The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The air and water quality in the US is vastly better since the passage of laws that created and empowered the EPA (Created by the Republican President Nixon). The endangered species act has had many similar successes.
I live on Maui. The waters are now filled with Green Sea Turtles and Humpback whales that were nearly non-existent just 30 years ago. Yet when development and global climate change are threatening our reefs, people look at you like you're crazy for thinking that laws can be effective in safeguarding the environment for the future.
For me, the environmental successes of the last 30 years are a pretty amazing example of some of the awesome things humans can do when they put their minds to it.
Additionally, the overly negative and pessimistic view of government and laws removes critical tools for that improvement.
That move away from centrally planning poor nations was often achieved by changes in laws, and by the actions of a wide variety of organizational bodies and peoples. I'm not sure I have enough information in this article or elsewhere to state what has been effective at reducing the poverty.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/deirdre-mccloskey-... [2] https://ricochet.com/perhaps-the-most-powerful-defense-of-ma...
As for Deirdre McCloskey, as Noah Smith says,"do not believe things that Deirdre McCloskey says just because she says them."
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/deirdre-mccloskey...
"Reducing" is technically correct, even in China. But China still has a command economy in housing, infrastructure, telecommunication, transportation, etc., and is still run by a big 'C' Communist Party. That's where the uplift happened, and it needs to be explained in terms of local conditions.
The sort of groups that listen to people like Grover Norquest who said: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
While there is a lot to be said about the idea of efficiency in government it isn't the same as wanting to burn our infrastructure down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Thinking that the political process begins and ends with voting is one of the key components of despair and cynicism in a democracy.
What part of that analysis is wrong? What counterexample can you offer?
The current state of immigration reform, where politicians demand (and are getting) increased enforcement without any expansion of a legal right to work in the U.S., works great for companies in labor-intensive industries. On the one hand, you get a workforce willing to get paid less than the legal minimum, and you don't have to pay things like worker's comp, social security, etc. On the other, enforcement has increased so much that those underpaid workers live in constant fear of being deported or having their families split apart, so they don't report their employers breaking the law.
For companies that have access to that pool of precarious labor, the situation is great, and they've invested a lot in not changing anything.
What you propose they are doing is the equivalent of inviting the fox into the hen house to give the other roosters a run for their money--it is Russian roulette. I doubt anyone using undocumented labor wants more enforcement, although certainly a low-wage state would welcome enforcement for a "competitive"/"fair" advantage over higher-wage states (like California, with its massive undocumented labor pool).
Immigration reform is more of a fight between the corporations that want more legal immigrants to depress high wages (e.g. Facebook/FWD.us) and the corporations that want to keep employing illegals at sub-minimum wages (e.g. fruit & vegetable pickers).
This actually puts them in direct opposition to one another on a range of legislative issues.
PS: Obama might have been a better option, but I disagree with over half of what he has done.
The vast majority of people ignore 99% of the elections out there, and then wonder why they don't have an influence on things. I mean, seriously - we often have elections here with turnout in the teens. And I've worked the polls for those elections - even the minority of people who bother showing up have no clue to who's even on the ballot. Many times when I ask people who they voted for, they can't even remember (again, the few who bothered to vote).
It's like staying at home while other people work on a year long project, then showing up 3 days before release and complaining that you have no control over it. Well, yeah.
Further, I don't think a great president looks much like a great senator.
You see this more and more as you move away from the big races - I've seen numerous examples where the loser outspent the victor 20 or 50 to 1. Heck, there was even a situation recently where someone with just about no political or financial backing came in second (doing better than several candidates with much better funding and much more insider connection) simply because his name sounded like another politicians. When I look at things like this, it seems like apathy influences our politics much, much more than money.
Less corrupt government? Absolutely, but the idea that government is "too big" seems entirely in province of the contemporary right (and you can partition that up into the industrialists who want to abolish the EPA, the code-worded-racists who want to end welfare, the bootstrappers who want to privatize everything, etc).
As a progressive, I support removing the costs of worker healthcare from labor costs to industry.
As a progressive, I support reducing the over-all social cost to higher education by eliminating the federal grant and loan processes, and simply block allocating per-student rates for state schools.
As a progressive, I would love to see Corporations dehumanized; Speech equal speech; and commercial activity limited to the interaction of autonomous entities.
