
Mainline Protestantism has been slow to create new models of clergy leadership development that take into account the disruptive forces acting in congregations and the culture. ...
9. Boston Globe: Can the evangelical church embrace gay couples?
A new wave of thinkers says yes — and is looking to Scripture for support. ...
10. Cannon & Culture: An Antidote for ADHD Activism
Review by Jordan J. Ballor of Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good (IVP, 2012)
Writing as a lifelong activist against nuclear weapons, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson is uniquely placed to criticize a brand of evangelical social activism that emphasizes energy and enthusiasm over patience and perseverance. Christian obedience requires all these at various times and in various manifestations, but Wigg-Stephenson detects an imbalance at the heart of contemporary Christian cultural engagement that threatens to wither the roots of the entire enterprise. He is greatly concerned about the “cause fatigue” that he commonly, and increasingly, sees among younger Christians. ...
11. Christianity Today: Aged Out of Church
Ask anyone who's hit midlife, and they'll tell you: this stage is no joke for us.
The emotional, spiritual, physical, and relational shifts that occur at midlife can lead to disconnection from old social networks and a profound sense of loneliness, which brings with it serious health risks. At this point, many also feel drained by the increasingly common occurrence of death, disease, divorce, and the changes that redefine old friendships.
And yet, rather than engage these important but uncomfortable issues that come with aging, our culture—including, at times, the church—would rather laugh it off....
12. Religion News Service: Survey finds growth, vitality in multisite church model
(RNS) The vast majority of multisite churches are growing, according to a new study, and they are seeing more involvement from lay people and newcomers after they open an additional location.
Nearly one in 10 U.S. Protestants attends a congregation with multiple campuses, according to findings released Tuesday (March 11) in the “Leadership Network/Generis Multisite Church Scorecard.” ...
13. Atlantic: Greed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea
Not long ago, the pursuit of commercial self-interest was largely reviled. How did we come to accept it? ...
14. Huff Post: Why Do People Go to Church?
... What are we doing in worship? We are sorting through our mixed motives and mysterious desires. We are learning God's story again. We are returning home so that we can go with power into the everyday world.
15. Library of Economics and Liberty: You're Not Pushing Paper Across A Desk. You're Saving the World.
In my profession as an economics professor and through churches I have attended, I've been around a lot of people who want to "make a difference." They almost inevitably equate "making a difference" with "working for a government or a non-profit organization like a church that is dedicated, at least in part, to helping poor people." Rarely do I hear anyone say "I want to work in accounts receivable for a company that makes faucets--or worse, a company that just sells faucets and other sundries."
But here's the irony: I suspect that you will probably make a bigger, albeit harder to see, difference in the lives of many by working in accounts receivable for Amalgamated Faucets than you will on your two-week summer mission trip or in your career as a relief worker. ...
16. Christian Century: TV Protestants
An episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead features a scene in a Baptist church that has a Catholic-looking crucifix. HBO’s new series True Detective includes a scene in which a fundamentalist preacher crosses himself. These are two isolated examples of how the people involved in making television shows and movies don’t know or don’t care about the differences between different forms of Christianity. ...
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. ...
Back in January, Oxfam published a statistic saying that eighty-five people have more wealth than the bottom half of the world population. It has become a widely circulated stat in the debate about inequality. (Forbes recently countered that the number is actually sixty-seven people.) But what do these numbers mean? I know full well that when most people hear “wealth,” they envision how much money and stuff people own. That is incorrect. These are assets. Wealth is your assets minus your liabilities (i.e., debt). What difference does that make?
Felix Salmon, a writer at Reuters, did some digging into the Oxfam report to find the data upon which they based their claims. (See: Stop adding up the wealth of the poor) It comes from Credit Suisse’s 2013 Global Wealth Databook and here is a graph Salmon clipped showing another take on the data:
Notice the top left corner of the chart. It shows that 7.5% of North Americans are in the bottom 10%. If you look further down, you will see that virtually no one from China is. How is that possible?
Take two hypothetical people:
1. American Physician – A new physician with a salary of $150,000 a year. She has $125,000 dollars in student loans and a car with a $25,000 loan. That totals $150,000 of debt. She is renting an apartment. Her total assets including cash, car, and other items equal $50,000. That means her wealth is -$100,000.
2. Chinese Peasant Farmer – A Chinese farmer who earns the equivalent of $3 a day, or $1,400 a year. He has managed to save $50 in cash, and he has property worth about $250. He has no debt. His wealth is $300.
The physician would likely be found in the lowest decile while the farmer would be in the third or fourth decile. By Oxfam’s reasoning, the farmer is much wealthier than the physician! That is technically true, but does this have any correspondence with what most people think of when they think of "wealth?"
Just as advanced economies have upper-income levels that far outstrip the upper levels of emerging nations, so do they also have people with huge sums of net debt that far outstrip what people would have in emerging nations. Consequently, people from more advanced economies are going to dominate at either end of the wealth distribution. (You see evidence of this in the chart by the higher percentages at the extremes for North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific excluding China and India.) People who are unable to earn or borrow much are going to be more toward the middle of the distribution. But as with the physician, high debt doesn’t necessarily mean deprivation.
