Kruse Kronicle

Calmly Considered: 2022 Review, 2023 Preview

Allan Bevere and I look back at 2022 and forward to 2023.

Christian Nationalism - Christ AND Caesar?

Here is the August dialog between Allan Bevere and me about Christian nationalism and its implications. 

Calmly Considered: Global Living Conditions-- Better or Worse?

Are global living conditions getting better or worse?

There are three simultaneous truths:

1. Living conditions are awful for a great many.
2. Living conditions are better than they ever have been, by far.
3. Living conditions can be improved and the trajectory is in a positive direction.

Join Allen Bevere and me as we calmly consider global living conditions.

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

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

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

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

You can learn more about these four levels here. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some observations.

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

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

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

Why Population Control Is Not The Answer to Climate Change

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

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

Trends in Fertility

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

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

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

The Compounding Effect in Future Fertility

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

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

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

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

The Depopulation Problem

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

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

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

Decoupled Economic Growth

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

Global Childhood Deaths In Steep Decline

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

(Where in the world are children dying.)

Extreme Poverty is Vanishing. What Does That Mean in Practical Terms?

Throughout human history, 90% of people have lived at a subsistence level - at or under what economists today call the extreme poverty line. Between 1820 and 1980, that percentage shrank by half to 44%. Between 1980 and 2005, it halved again to about 22%. During the next ten years, it has more than halved to less than 10%. Remember that while these percentages were shrinking, the global population grew from one billion to more than seven billion.

That is all good, but most people don't relate well to statistics. Is there some way to visually capture what this means in concrete terms?

Gapminder has an excellent graph that gives a sense of what it means to move from extreme poverty. The left column indicates how the extremely poor live relative to the features listed on the left. The second column is indicative of the life to which they emerged. 

The graph is also instructive in dividing living standards into four levels. Many of us who went to school in the 1960s to 1990s have tended to see a binary world - developed and undeveloped, first world and third world, rich and poor, the West and the rest. That has ceased to be the case. It has been on a trajectory away from a binary world all during our lifetimes. At the bottom of the graph, you will see seven yellow human figures. Each stand for one billion people. Most of the world is now concentrated in the middle and moving upward or to the right in this chart. The percentage of people in level one is now well below one billion and shrinking rapidly.

Gapminder Dollar Street has visited 264 families worldwide and taken photos of their homes and belongings. The links to photos of the households are arranged in columns like the chart, allowing you to walk through the houses and get a sense of what it means to live at various living standards. It is an excellent resource.

World Social Indicators: Child Mortality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next, we will look at economic issues.

[Series Index]

Save

Save

World Social Indicators: Life Expectancy

Demographers commonly use life expectancy rates as a measure of societal well-being. Life expectancy is the number of years someone is expected to live when born based on actuarial science. Long life is a universal indicator of prosperity across cultures and time. It is an important measure to demographers because achieving it requires a complex mix of variables, like a sustained nutritious food supply, a sanitary and safe environment, relatively little disease, the absence of war, and a stable society.

So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of two social scientists and economists typical of those who study these issues:

For most of its existence, homo sapiens lived in far-flung hunter-and-gathering communities, each of which was quite small and barely able to reproduce itself. Life expectancy at birth was hardly twenty-five years on average, and those persons who survived childhood often died violently, in combat with other hunters, at relatively young ages. (Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, 48)

For much of human history, average life expectancy used to be 20-30 years. By 1900, it had climbed to about 31 years … By 2003 it was 66.8 years. (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 31)

To put the last statement by Goklany in perspective, let's graph the estimated life expectancy on a chart:

If we show only the last 250 years, we get a clearer picture of what has happened:

Source

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

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

Interactive Source

The trajectory of change is an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven growth, but every corner of the planet has improved, and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.

Next, we look at infant mortality rates.

[Series Index]

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

World Social Indicators: Introduction

Is the state of the world getting better or getting worse? How would you answer that question? What indicators would you use?

For Christians, our mission is to seek the greatest shalom possible in the world, always cognizant that shalom in its fullness will only be recognized at the consummation of the new creation. But how would we measure shalom?

Isaiah 65:17-25 is a statement of what the ancient Hebrews understood as the fullness of shalom.

17 For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
18 But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.
19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
20 No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD --
and their descendants as well.
24 Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent -- its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain, (NRSV)

Several themes jump out from this characterization of a world restored to shalom. There are some very practical and specific features:

• God will delight in his people and be attentive to them. (18-19, 24)
• Safety will prevail. (19)
• Infant mortality will cease. (20)
• Life expectancy will increase beyond 100 years. (20)
• There will be a just and prosperous order in society (absence of war and oppression.) (21-24)
• Nature itself will be altered into a more peaceful order. (25)

The New Testament version of the new creation expands this vision even further. In the New Testament, God dwells with humankind, and there is eternal life. But it seems to me that if we look at the features of shalom in this Isaiah, we can get a good sense of whether or not the world is moving in the right direction.

Especially interesting about this Isaiah passage is the direct reference to infant mortality rates and life expectancy. Social scientists frequently turn to these measures for a sense of societal welfare. Why? These two indicators serve as indirect indicators of other societal realities. Many other social variables (i.e., adequate food, health care, environment, social stability, healthy social institutions, and low crime) must be positive for these two variables to be positive.