As a progressive, I would support returning the sovereign responsibilities of application of force to the government, and in doing so reduce the actual per-body cost of warfare and law-enforcement. (Ending cost-plus contracting) (Returning prisoners to the states from private enterprises)
If given free reign, every industry would cloud it's cost externalities, such as the environmental repercussions, or the needs of the dependents that work those convenient company towns. Quarterly balance reports rarely see the value in education, healthcare, or decent food in those locked-in labor units.
It used to be that progressives would resoundingly argue for smaller, more efficient government that achieves desired social goals. Somehow over the last 50 years they stopped doing this, and instead got into some kind of pissing match with conservatives over the size of government. It'd be great to get back to a discussion around "what are your goals, what are the trade-offs you are willing to make, and what is the most efficient way to achieve them?"
As an example, it used to be that you could just dump whatever you wanted into the local water table. Now everything is picked over with a fine comb.
But I do believe people shouldn't give up and should be informed and try to participate in elections and citizen activisms. I mean... if we don't try how can we keep the corrupt from running the show?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Critici...
The language of economics is designed so that this is tautologically true and all empirical evidence that this is false is euphemized away with the term 'externality' or 'market failure'.
Market failure is a subjective term that assumes a problem can be always be solved fairly (no one is made worse off). That euphemism tends to be used by those who believe "free market" (no such thing) solutions are inferior to state-imposed solutions, which often involve force and/or benefit the ruling class. There's plenty of empirical evidence to support that.
Market failure is defined as a situation in which markets fail to achieve pareto efficiency; pareto inefficiency is definitionally the condition where someone's situation can be improved fairly, as you call it. A few heterodox schools simply choose a different definition of efficiency to wave away the problem of market failure, but this is circular logic: They define markets as the best system of allocating resources and therefore it is impossible for markets to fail.
If that's the position you want to take, please be forthright about your assumptions. I no longer think we're using the same basic definitions and I am fairly certain I am talking about well established mainstream concepts in economics.
P.S.
> state-imposed solutions, which often involve force
Private property as it exists is definitionally a state-imposed by force concept. I don't think your moral claim about people who use the term market failure is as biting an indictment as you think.
And while state-enforced property rights have enabled many other technological advancements and objectively moral outcomes, this does not give the state the moral high ground to use force for its own arbitrary purposes. On the micro scale, just because my authority allows my children to claim their own space, clothes, etc. doesn't necessarily mean that authority can always lead to good outcomes in every interaction they have with each other. It's just a means to an end, like the state.
Why does lack of direct ownership imply lack of protection?
It's possible to have a common resource that is owned by nobody/everybody, and have an organisation set up to protect misuse of this resource. Just because it's free to use, doesn't mean it's free for all potential uses.
And this organization would be different from a government how?
Ralph Nader, and the organizations who were influenced by his work, took advantage of the social upheaval in the late 60s/early 70s to make these laws pass.
Even though activist voices are as loud as they've ever been, we have a government that no longer fears movements. I've heard the Nader generation of activists make this point regularly. Power has been sharply shifting from people (activists organizations, labor unions) to business since the late 70s.
Humans can keep helping by gaining greater understandings of the impact our actions have on everything around us (negative externalities if you want economic-speak).
I saw a turtle with tumors, in person, and a local suggested that it was suspected that some sort of runoff was the cause of the issue. My thought was that there may not be enough regulation and accountability.
> When 95 percent of Americans are completely unaware of a transformation of this magnitude, that reflects a flaw in how we journalists cover the world — and I count myself among the guilty.
Sometimes it is really maddening how far astray the common perceptions are with respect to reality. It is good to have an example here that shows this clearly.
What Kristof doesn't state, however, are these facts:
1. Those people live almost entirely in China and India.
2. The rise in nominal wealth has come from a tremendous increase in energy consumption.
3. Both nations have extreme environmental problems, including the worst air pollution situations in the world, result of extreme amounts of coal consumption, water shortages, water pollution, and extensive land contamination from mining, industrial, municipal, and other waste.
4. Though overall efficiency in GDP output per unit energy has increased modestly, overall, increases in economic wealth require vast amounts of additional resource consumption.
The combination of factors 3 and 4 above means that the gains in economic output are being accomplished largely by both strip-mining resources and exhausting effluent dumps in China and India.