Wealth is a useful measure for some purposes, but if we want to get an accurate picture of economic well-being, we must also include measures like income. Particularly important is consumption per capita because “income” doesn’t include transfers and non-cash assistance. Statistics often show people routinely consuming as much as double their cash income because of this discrepancy. Consumption tells us much more about how people actually live. In short, Oxfam’s stat is great for sensational headlines but does little to educate us about the challenges people face.
(Related: Your New Born Is Wealthier than 60 Million Americans)
1. Washington Post: Robert Samuelson: America’s demographic denial
... For proof, see Paul Taylor’s new book, “The Next America.” Taylor oversees many of the Pew Research Center’s opinion surveys. His masterful synthesis of polls shows that three familiar mega-trends lie at the core of America’s political and social stalemate. First, immigration. By 2050, immigrants and their U.S.-born children are projected to represent 37 percent of the population, slightly higher than in 1900, when the country last experienced mass immigration. ...
... Second, family breakdown. In 2011, unmarried women accounted for 41 percent of U.S. births, up from 5 percent in 1960. The trend affects all major groups. The rate is 29 percent for whites, 53 percent among Hispanics and 72 percent among African Americans. Although 60 percent of single mothers have live-in boyfriends, half of these relationships end within five years. Single parenthood’s stigma is gone. ...
... Finally, aging. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65. The retiree flood is swamping the federal budget. ...
2. Economist: How divorce and marriage compare internationally
3. NPR: Walking Down The Widening Aisle Of Interracial Marriages
... More than 5.3 million marriages in the U.S. are between husbands and wives of different races or ethnicities. According to the 2010 Census, they make up between opposite-sex couples, marking a 28-percent increase since 2000. ...
4. Pew: Record share of wives are more educated than their husbands
5. NPR: Older Americans' Breakups Are Causing A 'Graying' Divorce Trend
For baby boomers, divorce has almost become, like marriage, another rite of passage. The post-World War II generation is setting : Americans over 50 are twice as likely to get divorced as people of that age were 20 years ago. ...
6. Atlantic Cities: The Developing World's Urban Population Could Triple by 2210
... A new working paper (PDF) by my colleagues Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer of NYU’s Marron Institute projects that the world’s urban population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2210, with nearly 87 percent of the 11.3 billion people on Earth living in cities. That urban population will be split unevenly, with just 1.2 billion people living in the cities of what we now think of as developed countries, and a whopping 8.6 billion making their homes in the cities of the developing world. These projections, based on UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Data, are some of the largest that I’ve seen to date. ...
7. Conversable Economist: U.S. Teen Birthrate Plummets
8. The Diplomat: Japan's Demographic Crisis: Any Way Out?
... However positive the macroeconomic outlook for the Japanese economy and however successful Abe might be at normalizing Japan’s military stance, Japan isn’t back — its falling birthrate and shrinking population will significantly damage its international competitiveness. Japan’s population fell by a record 244,000 last year, further evidencing that this trend is accelerating. Is it all doom and gloom for Japan from here on out or is there a possible way out? ...
... The immigration solution to demographic problems presents a novel scenario for Japan, which has traditionally been ethnically homogenous despite its high level of integration with the global economy. According to the Japanese government, the number of foreign residents in Japan is slowly but surely rising. Should the government’s plan to add an additional 200,000 immigrants per year succeed, Japanese society will begin to look very different within a decade, raising possible national identity issues. Currently, less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is non-ethnically Japanese. Should immigrants comprise a greater percentage of the whole, the idea of Japan will have to change, incorporating its new residents into the fold. That change won’t be easy, but it might be necessary to avert the alternative scenario: a country that shrinks its way into ruin.
9. USA Today: 'Do it for Denmark' ad encourages Danes to have more sex
... Denmark has the lowest birth rate in 27 years, according to the "Do it for Denmark" campaign the travel company launched Wednesday. "The Danish government has not found a solution," the ad says. "But there has to be one."
That solution, according to the company, is to travel, see your partner in the light of a different city and get romantic.
The ad claims that Danes have 46% more sex on vacation and that 10% of all Danish children are conceived on getaways. It's unclear where these stats came from, so take them with a grain of salt. ...
10. Atlantic: There's Something About Cities and Suicide
As more people move to a city, you’d expect about a one-to-one increase in shirts being worn, for instance, or the number of house keys issued. If something doubles as population doubles, that’s not surprising. What is unusual, though, is when something grows faster or slower than a population. That means people seem to be doing more or less of it, on average, and that could signal an interesting societal quirk. ...
... The authors found that if they doubled the size of a Brazilian city, car-crash deaths would also double, as predicted. But the rate of murder would grow by 135 percent—that is, homicides would more than double.
The rate of suicides, meanwhile, increased slower than population growth, rising just 78 percent when population went up by 100. A similar trend was true among the U.S. counties. There seems to be something about big cities that makes murder more likely but suicide less so. ...