What is particularly interesting is that every time I hear sermons on this passage, the emphasis is on the declining state of shalom in our world. One sermon I heard a few years back lamented rising inequality, AIDS, poverty in Africa, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and polar bears drowning due to melting ice (the last one was in the prayer of confession.) In my Presbyterian tradition, the prayers of confession frequently include lament of our greed and threatened destruction of the plant. I routinely read theologians on social media who decry "neoliberalism" and the deepening dystopia into which it is leading our planet. Public theologian Brian McLaren characterizes the present world order as a "suicide machine." Is this an accurate assessment?

The most common trait I find in these assessments is that they are usually thoroughly subjective. They are without context and awareness of empirical realities. Do not misread me here. I am not saying we are without need of confession. Evil is at work in the world and within us. But what if we collectively found a way to double life expectancy, make infant mortality rare, virtually eliminate extreme poverty, reduce global income inequality, and radically reduce the number of deaths due to war. Would we not celebrate? Yes. The historical reality is that all things have happened or are on the way to happening! Yet I do not believe I have ever heard a sermon extolling and celebrating the profound and unprecedented improvements we have seen in global well-being.

I want to offer some thoughts on how we might measure shalom, at least from the physical and material well-being perspective. In the coming days, I'll write several posts that look at key indicators. As you will see, I conclude that we live in an era of unprecedented expansion of global shalom.

That is not to say we are at some Francis Fukuyama-like "End of History" moment, but the idea that global well-being is in decline is indefensible. Unprecedented positive change is underway and has been for some time. Yet there are still more than a billion barely touched by these world events. There is so much more that needs to happen. We have learned a great deal and need to learn a great deal more. In my estimation, the biggest threats to the continuation of these advances are radical populist movements from the right and left, disconnected from facts and history. We need to be informed about the world's true state before joining movements to "fix" it. We must lift up achievements as morale builders and learn lessons from successes as we press ahead.

I hope you will join me for some conversation.

[Series Index]

Save

Save

Save

Don't Forget the Good Stuff

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

Shrinking the World, 1800-1930

Satirist and humorist Douglas Adams, probably best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, once wrote:

"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

We tend to view our era as a time of unprecedented change while assuming the world before our birth was virtually stagnate. In fact, rapid, radical change has been the norm for at least the past few centuries. The case can be made that the generations living just before our generation experienced changes every bit as disorienting as ours.

I recently came across this graphic from The Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States, published in 1932. These maps show the improvement in travel times from New York from 1800 to 1930.

I remember first coming across similar maps in Allan Pred's Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1830. Pred demonstrates that not only did travel times shrink, but the cost per mile of travel shrank as well.

Early in the nation's history, most travel was by water. We built cities on major waterways. Most states in the eastern half of the United States have a major river or the ocean as a boundary. This meant that each state had access to the water transportation superhighway. Traveling by land was exceedingly difficult. There were few roads. It took days to reach even nearby cities by stagecoach, and each night meant fees for food and lodging that were not part of the stagecoach price. You had the labor of a driver spread across a few people. The cost of travel for even short distances could consume a week or more of wages for a typical working person. Only the wealthy and merchants could afford such travel.

I believe it was Pred who said travel from New York to Pittsburgh did not typically take a route across Pennsylvania. It involved boarding a boat in New York, sailing down the east coast around Florida to New Orleans, and then navigating up the Mississippi and Ohio to Pittsburgh. Boats could handle far more people per trip, required no extra lodging expenses, food was generally provided on board, and laborers per person were much smaller. Water travel was also far more energy efficient and thus less costly.

As turnpikes and canals were built, and with the advent of the steamboat in the 1820s, travel times shrank, and so did the prices. Depending on travel destinations, Pred shows the cost of travel per mile between 1800 and 1840 dropped by 50-90%. Railroads shrank the distance and decreased costs even more. Today, we can fly from New York to Los Angeles in a few hours for one or two days' wages for someone earning around the US median Salary.

The world continues to change significantly but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that our age is the first to encounter sweeping technological and economic changes.

[Note: If you are interested in American economic history, you need to investigate the interactive Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States.]

You may also find this clip by Louis C. K. sums up well our lack of appreciation.

Save

The Future of the American Dream

For most Americans today, there has been a presumption that our children's lives will be more prosperous than ours. The American Dream, whatever particularities might include, has always included this assumption. It is virtually a social contract. Is the idea that most of our children will have a more prosperous life than we did really valid?

Robert Gordon, economic historian at Northwestern University, released a book earlier this year, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Gordon's mammoth tome documents changes in American living standards over the past 150 years. His research leads him to conclude that not all innovations significantly improve living standards. From 1870-1970, a wave of technological and social innovation emerged that radically improved worker productivity, improving our living standards. There has been innovation since 1970, but most of it, apart from communication and entertainment, has been an extension and a deepening of the innovations before 1970. The period from 1870 to about 1920 was a period of development and implementation of innovations that began to have a full impact after 1920. Gordon estimates the average annual growth rate in output per hour like this:

1890-1920 = 1.50%

1920-1970 = 2.82%

1970-2014 = 1.62%

For those familiar with American history, you will remember that income inequality was relatively high going into the 1920s. Inequality shrank steadily and substantially over the next fifty years until the mid-1970s. This corresponds with Gordon's estimates of rapidly improving worker productivity. Since the 1970s, there has been slower growth, which is more related to capital investment than improving worker productivity. We have seen income inequality grow since the 1970s.