5. Much of the apparent "de-materialisation" of economies in the developed world outside China and India is actually, on closer examination, based on exporting raw material (and effluent) demands to those countries. See research out of CSIRO (Australia) and UCSB.
6. Outside of China and India (though yes, they're both huge countries), progress in the "developing" world has been far more modest. In cases, backsliding. Add to this economic regression through much of the Middle East and North Africa (much of the disturbances of the Arab Spring is attributable to economic circumstances), and even in OECD/European nations, particularly Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
And finally: the foundations of modern economic wealth, vast quantities of nonrenewable resources, tapped at uttelry unsustainable rates, are quite simply not sustainable. Without looking to this basis, effectively the fuel in the tank, observations of altitude or velocity tell little.
the fuel in the tank has been increasing a lot actually in the past 20 years. Did you notice that the US became the first producer of petrol ? And vast amount of natural gas have been discovered, and we have uranium for the next 10 000 of years at least.
The real question is: are we running out of Energy ? The answer is a resounding NO. and Peak petrol never happened, despite everybody claiming it would, 20 years ago.
But when will it pop and what happens then? That's a lot tougher to know, and so far all attempts to call a top have been wrong.
But a crash will come. How bad will depend on just how far along we are in developing alternatives and how abrupt the crash ends up being. If alternatives are in full swing it will be gradual phase out and few will notice. If an abrupt crash came today it would be Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."
If the alarmists are correct and peak fossil fuels is just around the corner, then after the peak the cost of fossil fuels will gradually go up until alternatives -- alternatives that we know about and can make use of relatively quickly -- make more economic sense. At some point, certain sources of oil will become economically viable which aren't now. At a higher point, it will make more sense to create synfuels, or switch to natural gas, or to build more solar or wind plants and all-electric cars. Will this be economically worse than just using cheap fossil fuels? Yes (assuming that the pricey energy doesn't motivate breakthrough technology such as fusion power or really good solar.) Will the world end or even change dramatically? No.
Heck, it's an insane, absurd speculation, but maybe at some point energy will become so expensive we'll even come to our senses, stop listening to Greenpeace, and build nuclear plants to use that 10,000 years of uranium. Weirder things have happened.
That's not necessarily true. Well extraction curves decline exponentially with the highest amount extracted early in the well's life.
Well discovery follows a very steep increase followed by a very steep decrease. The new fraking boom gave the extraction curve a new "bump" so it looks more like two gaussians overlapping each other. But the deposits were already discovered for the most part, so the discovery curve has remained consistent. And the drop off of the discovery curve is also exponential.
Ok, what all that boils down to is if the extraction curve doesn't keep resetting the drop off goes from global glut to largely unavailable in 20-30 years.
So when it runs out, for all practical purposes, you could easily be talking to a 25 year old who clearly remembers when everyone had a gas car, yet all the gas stations are closed.
Which would definitely feel like an "Oh shit!" to anyone experiencing it.
edit
To clarify a bit, that's 20-30 years from peak to pit. So if society doesn't seriously talk about the problem for 10-15 years (totally believable, we were heading downward before fraking), then argues over the solution for a couple of presidencies for ~10 years (again totally believable...), then you only have maybe 5 or 10 years to adjust societies power sources.
And it takes 7-10 years to build a nuclear power plant. Oh. Shit.
Indeed. Higher prices are what lead directly to the fracking boom. Now some of those wells are being shut because prices have declined.
"Heck, it's an insane, absurd speculation, but maybe at some point energy will become so expensive we'll even come to our senses, stop listening to Greenpeace, and build nuclear plants to use that 10,000 years of uranium."
Your mouth to God's ear, my friend. There's actually enough for billions of years, if all sources and technologies are included. The late John McCarthy (probably better known here as the creator of Lisp) had a series of web pages about it.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html
The 1970s oil shock did change the world dramatically. And local peak oil in Syria has been a contributory factor to the war: spike in prices led to riots, which were repressed, igniting the violence.