11. New York Times: Why Black Women Die of Cancer
SINCE the early 1970s, studies have shown that black Americans have a higher death rate from cancer than any other racial or ethnic group. This is especially true when it comes to breast cancer. A study published last week in the journal Cancer Epidemiology found that, in a survey of 41 of America’s largest cities, black women with breast cancer are on average 40 percent more likely to die than their white counterparts.
The principal reason for this disparity is the disconnect between the nation’s discovery and delivery enterprises — between what we know and what we do about sick Americans. ...
12. Christian Science Monitor: Why African-Americans are moving back to the South
... The Coxes' decision is one unfolding in African-American households across the nation. After decades of mass exodus, blacks are returning to the South in one of the most notable migrations of the new century.
It's a subtle but significant shift that experts say provides not only a snapshot of the changing economics and sociology of the nation but of an emerging new South and, in some cases, of a growing disillusionment with the urban North. ...
13. New York Times: Population Growth in New York City Is Reversing Decades-Old Trend, Estimates Show
New York City may be an expensive place to live. Jobs are not easy to find, even as the city rebounds from the recession. And the public transit system is not always reliable or comfortable.
But despite the challenges of city living, the city’s population is growing in ways not seen in decades.
For the third consecutive year, New York City last year gained more people than it lost through migration, reversing a trend that stretched to the mid-20th century. ...
14. Business Insider: How The American Population Changed In One Year
15. Carpe Diem: Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years
16. Watch as 1000 years of European borders change
17. Business Insider: Here's What The World Would Look Like If It Were Divided Into Regions Of 100 Million People
18. Business Insider: 6 Land Transformations That Are Changing The World (GIFs)
As the global population grows past seven billion, our cities continue to expand, increasing the need for natural resources while simultaneously decreasing the supply.
Google's Earth Engine team created these time-lapse maps to illustrate a few of the trends reshaping the world right now. ...
19. Aljezzera America: How the north ended up on top of the map
Why do maps always show the north as up? For those who don’t just take it for granted, the common answer is that Europeans made the maps and they wanted to be on top. But there’s really no good reason for the north to claim top-notch cartographic real estate over any other bearing, as an examination of old maps from different places and periods can confirm. ...
... The McArthur map also makes us wonder why we are so quick to assume that Northern Europeans were the ones who invented the modern map — and decided which way to hold it — in the first place. As is so often the case, our eagerness to invoke Eurocentrism displays a certain bias of its own, since in fact, the north’s elite cartographic status owes more to Byzantine monks and Majorcan Jews than it does to any Englishman.
There is nothing inevitable or intrinsically correct — not in geographic, cartographic or even philosophical terms — about the north being represented as up, because up on a map is a human construction, not a natural one. Some of the very earliest Egyptian maps show the south as up, presumably equating the Nile’s northward flow with the force of gravity. And there was a long stretch in the medieval era when most European maps were drawn with the east on the top. If there was any doubt about this move’s religious significance, they eliminated it with their maps’ pious illustrations, whether of Adam and Eve or Christ enthroned. In the same period, Arab map makers often drew maps with the south facing up, possibly because this was how the Chinese did it. ...
1. Atlantic Cities: How Different Generations of Americans Budget Their Time
Example
2. Business Insider: How Women Spend Their Time Vs. How Men Spend Their Time
3. USA Today: Millennial doesn't mean liberal: Column
Bad news for Democrats: It seems Millennials are special little snowflakes after all.
A new report by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way highlights the political complexity of a generation raised to believe they were utterly unique. When it comes to politics, they do it their way. Which could make the cohort that turned out en masse for President Obama unpredictable as voters.
Third Way focused on how Millennials' experience as the first generation raised in an information-on-demand culture has shaped them. They are not "adaptors." They have only known a world full of endless choices, not a life where you make do with what is available. ...
4. Forbes: Why Millennials Annoy Their Elders
... Anyone who frets over the idea that millennials aren’t drinking the kool-aid should stop and ask “What good has the kool-aid done me?” We raised our kids to be smart and to pay attention to the world around them. Are we going to castigate them now for doing that so well that they end up rejecting the deal-with-the-devil “Just put your career in our hands, focus on pleasing your employer, and everything will be fine!”?
I hope we trust our kids to make good choices, since they’ll be running the world in another few years.
I think we can put our trust in millennials. They have a better sense of priorities than many of their status-and-income-drunk elders do.
5. Atlantic: Study: Millennials Deeply Confused About Their Politics, Finances, and Culture
Or at least deeply contradictory: They're always connected but distrustful. They're selfish yet accepting of minorities. They're "independents" who mostly vote Democratic and love Obama while hating Obamacare....