Gordon is doubtful that we will ever again have a convergence of innovation as we had from 1870-1970. This and certain demographic headwinds will make sustainable high growth improbable for present generations. I hope to write more about this in the coming days, but this graphic posted by William Easterly on Twitter caught my eye. It comes from an article by David Leonhardt, The American Dream, Quantified at Last. I take it as more evidence consistent with Gordon's thesis.

Save

American Geographic Mobility is Declining (It Has Been for Generations)

“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.

An Improving World

Life expectancy at birth is one of the single best indicators of societal well-being. So many things have to work well for the great majority of people to live long lives that the high life expectancy is a proxy for holistic well-being. The measure is of particular value in that it measures something relatively concrete, as opposed to income (which has varying impacts relative to local living standards and exchange rates) or happiness (a highly subjective term.)

Throughout human history, global life expectancy at birth was about 30 years. This does not mean that everyone died before age thirty. It is an average age of death. One in four children died before their first birthday (it is less than 1% in developed nations today). Some people lived to be quite old. But on average, people lived to be thirty.

Over the past two hundred years, something has changed. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled and is still improving. I won't give a dissertation on why that might be but rather invite you to realize that contrary to our intuitions, news reports, and personal biases, we are living through the most astonishing improvement in human flourishing in human history.

Here is a chart showing the trend.

This chart offers an animated presentation of the improvement by nation.

More Evidence of an Improving World - HDI

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.

 

Rosling Univeristy (How to be smarter than a chimp)

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

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

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

Now chimps will randomly select, giving each answer a 33% chance. Yet when Rosling asks audiences, at least half will say A, a sizable percentage will say B, while a few will say C. Yet C is the correct answer! This is the case with one variable after another. Audiences routinely score worse than chimps, choosing the most negative option.

An old adage states, "It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know that ain't so." That we routinely pick the wrong answer more often than chimps shows that we have bias.

In the Ted talk, How not to be ignorant about the world, Hans' son Rosling notes that part of the problem is our education system. Teachers go to college at a particular point in time and learn the state of the world at that time. But they tend not to learn about ongoing developments. The data has often been hard to come by and hard to interpret. So teachers are biased by what they learned years ago. (Reporters have the same problem.) But there are other factors.

During our evolutionary history, our brains became wired to notice threats. Hunters walking through the brush who were attentive to the possibility of tigers lying in wait likely survived those who went about carelessly enjoying a beautiful day. So when we reflect on broad human trends, we fixate on perceived threats. What was useful for us in the wild is counterproductive as we try to interpret socioeconomic trends. If you want to outscore a chimp on an exam about global well-being, Ola Rosling suggests that you must drop your predispositions and adopt these four rules of thumb:

1. Assume most things are improving.
2. Assume most people are in the middle of a distribution, not a binary of rich and poor.
3. Assume social development precedes becoming wealthy. (Don't assume that a population must be rich before meeting basic social needs.)
4. Assume you are exaggerating the threat if the topic is something you personally fear.

Additionally, Hans, Ola, and others have been working to build the Gapminder website to provide you with data that can be presented in meaningful ways. But one of the most important contributions the Roslings have made is their collection of entertaining and informative videos. In this post, I include every video I can find with a brief annotation. (I'll add more as I find any.) Many videos overlap or cover similar data but are all well worth viewing. So here is your resource for becoming smarter than a chimp. Don't say I never gave you anything.

(This link also has links to most of these videos, including some shorts not listed here: Gapminder Video)

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes (2010)

If you are just getting acquainted with Rosling, I'd begin here. This four-minute presentation gives you a quick sense of what he is talking about.

 

Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world. TED June 2014

This is the second video to watch. The front half is Hans making his case that the world is improving, and the back half is Ola explaining, as I recounted above, why we are so disinclined to see positive change.

 

Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine. TED December 2010

This is the third one to watch. This is one of my favorites. While fully embracing the concern about the environmental impacts of economic growth, Rosling shows the importance of economic growth through the story of the washing machine.

 

THE REST ARE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen. TED February 2006

The TED presentation that kicked it all off. He focuses on the positive changes underway in the world. He points to his efforts to liberate, integrate, and animate data and to find ways to present data the public finds understandable.

 

Hans Rosling: New Insights on Poverty. TED March 2007

Rosling shows that social development tends to precede economic development. He addresses the issue that, unfortunately, economic development has always been based on fossil fuels. Higher yields, technology, and markets are key to ending poverty, but more dimensions like human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health, and culture need our attention. The ending has a great surprise!

 

Human Rights and Democracy Statistics- Gapminder c. 2008

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

Source

Yes they can! - Gapminder c. 2008

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

Source

Poor Beats Rich in MDG Race - Gapminder c. 2008

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

Source

What stops population growth? - Gapminder c. 2008

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

Source

Hans Rosling: Insights on HIV, in stunning data visuals. TED February 2009

Uses Gapminder data to show nuances in how AIDS has spread and what it takes to defeat it.

 

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset. TED June 2009

This is the third video you should watch. Rosling deconstructs the dichotomy of wealthy and developing nations and challenges the idea of thinking in sweeping terms like "Africa."

 

The Joy of Stats with Professor Hans Rosling - Gapminder c. 2010

Rosling shows how making data available and animating empowers people to make better decisions, sometimes without realizing they are using statistics.

Source

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

Rosling forecasts when China and India will catch up with the USA and UK.