I think a lot of people oversell nuclear power. It's true that there's a lot of irrational FUD about it, but the real reason it hasn't taken over isn't that. Greenpeace protests coal but that doesn't stop anyone from using it. Radical greens are not really that powerful. The reason nuclear hasn't taken over is that it's an expensive, finicky, difficult to manage and scale technology -- at least in its present form -- and has several "unacceptable" failure modes in worst case scenarios. I also suspect that the fossil fuel lobby has worked behind the scenes to shut down research into better ways of doing nuclear, since better forms of nuclear power that did not have these massive downsides would be genuinely disruptive. Multi-trillion-dollar industries are far more powerful than hippies.
But then why did Germany shut down all its nuclear power plants, plants which already existed and were running without major problems?
Radical greens are not powerful in the sense of having direct political power, but they are extremely powerful in that the radical green memeplex (nuclear is bad, GMOs are bad, pollution is getting worse, recycling is a moral obligation, humanity is generally a blight on the planet) is hardened conventional wisdom in most, if not all, Western nations.
No we don't. If you keep up with energy demand it's more like 300-1000 years.
At full energy supplied by nucelar, closer to 6.
If suggestions that 2ppm concentrations of uranium can be recovered from seawater, possibly a few thousand years, though that strikes me as a systemically risky proposition.
I've seen estimates for thorium all over the map, as well as other breeder-type fuels. Between refining, proliferation, reprocessing, and waste, many risks. We're also talking about nuclear power plant commissioning and decommissioning rates on the order of one per day, until doomsday, with 15,000+ plants required worldwide.
And nuclear still doesn't, on its own, address the liquid fuels problem. Or other resource issues: fresh water, topsoil, phosphate, copper, tin, lithium, etc. We're facing sharp limits on these and many other mineral resources.
Globally, oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s. Estimates of recoverable reserves have increased with both rising costs and (relatively modest) technological improvements, but that's a matter of increasing the ability to suck from the tank, not increasing its size or refilling it. Natural gas follows a similar trajectory.
And recall just what it is that "oil prices" (or energy prices generally) means: that's the sacrificed resources necessary to provide a unit of oil, or coal, or gas. And it can be directly compared to the economic benefit of that unit.
For the US, a barrel of oil returns somewhat more than $1,000 in GDP. In most of the EU it's closer to $1500, peaking at $3,000 in Switzerland. For the "emerging growth economies" of India and China, it's closer to $450-500 GDP/bbl.
This means that at $40/bbl, the US sees a 50x economic surplus per barrel of oil, but only a 10x surplus at $100. For China and India, it's 10x at $40/bbl, and 4x at $100/bbl. That means a lot of marginal economic activity is shunted aside as energy costs rise. Demand destruction, as it were.
In light of the fact that much US and EU productivity is really outsourced resource consumption to India and China, this is hugely significant.
Peak petrol absolutely did happen in the United States, in 1972, with the immediate result that once the US no longer had the ability to provide reserve supplies from excess capacity, it was at the mercy of whomever else had their hands on that tap. For over 40 years, the Texas Railroad Commission had controlled US petroleum extraction rates, and hence global petroleum prices. In 1974, OPEC asssumed that role, with drastic effect. It wasn't that "the world ran out of oil", but the US could no longer assure the supply.
Things balanced out somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s (North Sea oil, Alaskan North Slope, offshore Gulf of Mexico, Mexican and Brazilian finds, an "understanding among friends" between the US and Saudi Arabia). But it's not as if another 500 million years of oil were magickally returned to the ground.
Unfortunately those great Hans Rosling presentations really only deal with mortality at birth, which has consistently improved but probably only down to improvements in neonatal technology.
It's really about time people came to realise the World Bank/IMF neoliberal "free trade" globalisation experiment really only works to enrich western asset holders at the expense of the rest of the world through debt bondage.
It always fascinates me how much my world view and the world view of those around me is based on the exceptional and not the mundane. The news outlets report the news assuming that the audience knows what's normal. When the news is used to become informed about the world many people come away with a skewed impression of reality. I am of the opinion that people would be better served by news reports that provide context to explain why the news is in fact news.
Here's some context I find interesting:
According to the CDC:
Americans murdered per year: 16,121
Americans killed in car accidents per year: 33,804
Americans killed by smoking related diseases per year: 480,000
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_...
Data from the FBI[1] lists information about murders, including weapon types, circumstances of the murder, relationship to the victim, etc. (2013 numbers)
Going through those numbers is enlightening and will augment your CDC data, which gives great context to overall death rates.
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...