6. PBS: How should the U.S. improve opportunity for young men of color?
7. Slate: “Kid, I’m Sorry, but You’re Just Not College Material”
... But what if such a cautionary sermon is exactly what some teenagers need? What if encouraging students to take a shot at the college track—despite very long odds of crossing its finish line—does them more harm than good? What if our own hyper-credentialed life experiences and ideologies are blinding us to alternative pathways to the middle class? Including some that might be a lot more viable for a great many young people? What if we should be following the lead of countries like Germany, where “tracking” isn’t a dirty word but a common-sense way to prepare teenagers for respected, well-paid work? ...
8. Atlantic: The Geography of Small Talk
How you start a conversation with a stranger depends on where you live. We survey the diverse geography of American greetings—from Honolulu to Hays, Kansas, from Anchorage to Appleton, Wisconsin, from New Orleans to New York. ...
9. Forbes: 'Where Are You From?' And Other Big Networking Racial Faux Pas
... So what’s the best way to approach ethnicity? If you’re dying to figure out if someone is of Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese heritage, is it ok to ask the first time you meet them? This topic is incredibly nuanced. There’s no right way to ask, though there are plenty of wrong ways. ...
10. Conversable Economist: How Academics Learn to Write Badly
Most of my days are spent editing articles by academic economists. So when I saw a book called Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, the author Michael Billig had me at the title. The book is a careful dissection of the rhetorical habits of social scientists, and in particular their tendency to banish actual people from their writing, and instead to turn everything into a string of nouns (often ending in -icity or -ization) linked with passive verbs to other strings of nouns. (If that sentence sounded ugly to you, welcome to my work life!)
I found especially thought-provoking Billig's argument early in the book about how the necessity for continual publications is relatively recent innovation in academic life, and how it has altered the incentives for quantity and quality of academic writing. ...
11. Gallup: Americans Most Likely to Say Global Warming Is Exaggerated
12. Gallup: Americans 'Level of Worrry About National Problems
13. Atlantic Cities: The Reason Songs Have Choruses
The secret lies in how your brain processes sound: People love repetition.
It is not hard to estrange the idea of the chorus. Why should songs have some parts that are repeated and others that are not? Imagine other works of art in which a quarter or half of the work is repeated: a movie that shows the same 10-minute sequence every 20 minutes, or a book that repeats every other chapter.
Yet, in popular music, the chorus seems necessary. It is, in many cases, the point of the song.
And now, in a wonderful essay on Aeon, Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, argues that repetition is the point of music. The chorus is merely our culture's embodiment of a deeper human desire to play it again. ...
14. Atlantic Cities: Watch Your Name Grow and Shrink in Popularity Across the U.S.
Loved this one. The Matrix effect.
15. PBS: Note-takers volunteer to help the elderly during doctor visits
... Wolozin is a volunteer for the Northwest Neighbors Village in Washington, D.C., one of the more than 200 “villages” across the United States. These neighborhood membership organizations provide volunteers and other resources to help with everything from transportation and snow shoveling to hanging curtains and solving computer glitches. ...
16. Carpe Diem: Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years
17. NPR: With Sobering Science, Doctor Debunks 12-Step Recovery
Since its founding in the 1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous has become part of the fabric of American society. AA and the many 12-step groups it inspired have become the country's go-to solution for addiction in all of its forms. These recovery programs are mandated by drug courts, prescribed by doctors and widely praised by reformed addicts.
Dr. Lance Dodes sees a big problem with that. The psychiatrist has spent more than 20 years studying and treating addiction. His latest book on the subject is The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry.
Dodes tells NPR's Arun Rath that 12-step recovery simply doesn't work, despite anecdotes about success. ...
18. Atlantic: Americans: Republicans in General, Democrats in Particular
When Americans think about government in the big picture, they can seem like a nation of Ayn Rands. People want to lay waste to the Leviathan. But when Americans consider specific aspects of government, a curious thing happens. People rediscover their love of Washington. On issue after issue, Republicans are winning the argument in general, whereas Democrats are winning the argument in particular. ...
19. Huffington Post: Native Americans' Ancestors Got Stuck On Land Bridge On Way To Americas, New Research Suggests
Native Americans along the Pacific Coast and aboriginal Siberians may have both originated from populations living on the land bridge now submerged under the Bering Strait, a new language analysis suggests.
The language analysis, detailed today (March 12) in the journal PLOS ONE, is consistent with the notion that ancestors to modern-day Native Americans were stuck in the region of the Bering Strait before making their way into North America.
1. AEI - James Pethokoukis: What MinuteClinics and Google Fiber teach about crony capitalism
... Andy Kessler explains how established Internet service providers are trying to block Google from deploying Google Fiber, its superfast, gigabit broadband service. His solution: “The FCC can change this overnight. Instead of allowing municipalities to dictate onerous terms and laws that lock in (slow) incumbents, the FCC can mandate right-of-way rules similar to those granted Google Fiber to all credible competitors. If only the federal regulator would promote progress and focus on what’s best for the U.S. economy rather than for those it regulates.” Regulation should promote innovation and competitive churn, not protect revenue streams of existing players.
There is a big difference between being pro-business and pro-market. One does the bidding of incumbents, with the result being a static economy. The other promotes competition. Safety nets are for people, not businesses. The result is innovation and dynamism. Right now, America has too much of the former, not enough of the latter.