 

 Hans Rosling: Global population growth, box by box. TED June 2010

 Rosling says that child survival is the new green. This video explains why.

 

Hans Rosling: The good news of the decade? We're winning the war against child mortality. TED September 2010

Rosling breaks down the remarkable trends in child mortality. Education of women accounts for at least 50% of the drop.

 

 

Hans Rosling: Religions and babies. TED April 2012

Religion is not a factor in family size. There is no significant difference between Islamic and Christian countries regarding births per woman. The defining difference is economic well-being.

 

 DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population. BBC November 2013

 A one-hour investigation into the dynamics of population growth using stories about real live families interspersed with Rosling's entertaining presentation of data.

 

Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years. BBC September 2015

No embed is available.

You can view the video here.

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

An introduction to visualising development data

 

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

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, So Why Don't We Feel Fine?

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.

6 New Rules of Business for the Next Industrial Revolution

Alan Murray at Fortune summarizes a lengthier piece by Geoff Colvin called Why every aspect of your business is about to change. Here is my summary of Murray's summary:

1. You don't need a lot of physical capital. ...

2. Human capital will matter more than ever. ...

3. The nature of employment will change. For the rest of your employees, gig work will grow. ...

4. Winners will win bigger, and the rest will fight harder for the remains. ... McKinsey Global Institute puts it: "tech and tech-enabled firms destroy more value for incumbents than they create for themselves."

5. Corporations will have shorter lives. The average life span of companies in the S&P 500 has already fallen from 61 years in 1958 to 20 years today. It will fall further.

6. Intellectual property knows no natural boundaries. 

Fascinating stuff.

The world has improved since 2000 – but not because we planned it (Think Bonsai)

The Globe and Mail: The world has improved since 2000 – but not because we planned it

Millennium Development Goals: ...

... The headline goal, of cutting the proportion of people living in poverty in half, was achieved five years early, in 2010, by which time a billion people had left absolute poverty. And now the rate of poverty has fallen to less than a third of its 1990 level (that is, from 47 per cent of the world's people to 14 per cent).

The other MDGs saw impressive outcomes. The percentage of malnourished people has been cut in half. So has the number of children dying before the age of five, and the percentage of people without access to clean drinking water. The maternal mortality rate has almost dropped by half. The number of primary-age children out of school fell from 100 million to 57 million; the primary enrollment rate in sub-Saharan Africa rose to 80 per cent from 52 per cent. New HIV infections annually fell from 3.5 million in 2000 to 2.1 million in 2013. ...

... There's a problem with all the self-congratulation, though: Nobody has been able to find any connection between those impressive outcomes and anything done by the UN since 2000.

Charles Kenny and Andy Sumner of Washington's Center for Global Development have spent the decade tracking the progress of the UN's goals. In a series of studies, they've found that in most areas the goals had little or nothing to do with the outcomes. ...

... What did cause the world to improve so dramatically between 2000 and 2015? In large part, two things: After 1990, the old closed, nationalist economies of the postcolonial era and the Cold War broke down (with ugly results at first) and gave rise to the set of phenomena we call "globalization." And after 2000, countries in Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and much of Africa started developing better institutions of government, education and health. Stronger liberal economies and stronger states worked wonders.

The UN's new post-2015 goals at least recognize that economic growth is crucial (they call for an astonishing 7-per-cent growth a year in the poorest countries). It may, in fact, be the only key factor – and it's the one the UN can't control.

In fact, what is needed is a healthy economic ecosystem grounded in efficient and just soci0-economic structures, with markets providing a real-time feedback loop through which a society can be adaptive to ever changing priorities. That ecosystem needs to be justly connected to the larger ecosystem of global productivity and exchange.

There is a common tendency to believe that development can be achieved through top-down analysis, planning, and implementation. This is generally the U.N. Millennium Development Goals model. Such projects are rarely effective. It presumes that experts can correctly identify the most critical needs, that the priority of those needs will stay constant, and that they can identify which levers to flip to get the optimal outcome.

Mohammad Yunus uses the image of the Bonsai tree to illustrate the problem. The tiny Bonsai tree grows from the same seed as the tall tree in the forest. The difference is that the Bonsai tree has only the nutrients of the tiny pot in which to grow. The poor are Bonsai people. They can grow as strong and tall as anyone else if planted in the right soil. The right soil is healthy socioeconomic structures and inclusion in networks of productivity and exchange.

The U.N. approach has elements of paternalism. The poor can reasonably address their own needs if the "right soil" is present. Because of geopolitical concerns or pure ineptness, the West has too often played a role in "degrading the soil." This article again reminds us how impotent so many of our "big idea" solutions are. The critical factors lie in the less-than-glamorous work of building healthy institutions.

Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years (Hans Rosling)

YouTube: Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years (This World documentary)

"The legendary statistical showman Professor Hans Rosling returns with a feast of facts and figures as he examines the extraordinary target the world commits to this week - to eradicate extreme poverty worldwide. In the week the United Nations presents its new goals for global development, Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years looks at the number one goal for the world: eradicating, for the first time in human history, what is called extreme poverty - the condition of almost a billion people, currently measured as those living on less than $1.25 a day.