2. Economist: The politics of poverty. Another two cents.
... Within this miscellany [of the Ryan budget] there are some clues as to the future direction of Republican anti-poverty policies. Mr Ryan recently gave a speech in which he praised Britain’s Universal Credit, a plan to roll lots of government anti-poverty programmes into one. In some ways Britain is a strange place to seek inspiration: the British scheme is hopelessly behind schedule, a victim of the kind of IT snafu that has hobbled the Affordable Care Act. But the thinking behind it is sensible.
The other initiative that looks to have Mr Ryan’s blessing is the expansion of the Earned-Income Tax Credit (EITC) to people who do not have children (at the moment the childless are eligible for this credit but there is a low cap on the maximum payment they may receive). Marco Rubio has already spoken in favour of this. The report from the House budget committee cites plenty of evidence on the power of EITCs to boost the number of people in work. The president’s budget, published on March 4th, includes an expansion of this programme too. ...
3. Bloomberg: Free-Market Bashers Aren't Helping the Poor
... There's a more basic flaw in the thesis that markets have done nothing to help the poor while government programs have done a lot: Where does the government get the money to fund these programs? Economic growth is what enables Social Security checks to get fatter over time. Unless you're prepared to argue that the government is responsible for 100 percent of economic growth and markets for none, markets have to get some of the credit for whatever good government does. ...
... Both markets and government are necessary to improve the lot of the poor, and we ought to reform government programs so that they do a better job of helping the poor participate in markets. That's just common sense, and no study or statistic has given us a good reason to reject it.
4. AEI - James Pethokoukis: Has America finally reached peak food-stamp enrollment?
5. Carpe Diem: US household net worth increased to a new record high of $80.6T in Q4, fueled by stock market and housing gains
6. Bloomberg: Decoupling Happened: U.S. Stocks Soared, China's Shrugged
The idea that emerging markets could keep growing smartly despite the collapse of the U.S. was something romanced quite a bit in recent years. Decoupling, as it’s called, was at least numerically possible. After all, China, Brazil, India, and Russia—the planet’s four biggest emerging economies, which chipped in two-fifths of global economic growth in the year leading up to Wall Street’s 2008 collapse—stood out as the least dependent on exports to America. Upwards of 95 percent of China’s double-digit growth was attributable to domestic demand.
Turns out a decoupling did transpire in the five years since peak meltdown—only it’s the U.S. market that seems to be doing fine while China founders. It’s a divergence of fortunes few would have predicted. ...
7. Slate: The “Made in China” Fallacy
... But are iPhones really “made in China”? More than a dozen companies from at least five countries supply parts for them. Infineon Technologies, in Germany, makes the wireless chip; Toshiba, in Japan, manufactures the touch screen; Broadcom, in the U.S., makes the Bluetooth chips that let the devices connect to wireless headsets or keyboards.
Analysts differ over how much of the final price of an iPhone or an iPad should be assigned to which country, but no one disputes that the largest slice should go not to China but to the U.S., where the design and marketing of such devices take place at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The largest source of an iPhone’s value—and this goes for thousands of other high-tech products—lies not in its physical hardware but in its invention and the work of the individuals who conceived, designed, patented, packaged, and branded the device.
Taking these facts into account would leave China, the supposed country of origin, with a paltry piece of the pie. The Asian Development Bank estimates that as little as $10 of the value of every iPhone or iPad actually ends up in the Chinese economy.
Now magnify this across hundreds, even thousands of finished goods. Those Nike shoes that count as imports from China, all those flat-screen televisions, Android phones, clothing, furniture, Disney toys and figures. Almost all are the result of ideas generated in the U.S. (or Japan, or Germany, or Korea, and so on), with parts sourced globally and then assembled in China to be sold elsewhere. ...
8. Project Syndicate: The Poverty of Renewables
... Forcing everyone to buy more expensive, less reliable energy pushes up costs throughout the economy, leaving less for other public goods. The average of macroeconomic models indicates that the total cost of the EU’s climate policy will be €209 billion ($280 billion) per year from 2020 until the end of the century.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe burden of these policies falls overwhelmingly on the world’s poor, because the rich can easily pay more for their energy. I am often taken aback by well-meaning and economically comfortable environmentalists who cavalierly suggest that gasoline prices should be doubled or electricity exclusively sourced from high-cost green sources. That may go over well in affluent Hunterdon County, New Jersey, where residents reportedly spend just 2% of their income on gasoline. But the poorest 30% of the US population spend almost 17% of their after-tax income on gasoline. ...
9. New York Times - Economix: Q. and A.: A Development Expert on Narrowing Inequality
Branko Milanovic has been studying income inequality around the world for a long time. ...
... Inequality calculated among all individuals in the world, as if they were part of one single nation, has been edging slightly downward over the past 10 to 15 years, mostly thanks to very high growth rates in China and India. These relatively poor giants (particularly India) have pulled quite a lot of people out of poverty and into something that can be called “the global middle class.”