Rosling uses holographic projection technology to wield his iconic bubble graphs and income mountains to present an upbeat assessment of our ability to achieve that goal by 2030. Eye-opening, funny and data-packed performances make Rosling one of the world's most sought-after and influential speakers. He brings to life the global challenge, interweaving powerful statistics with dramatic human stories from Africa and Asia. In Malawi, the rains have failed as Dunstar and Jenet harvest their maize. How many hunger months will they face when it runs out? In Cambodia, Srey Mao is about to give birth to twins but one is upside-down. She's had to borrow money to pay the medical bills. Might this happy event throw her family back into extreme poverty?

The data show that recent global progress is "the greatest story of our time - possibly the greatest story in all of human history". Hans concludes by showing why eradicating extreme poverty quickly will be easier than slowly.

Don't Panic - How To End Poverty In 15 Years follows Rosling's previous award-winning BBC productions Don't Panic - The Truth About Population and The Joy Of Stats."

White People Aren't Driving Growth in the Suburbs

Atlantic Cities: White People Aren't Driving Growth in the Suburbs

"The decline of white suburbia has already begun. ...

... For the Brookings Institution, Frey explains that white populations accounted for just 9 percent of the population growth of the suburbs (in the 100 largest metro areas) between 2000 and 2010. The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings just launched a fascinating map that shows where white cities and suburbs gained and lost populations. It shows that some metro areas are already breaking from the population pattern that has fueled the last half-century of growth: white losses in cities, white gains in suburbs."

 

This animated map shows how humans migrated across the globe

Map Shows How Humans Migrated Across The Globe

China and India Overtake Mexico for Inflow of Foreign-Born US Residents

Conversable Economist: China and India Overtake Mexico for Inflow of Foreign-Born US Residents

The Decentralized Energy Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Richer World... but for whom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World is Not Falling Apart

Slate: The World is Not Falling Apart

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

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

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

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

Amen!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global Life Expectancy Increases by About Six Years

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

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

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

Why the Increase in Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement?

The rate of justifiable homicide by law enforcement is much higher in the United States than in other developed nations. The number of incidents has increased since 2000, even as the crime rate has dropped markedly. (See Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement by the Numbers) Why is this so?

The reason for the high rate of justifiable homicide relative to other nations seems straightforward. America is a violent society. Blame it on our frontier heritage, or whatever you will, the fact is that American homicide rates are much higher than in other developed nations. Firearms are abundant. Confrontations have a much greater chance of involving lethal force. Our relatively high rate strikes me as a statement about our society, not about the law enforcement community. The

The challenging question is why the rate of justifiable homicide by law enforcement should be increasing while crime rates have been falling. I am not certain. I am not a criminologist. The criminologist I read say solid data is lacking. Definitive answers are hard to come by. Here are my speculations.

Verbal Judo

Several years ago, I read a book by a police officer named George Thompson called Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion. Thompson had been an English professor with a black belt in karate before going into law enforcement. He tells about his first night on patrol. He pulled over a man for a traffic violation. When the man got mouthy, Thompson forcibly subdued and arrested him. Thompson was summoned to his superior at the end of the shift. He anticipated praise for his work. Instead, his captain explained that such a stop should not have ended in an arrest. Thompson would never make it as a police officer if he could not learn how to deal better with people.

During his apprenticeship as a police officer, Thompson came to see karate and judo as metaphors for a policing mindset. Karate is about meeting force with force, while judo is about using your opponent’s momentum to throw him in the direction you want him to go. So how might this work with an irritable speeder?

Officer: “Sir, I need to your driver’s license and registration.” (The officer makes clear what compliance looks like.)

Speeder: “Seriously! What did I do? Fail to flip a freakin’ turn signal? Drug dealers on the street and terrorist blowing up buildings. Don’t you jackasses have something better to do? How many people’s houses are being robbed?”

Officer: (calmly) “I can appreciate that sir but I still need to see your driver’s license and registration.”

There might be two or three iterations of this interchange, with the officer calmly making clear what is required each time. The officer allows the offender to vent while still making clear the need for compliance. If compliance is still not forthcoming, the officer might say something like:

Officer: (calmly) “Sir, if you do not comply, I will have to arrest you. You will spend the night in a cold uncomfortable cell instead of in your nice warm bed. I will have to spend an hour or more, sitting in my car, filling out paperwork. Neither of us wants that. Please hand me your driver’s license and registration.”

The officer reiterates the need for compliance but is now making clear the consequences of noncompliance. He appeals to the direction the offender wants to go (home to a warm bed) as an act of verbal judo.

If the offender still does not comply, then the officer will say something like:

Officer: (calmly) “Sir, are you sure there is nothing I can say to gain your compliance?”

At that point, the officer and his partner are positioning themselves to spring into action to apprehend the noncompliant offender.

This is verbal judo. It applies to almost any position of authority. The subject is not required to like the person in authority or the demand. They have the space to voice opposition. The goal is to gain compliance by helping the person see the consequences of noncompliance and help them see that compliance is desirable. The aim is to defuse resistance, not escalate it. Most often, the person will comply before things escalate to using force.

My point is not the specifics of the technique. I am pointing to the mindset. “Verbal Judo” is a different mindset than rolling up on a scene, barking orders, and taking the least perceived slight as justification for escalating to tasers, takedowns, and lethal force. I believe most officers have typically embraced a defusing model of policing. I base that on my limited interaction with the few law enforcement officers I have known and for whom I have great respect. They genuinely see their job as a calling to serve and protect.