That is the key factor behind the decline of global inequality: The distance between their incomes and the rather stagnant incomes of the middle class in rich countries has diminished. Yet global inequality is still extremely high by the standards of any single country. It is, for example, significantly higher than inequality in South Africa, which is the most unequal country in the world. ...
10. Prospect: “I started off as a libertarian economist, but I’ve come full circle”—Gregory Clark on social mobility
... If you look at England, for example, what we measure is whether you were at Oxford or Cambridge; how long you live, which is another good indicator of social status; occupational status; are you a member of parliament? Now one of the interesting findings here is that it doesn’t really matter which measure you use. For the families we’re looking at, all these things are actually highly correlated. The wealthy at any time are also the educated, members of parliament, those who live long. What the book shows is that there’s an underlying physics of social mobility which all of our political efforts seem to have no effect upon. And the startling conclusion is that we may never be able to change social mobility rates. ...
11. Business Insider: Every 25-Year-Old In America Should See This Chart
12. Business Insider: 13 Money Lies You Should Stop Telling Yourself By Age 40
... By the time you hit 40, rationalizing away your bad money management habits starts to have a serious impact on your financial future (not to mention age you).
Here are some of the top money lies that you should stop telling yourself by age 40: ...
13. Huffington Post: 5 Tools to Tackle Finances in Your Twenties
Your twenties are hard enough already: matriculating from college, finding your first "real" job, moving out on your own, learning how to pay bills for the first time and learning how to navigate adult relationships without the structure of college or free flow of alcohol. It is a scary and awkward time, no one disputes that -- but mastering your finances in your twenties will reduce your stress and increase your net worth in the long run. Below are 5 tools you need to tackle finances in your twenties. ...
1. Huffington Post: The Unexpected Way Philosophy Majors Are Changing The World Of Business
... Despite a growing media interest in the study of philosophy and dramatically increasing enrollment in philosophy programs at some universities, the subject is still frequently dismissed as outmoded and impractical, removed from the everyday world and relegated to the loftiest of ivory towers.
That doesn't fit with the realities of both the business and tech worlds, where philosophy has proved itself to be not only relevant but often the cornerstone of great innovation. Philosophy and entrepreneurship are a surprisingly good fit. Some of the most successful tech entrepreneurs and innovators come from a philosophy background and put the critical thinking skills they developed to good use launching new digital services to fill needs in various domains of society. Atlantic contributor Edward Tenner even went so far as to call philosophy the "most practical major." ...
... Here are a few reasons that philosophy majors will become the entrepreneurs who are shaping the business world. ...
2. BusinessWeek: Half of U.S. Business Schools Might Be Gone by 2020
Richard Lyons, the dean of University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has a dire forecast for business education: “Half of the business schools in this country could be out of business in 10 years—or five,” he says.
The threat, says Lyons, is that more top MBA programs will start to offer degrees online. That will imperil the industry’s business model. For most business schools, students pursuing part-time and executive MBAs generate crucial revenue. Those programs, geared toward working professionals, will soon have to compete with elite online alternatives for the same population.
Lower-ranked business schools, rather than recognized names such as Harvard Business School and Wharton, are most vulnerable to this phenomenon. When the big players start offering online degrees, they’ll draw far-flung students who might otherwise have opted for the convenience of a part-time program close to home. ...
3. Huff Post Business: All Hail, Do-Gooding MBAs!
Don't look now, but it seems that some MBA students are increasingly interested in doing good as well as making money, and more business schools are happy to accommodate them. This is all to the, ahem, good, because we need all the smart, talented MBAs we can get to attack our biggest social, ethical and environmental problems.
While the vast majority of jobs for MBAs are still the traditional ones, I'm seeing evidence of a nascent shift. Indeed, no less a prophet than Michael Porter sees the same thing, and believes that there are opportunities a-plenty for companies that focus on solving there world's most urgent social environmental problems. "If we can get business seeing itself differently and others to see businesses differently," Porter said in a recent TED talk, "we can change the world. My students are getting [the fact that [sic] we can break down this divide, this tension and finally have solutions." As Porter (and C.K. Prahalad before him) suggest, there is plenty of money to be made in doing so. ...
4. Salary.com: 8 College Degrees with the Worst Return on Investment.
...While there's no doubt that a college degree increases earning power and broadens opportunities, today's high cost of education means it makes sense to more carefully consider which degree you earn. When it comes to return on investment (ROI), not all degrees are considered equal. This article exposes eight college degrees with poor ROI....
5. Forbes: 'Should I Tell You The Good News First?' The Feedback Employees Most Want To Hear
... Improving your capability for both giving and receiving feedback is a key factor for every leader. This assessment can help you to understand what you currently prefer and avoid. Living in extremes generally doesn’t lead to lasting success. Positive feedback helps you to know what went well and encourages you to move forward, while corrective feedback opens different options to explore. Whether you prefer one or avoid the other, next time you are faced with a feedback challenge, take the opportunity to be fully aware of the value of what you give and receive.
6. Forbes: How To Tell Your Boss 'No'--Without Saying 'No'
... Pushing back on a request from your boss can be intimidating (especially if you work for someone who’s, let’s say, not the most receptive to answers outside the realm of “Of course! When would you like it completed?”), but the truth is, it’s significantly better than setting yourself up to fail.
The trick is to push back more diplomatically—getting your point across without actually using the word “no.” Read on for how to approach some common situations, as well as one time you should probably just say “yes.” ...
7. Huffington Post: Women at Work: The Unspoken Rule of Meetings
... Men have the luxury of not having to worry about such details. Instead, they can devote their brains to developing cunning strategies to advance their own interests and careers. Men often see meetings as a chance to profile themselves, particularly if the boss or an important customer is in attendance. They will speak up, even if they have little of value to offer -- the main point is that everybody sees them talking. Women will often not speak up unless they have something important to say. Who's going to win the deal?
In addition to the tedium and insipidity of the typical meeting -- dreaded by male and female alike -- women have to think about their voices, their gestures, their eye contact, their style and their very woman-ness. Men simply don't have to worry about these things. This is utterly unfair, but until women occupy more executive positions, these unspoken rules of meetings will remain a challenge for them. ...
8. Huffington Post: Why 'Follow Your Passion' Is Bizarre Advice
... In his TEDTalk, Rowe explains that the tradespeople he profiled on his show, Dirty Jobs, are surprisingly happy. "Roadkill picker-uppers whistle while they work," he said. "I swear to God -- I did it with them." To Rowe, these experiences began to challenge many of the "sacred cows" he had been taught to believe about work satisfaction. Perhaps foremost of these sanctified ideas he began to doubt was the importance of pre-existing passion.
"Follow your passion... what could possibly be wrong with that?" Rowe joked in his talk. "Probably the worst advice I ever got." ...
... In his talk, Rowe points out that many of the happiest people in the country have jobs that no one would ever identify as a pre-existing passion. He cited a sheep herder, a pig farmer ("smells like hell, but God bless him, he's making a great living"), and a guy who makes flower pots out of cow dung, as examples of unexpected professional contentment. These observations are powerful for a simple reason: They separate career satisfaction from the specifics of the work.
The pig farmer is not happy because he was born with a pig farmer gene, or because he grew up feeling a deep pre-existing passion for pork. He's instead happy because he's making a great living, has tons of autonomy, and does work that's useful to the world (he raises his pigs on food scraps from nearby casinos that would otherwise go to waste). You could replace pig farming with any number of pursuits, but so long as they yielded these same traits, he'd love his work. ...
9. NPR: Physicists, Generals And CEOs Agree: Ditch The PowerPoint
... The physicists are far from the only people moving away from PowerPoint-style presentations: The CEOs of and have eliminated the presentations from meetings. In his recently published memoir, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates Gates writes that as CIA director, he banned slides except for maps and charts, but he could not do so as Secretary of Defense. Gen. James Mattis, former commander of U.S. Central Command, Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster banned the presentations when he led a successful mission in Iraq, and he compared PowerPoint to an internal threat.
The main advantage of forgoing PowerPoint is that it forces both the speaker and the listener to pay attention, says John Paul Chou, an assistant professor of physics at Rutgers University who recently presented at one of the Fermilab forums.
With PowerPoint, he says, it's "easier to let your mind go on autopilot, and you start to lose focus more easily." ...
10. Huffington Post: Charitable Giving Could Harm A Company's Image, Study Says
Giving to charity may actually hurt a company’s reputation, a new study from the Yale School of Management has suggested.
Interested in how people view donors who make a profit while doing good, Yale professors George Newman and Daylian Cain presented a number of charitable scenarios to their research participants. Their findings, which have been published in Psychological Science, suggest that people are quick to dismiss those who benefit in any way while engaging in philanthropy.
"This work suggests that people may react very negatively to charitable initiatives that are perceived to be in some way 'inauthentic,'" Newman explained in a press release. ...
11. Business Insider: 15 Small Business Owners Share What They Wish They'd Known When They First Started
Building a successful business is typically done by trial and error, with many hurdles along the way. And when it's your first company, every day involves making mistakes and learning something new.
We asked small business owners around America to tell us the one thing they wished they'd known when they first started their businesses.
We've broken out some of the best to serve as a primer on getting as much as possible right the first time around. ...
12. Atlantic Cities: Why Some Communities Foster More Entrepreneurs Than Others
... But new research shows there's clearly more to the story than just individual skill, pluck, and ambition. The study, by Temple University’s Seok-Woo Kwon, the University of Missouri’s Colleen Heflin, and Duke University’s Martin Ruef, examines the relationship between self-employment levels and community support structures across America’s metro areas. Published in the December issue of the American Sociological Review, the authors argue that the strength of local social networks and trust — using the term “social capital,” popularized by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam — plays a major role in whether a city is able to foster a culture of self-employment and entrepreneurship.