Unfortunately, I worry this sense of calling is eroding. It concerns me that too many officers may now see Thompson’s aggressive escalating rookie behavior as the optimal model. I cannot empirically substantiate this except that I see the rising rate of justifiable homicides as a likely proxy for violence by law enforcement. Furthermore, the Justice Department just completed a study of the Cleveland Police Department and found the following patterns:

• The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;
• the unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including Tasers, chemical spray and fists;
• Excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check; and
• The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable. (Source)

A former St. Louis police officer recently wrote:

… As a cop, it shouldn’t surprise you that people will curse at you, or be disappointed by your arrival. That’s part of the job. But too many times, officers saw young black and brown men as targets. They would respond with force to even minor offenses. And because cops are rarely held accountable for their actions, they didn’t think too hard about the consequences. …

… I, too, have faced mortal danger. I’ve been shot at and attacked. But I know it’s almost always possible to defuse a situation.

Once, a sergeant and I got a call about someone wielding a weapon in an apartment. When we showed up, we found someone sitting on the bed with a very large butcher knife. Rather than storming him and screaming “put the knife down” like my colleagues would have done, we kept our distance. We talked to him, tried to calm him down.

It became clear to us that he was dealing with mental illness. So eventually, we convinced him to come to the hospital with us.

I’m certain many other officers in the department would have escalated the situation fast. They would have screamed at him, gotten close to him, threatened him. And then, any movement from him, even an effort to drop the knife, would have been treated as an excuse to shoot until their clips were empty. … (Source)

I have listened to other ex-officers from other cities give similar testimony. Despite what I perceive to be most officers entering their work as a noble calling, the evidence seems to point to systemic problems beyond isolated individuals going rogue. I nominate two factors for consideration.

Broken Windows

First, broken windows policing. As I understand it, this model suggests that disorder in a community makes residents withdraw and isolate themselves. This creates opportunities for more serious criminal activity to move in. A downward cycle ensues. Broken windows policing focuses on addressing even minor problems to restore a sense of order, catalyzing a positive upward cycle.

The broken windows policy came into vogue with the crack-cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The crime rate did plummet after 1994, and this policy may have played a key role. But is there a point at which neighborhoods reach a semblance of health, and it is counterproductive to continue this policy? Does continuation begin to feel like harassment? Add to this that has typically been implemented in minority neighborhoods. Continued enforcement means minority residents are charged with violations routinely ignored in white communities. It is not hard to see how a cycle of escalating resentment between law enforcement and citizens could emerge.

9/11

Second, 9/11. Curiously, 2001 is where we see the divergence between a dropping crime rate and a rising justifiable homicide rate. Law enforcement must take extraordinary measures in crises. We give law enforcement officers considerably more latitude. Many perceive our society to have been in a perpetual crisis ever since the attack on the World Trade Center. Militarization and the equipment law enforcement agencies are acquiring are rising in mindset. Fear of terrorism has become wedded to a perception that crime and chaos are spinning wildly out of control. (As noted in the previous post, crime rates have plummeted to their lowest rates in fifty years, but the widespread perception is much different.)  (Related: Police Violence Is The Exception.)

In this environment, defusing difficult encounters becomes a luxury. I routinely hear conservative commentators characterizing those who the police shoot as “resisting arrest” when they do not instantly follow an officer’s direction. They justify law enforcement in aggressive confrontations. This could certainly be true in a crisis, but for jaywalking? For selling “loosies?” I absolutely agree that citizens should show respect for police officers, but I flatly reject that failure to show such respect necessitates escalation by an officer. Officers who do not know how to defuse situations, or are unwilling to try, are not qualified to be in law enforcement. George Thompson’s captain was right.

I’m not suggesting that these are the only two variables. For instance, a National Sheriff’s Association report points to an increase in encounters between police and people who have a mental illness. (Source) Still, I think broken windows and 9/11 are key contributors that set the stage for much else.

Now I have purposely been sidestepping the issue of race because I wanted to lay the above foundation before incorporating race. More in the next post.

What do you think?

 

 

 

 

Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement by the Numbers

It has been more than a week since a grand jury reported a decision not to indict Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown. We have no indictment decision by a grand jury in New York for Daniel Pantaleo killing Eric Garner. These cases are essentially classified as justifiable homicide. I've been listening to the ensuing discussions and have some observations, which I will spread across at least two posts.

Anytime issues like these come to the fore, I find myself wanting to get a handle on the big picture. I've been doing some research on the topic, which is quite frustrating. Here is what I've learned.

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR), there were 461 justifiable homicides by police. (UCR) Let us assume this data is valid for the moment. How can we put that in perspective?

Let's compare it to three other countries. The number of justifiable homicides was zero in England in 2013, eight in Germany over the last two years, and about twelve per year in Canada. (Source) These countries are smaller than the USA, so let's increase their population to the size of the USA and assume justified homicides would rise by a corresponding number. Here is what you get:

England = 0

Germany = 16

Canada = 110

USA = 461

So we have a much higher rate than comparable nations.

However, I stipulated an assumption that the data is correct. It is not. The UCR only compiles crimes known to police in 750 of more than 17,000 law enforcement entities. Participation is voluntary and inconsistent across entities. (Source) Analysis of data from 105 of the submitting entities shows 47% more incidents than were reported. (Source) For instance, some entities do not consider justifiable homicide an "offense," so they do not report their data. Adjusting for this undercount would mean something like 680 justifiable homicides by law enforcement. But we need to go a step further.