The study measures entrepreneurship using data on self-employment from the Census, and compares that to data from Putnam’s own Social Capital Benchmark Survey and the General Social Survey. The results get at how key aspects of social capital, such as membership in voluntary organizations or variation in trust across communities, affect rates of self-employment and entrepreneurial activity. ...
13. New York Times: For Many Older Americans, an Enterprising Path
... Kimberly Palmer, author of “The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession-Proof Your Life,” said she had noticed that the most eager audience for the book was often people approaching retirement, or already in it. “They want to leverage their skills and experience into something entrepreneurial,” she said.
According to a recent study published by the Kauffman Foundation and Legal Zoom, in 2013, about 20 percent of all new businesses were started by entrepreneurs aged 50 to 59 years, and 15 percent were 60 and over.
And, in fact, over the last decade, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to those in the 55-to-64 age group, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.
A desire to work for oneself and create a business that is meaningful and has social impact at this stage of life, combined with a job market that makes it tough for workers over 50 to get hired, has clearly pushed more people to pursue the entrepreneurial path. ...
14. Business Insider: 10 American Industries That Are Going To Boom In The Next Decade
... A new data release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals which industries are going to grow the fastest between 2012 and 2022. Health care and technology, already giants today, are expected to keep up their rapid growth over the next decade. At the same time, manufacturing is expected to continue its rapid decline.
So if you're looking ahead to the future, here are the industries that are going to boom. ...
15. Business Insider: 10 Predictions For How Shopping Will Completely Change In The Future
Retail is an incredibly dynamic industry.
"We will see more disruption in the next ten years of retail than we did in the previous one thousand," said Doug Stephens, founder of industry website Retail Prophet and author of The Retail Revival: Re-Imagining Business for the New Age of Consumerism.
Stephens recently published his 10 predictions for how retail will change this year.
He agree to share his list with us. ...
16. Economist: The music industry will see better times in 2014
17. CNN Money: Inside the world of one-click grocery delivery
FORTUNE -- It all seems so simple: Hit the "place order" button online and get a head of lettuce, a dozen eggs, or a gallon of milk delivered to your doorstep within 24 hours. But behind the scenes, the burgeoning market of online grocery delivery involves a surprisingly delicate dance to ensure that perishable food gets from producer to consumer in just enough time to avoid (quite literally) a spoiled delivery.
With demand on the rise, giants such as Wal-Mart (WMT) and Amazon (AMZN) are jumping into the fray as investors bet millions on a crop of startups with names like Good Eggs, Relay Foods, and Farmigo. Yet actually turning a profit and managing the logistics of food delivery is tricky, says Leslie Hand, a director at IDC Retail Insights, a market research firm. Unlike shipping books or durable products via UPS, fresh food delivery requires specific short routing, planning, technology, and a race against the clock. ...
18. BloombergBusinessweek: Three Restaurant Chains With Happy, Low-Paid Workers
Low pay in the restaurant industry has spurred a series of one-day walkouts this year by fast-food employees demanding more, yet a trio of chains found their way onto a new list of the 50 best places to work. Starbucks (SBUX) (No. 39), Chick-fil-A (No. 43), and Texas Roadhouse (TXRH) (No. 47) made it onto the annual ranking by jobs website Glassdoor.com, derived from reviews submitted by U.S.-based employees. ...
19. Businessweek: Why the Gender Pay Gap Persists—and How to Really End It
Embedded in a new research paper (PDF) by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin is a valuable piece of news for anyone who is frustrated by the stubborn persistence of the gap in earnings between women and men. It has long been held that women earn only $0.77 for ever dollar that men do, in large part because of discrimination. But, Goldin argues, most of the difference comes down to factors that have nothing to do with sexism: The number of hours a person works and the degree of job flexibility.
This means that companies offering true, stigma-free flexibility and linear compensation—meaning the same pay per hour worked, regardless of when it is worked—have the lowest gaps in pay between men and women—and, in many cases, more women employees overall.
All that’s left is for corporate America to do something about it. ...
20. Forbes: What Happens When Leaders Only Care About Money?
... So yes, under any of the preceding conditions, a profit-is-all-that-matters approach will work.
But, under circumstance other than those above – it probably won’t work. If a leader needs to build a sustainably growing and profitable enterprise in an industry that requires a high degree of innovation or creativity and/or must provide excellent customer service – then the money-only approach will not work. I’ve seen profit-only leaders fail time and time again under such circumstances.
And the core reason – from my observation – is that delivering innovation, creativity or extraordinary customer service demands talented, hardworking employees who are loyal and motivated, and who are supported to do their best. And in this day and age, such employees are in high demand. As soon as they realize that a leader, or a company, cares about them only as a means to the end of raking in the dough – and will therefore consistently look for ways to give them as little of that dough as possible – their resumes will be on the street.
If you, as a leader, need to build a sustainably profitable business that relies upon innovation and/or great customer service to succeed, then I’d suggest the following approach: hire the best people you can find, support their development and their creativity, and establish an environment that both demands and rewards great results. I predict you’ll make lots of money – all without having to avoid telling your mom how you run your business.
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. ...