There is no federal clearinghouse collecting data on homicide by law enforcement. On May 1, 2013, a Facebook page called Killed By Police was created that attempts to catalog every death that happens at the hands of police from news sources across the nation. It chronicles every kind of death, including someone who dies of a heart attack after arrest or in a collision with a police vehicle in a high-speed chase. The FiveThirtyEight folks analyzed the data, weeding out deaths unrelated to the process of an arrest, and estimated the number of deaths to be about 1,100 a year. (Source)

We simply do not know the exact number of justifiable homicides by law enforcement; therefore, we have no definitive means of measuring trends in the frequency of such cases. We do not know the characteristics of the people involved. That said, it seems likely that the rate of justifiable homicides by law enforcement has been rising.

If we assume the Uniform Crime Report data is from the same law enforcement entities using the same methods from year to year, we see an increase in justifiable homicides by law enforcement from 309 in 2000 to 461 in 2013. (The data only goes back to 1980. The 1999 and 200o stats were the lowest since a previous low of 300 in 1987.) (Source) If we then assume the UCR data as a proxy for what has happened in non-reporting areas as well, then the instances of justifiable homicides by law enforcement have risen by 50% from 2000 to 2013.

Note that the crime rate, as reported by the UCR, dropped by 20% during 2000-2013. The murder rate shows a drop of 5.5 per 100k population to 4.5, about a 20% drop. (Calculated from here.) But also remember that the UCR data is not the best measure of actual crime incidents. Victimization studies (annual surveys asking about victimization, whether reported to police or not) show a 50% drop in crime. (Source)

In short, justifiable homicide by law enforcement is far more common in the USA than in other advanced nations. And the perplexing reality is that it is getting appreciably worse each year, despite less and less crime. Something is not right.

What do you think is going on? In a follow-up post, I'll offer my thoughts, including how race figures into this, but I'm curious to know what you think.

Religion in China: Cracks in the atheist edifice

Economist: Religion in China: Cracks in the atheist edifice

The rapid spread of Christianity is forcing an official rethink on religion. ...

... In April one of Wenzhou’s largest churches was completely demolished. Officials are untroubled by the clash between the city’s famously freewheeling capitalism and the Communist Party’s ideology, yet still see religion and its symbols as affronts to the party’s atheism. ...

... Christianity is hard to control in China, and getting harder all the time. It is spreading rapidly, and infiltrating the party’s own ranks. The line is blurring between house churches and official ones, and Christians are starting to emerge from hiding to play a more active part in society. The Communist Party has to find a new way to deal with all this. There is even talk that the party, the world’s largest explicitly atheist organisation, might follow its sister parties in Vietnam and Cuba and allow members to embrace a dogma other than—even higher than—that of Marx.

Any shift in official thinking on religion could have big ramifications for the way China handles a host of domestic challenges, from separatist unrest among Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uighurs in the country’s west to the growth of NGOs and “civil society”—grassroots organisations, often with a religious colouring, which the party treats with suspicion, but which are also spreading fast. ...

... Buddhism, much longer established in China than Christianity, is surging too, as is folk religion; many more Han are making pilgrimages to Buddhist shrines in search of spiritual comfort. All this worries many officials, for whom religion is not only Marx’s “opium of the people” but also, they believe, a dangerous perverter of loyalty away from the party and the state. Christianity, in particular, is associated with 19th-century Western imperial encroachment; and thus the party’s treatment of Christians offers a sharp insight into the way its attitudes are changing.

It is hard even to guess at the number of Christians in China. Official surveys seek to play down the figures, ignoring the large number who worship in house churches. By contrast, overseas Christian groups often inflate them. There were perhaps 3m Catholics and 1m Protestants when the party came to power in 1949. Officials now say there are between 23m and 40m, all told. In 2010 the Pew Research Centre, an American polling organisation, estimated there were 58m Protestants and 9m Catholics. Many experts, foreign and Chinese, now accept that there are probably more Christians than there are members of the 87m-strong Communist Party. Most are evangelical Protestants.

Predicting Christianity’s growth is even harder. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China’s Christian population the largest in the world. Mr Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire. ...

... A new breed of educated, urban Christians has emerged. Gerda Wielander of the University of Westminster, in her book “Christian Values in Communist China”, says that many Chinese are attracted to Christianity because, now that belief in Marxism is declining, it offers a complete moral system with a transcendental source. ...

... Some Chinese also discern in Christianity the roots of Western strength. They see it as the force behind the development of social justice, civil society and rule of law, all things they hope to see in China. ...

... The paradox, as they all know, is that religious freedom, if it ever takes hold, might harm the Christian church in two ways. The church might become institutionalised, wealthy and hence corrupt, as happened in Rome in the high Middle Ages, and is already happening a little in the businessmen’s churches of Wenzhou. Alternatively the church, long strengthened by repression, may become a feebler part of society in a climate of toleration. As one Beijing house-church elder declared, with a nod to the erosion of Christian faith in western Europe: “If we get full religious freedom, then the church is finished.

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

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

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

Here are graphs that summarize key findings:

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

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

The article includes this graph:

Then this one about poverty:

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

The author closes with the following:

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

The world is getting better all the time.

Preach it!

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

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

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

 

The U.S. imprisonment rate has fallen for the fifth straight year. Here’s why.

Washington Post: The U.S. imprisonment rate has fallen for the fifth straight year. Here’s why.

The U.S. imprisonment rate has fallen for a fifth straight year, a run not seen since Richard Nixon was in The White House.  According to data released Tuesday from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while the U.S. incarceration rate is still remarkably high, 2013 marks a 10-year low.  For five reasons, the de-incarceration trend has an excellent chance of continuing.

First, crime is down by about 50% in the past two decades. ...

Second, U.S. prison policy is primarily set by states and hence is less constrained than other potential reforms stalled by Washington's political gridlock. ...

Third, even though conservatives and liberals are battling each other vigorously on many policy fronts, de-incarceration is not one of them.  ...

Fourth, a new generation of evidence-based community supervision programs  ...

Last, just as a high crime rate can create the conditions for more crime (e.g., by overwhelming law enforcement) and a low crime rate can create the conditions for less crime (e.g., by encouraging more citizens to walk the streets at night), lower imprisonment rates also appear capable of creating virtuous self-reinforcing cycles....

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

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

Dying Young Is Quickly Becoming A Thing Of The Past

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

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

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Matt Ridley: Reasons to Be Cheerful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

US violent crime is lowest in 44 years and half the rate in 1991

Carpe Diem: US violent crime is lowest in 44 years and half the rate in 1991

The Populations Of The US, China, And Japan. 1990-2050

Business Insider: Epic Demographic Chart Shows What's Happening To The Populations Of The US, China, And Japan

The Poor Will NOT ALWAYS Be With Us

Excellent!

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

These Staggering Maps Shows How Much The World's Population Is Aging

Business Insider: These Staggering Maps Shows How Much The World's Population Is Aging

Science and Technology Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine life without the Internet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Conversable Economist: When Technology Spreads Slowly

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

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

Also this ...

13. Atlantic: America's Coming Manufacturing Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. Slate: What Will Become of the Library?

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

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

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

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

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

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

18. The Big Think: When Evidence Backfires

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

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

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

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

And that's just the beginning. ...

20. BBC: Doctors implant lab-grown vagina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think Progress exaggerates child hunger by 8,000%

Just Facts Daily: Think Progress exaggerates child hunger by 8,000%

... However, instead of reporting the facts of this important issue, a number of influential media sources are greatly exaggerating the problem.

One of these sources is Think Progress, which ranks among the nation's top-15 political websites. In a recent article, Alan Pyke, the Deputy Economic Policy Editor of Think Progress, reports that "more than a fifth of America's children are going hungry," government food "programs have faced wave upon wave of funding cuts," and "America does a slightly better job at feeding adults" than children.

All of those statements are categorically false according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Census Bureau, and the White House Office of Management and Budget. These primary sources show, for example, that on an average day, less than 1% of U.S. households with children have a child who experiences hunger.

These sources also show that the annual hunger rate for children is lower than adults and that federal spending on food and nutrition programs has risen by more than two thirds since 2007, even after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

Below is the documentation of these facts, along with the details of how Think Progress has distorted the truth.

"Food insecure" does not mean "hungry"

The crux of Pyke's misreporting is that he falsely equates food insecurity with hunger. "Food insecurity" is a technical term used by the USDA to categorize households based upon a survey conducted by the Census Bureau.

This annual survey includes a series of questions about food consumption, and if respondents answer "yes" to at least three of ten questions, their households are classified as food insecure. For example, respondents are asked if they ever "worried" that their "food would run out before" they "got money to buy more." For another example, they are asked if they "couldn't afford to eat balanced meals."

According to this survey, 21.6% of children and 15.9% of adults lived in households that were food-insecure at some point during 2012. These are the figures quoted by Pyke, but they do not apply to hunger, especially for children.

The title of Pyke's article is "More Than A Fifth Of America's Children Are Going Hungry." Just to be clear, "hungry" means hungry (not food-insecure), "children" means children (not households), and "going" means currently (not once during the past year). Beyond the standard ten questions in this survey, the Census asked direct questions about child hunger, and the results look nothing like what Pyke reports. ...

... Pyke is not the only purveyor of inflated hunger statistics. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning fact check organization, has alleged: "According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 'food insecurity' means that at some point in a year, someone in a household went hungry because the household couldn't afford food."

That claim is in direct opposition to what the USDA explicitly states. Again: "Households classified as having low food security have reported multiple indications of food access problems, but typically have reported few, if any, indications of reduced food intake."...

The article also includes this graph:

I'm glad to see someone do a detailed analysis of these claims about hunger. I hear and read so many widely varying claims about hunger in the U.S. that it is hard to know what is factual. I haven't taken the time to research this myself, and while I didn't know the right number (less than 1%), the 21.6% was just preposterous. It is good to understand how the misconception has occurred.

Repackaging Climate Action

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

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

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

Religion Links

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:

• The most “engaged” readers — who read the Bible almost daily and see it as sacred — are now matched by “skeptics” who say it’s just a book of stories and advice. Both groups measured 19 percent.
• While the engaged stayed steady since 2011, skeptics grew by 10 percentage points — since the same survey was conducted in 2011.
• Skeptics cut into the number of folks Barna calls “Bible friendly,” those who read the Bible occasionally and see it as inspired by God. The “friendly” demographic fell to 37 percent, down from 45 percent in 2011.
• The percentage of people who view the Bible as sacred has dropped to 79 percent, down from 86 percent in 2011.

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. ...

Economic Development Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

11. "Immigration Myths Debunked" | LearnLiberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. USA Today: Blindness rates plummet in developed countries

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

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

The international research review, which includes Eastern and Central

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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