There's nothing inherently wrong with being profit driven (although it's not without its problems), the bigger problem is, I think, being advertising driven. Which sets up an incentive of maximizing viewership with the least costly content, irrespective of quality.
My main news sources are: - CBC (Canadian crown corporation), - BBC (UK Royal Charter), - TVOntario (Ontario crown corporation), - Democracy Now! (independent non-profit), - PBS (independent non-profit), - crowd-sourced for-profit sites (HN, reddit)
I live in NYC, and it's always really strange to see how prevalent for-profit media is here when there are so many better options.
Channel 4 news is better, but still i despair at some of the trolling for soundbites that goes on, it's still about the best of the mainstream UK news channels.
Recently The UK Guardian, which i used to have a very high opinion of, got into quite a bit of trouble (with the readers) about it's biased coverage against Jeremy Corbyn's labour leadership campaign.
I imagine the US media is way worse, but in todays horribly co-opted world, sometimes the best you can hope for it to take a cross-sample of biased sources and somehow average it out in your head :(.
Murder is rare, but it has a very high impact on society and the surrounding people. It creates an environment of stress and fear. Car accidents do the same to a much lesser extent. Smoking related diseases are somewhat more expected, they aren't so sudden. People have time to adjust, receive medical attention, and so on.
When you put the numbers together it feels like we should tackle the causes of the largest number of deaths first, then work our way to the fewest. But I don't think that is beneficial, or even a rational approach to improving our society.
You could use those numbers argue for ignoring mass shootings: i.e., there are so few related to other causes of death. But it fails to take into account just how many people they effect and how much it twists society (e.g., having schools perform lockdown drills with 5-year-olds who don't understand why they have to hide in a closet [1]).
I don't think we have a good measure to use to compare murders, to car accidents, to death by disease. As raw quantities they skew our perception and priorities. As pure numbers they fail to indicate to us the impact they could have on our society.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rehearsing-for-death...
You're right though that smoking shouldn't be top. Everbody dies of something but we can't save all old people from old age diseases forever.
Non-domestic terrorism seems like a good counter-example, where we have gone too far in an attempt to eliminate it: a huge financial and societal undertaking (e.g., the TSA, the justified mass-surveillance, the increase in public fear) for relatively few deaths.
The CDC disagrees. If you click through the last link in the post above they list in great big bold letters "Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death." The key word being "preventable". You're right in that there is little value in worrying about unpreventable causes of death but, please, don't make the mistake of thinking smoking is by any means unpreventable. Also, it's worth pointing out that smoking including second hand smoking kills people of all ages
How do you know? What metrics are you using to form this opinion? Or are you using the same gut impression that the article alludes to and the GP specifically states?
By my math each murder could affect 10 people as to leave them in a state equivalent to death and still not come anywhere close to the impact as smoking.
Let me put it another way. Odds are that you've never known anyone that was murdered but there is a pretty damn high you've known someone that died from smoking. BTW, the number of people who die from second hand smoking alone dwarfs the number of people who are murdered.
My main point was that seeing the raw numbers may also present a skewed perception of the how impactful those deaths were on society. Especially when you see them side by side, and one looks so much more "important" than the others by virtue of being an order of magnitude larger.
You might be right that a death from smoking related disease is more impactful on society than a murder, I have no idea about that and my speaking about it probably confused the point.
Should we say deaths from murders are 1.5x important as smoking deaths? 2.5x?
This line of reasoning, while a tad ghoulish, is important because decisions have to be made, governance has to be picked, and taxes have to be spent. If it turns out we have no rational systematic way of determining a multiplier I believe it's reasonable to go with the information we have which are the basic facts about what's killing us.
I think it's quite important not to treat all deaths as equal. It's just a gut feeling on my part, as I don't have the qualifications to make any serious statements about this. But I feel the long awaited death of an elderly relative is vastly less impactful than the sudden death of a child. I feel as though a murder has far more negative consequences for society than the death of a smoker from disease (one obvious one is the amount of resources that must go into finding and prosecuting, incarcerating the murderer.)
So when we compare ~16,000 murders to ~500,000 deaths from smoke-related disease, we also have to compare the toll of 16,000 murder investigations. Thousands of prisoners being entered into the prison system. Thousands of appeals and court cases. As well as the cultural and social impact of having so many humans bear witness to murder and the stress of sudden, violent, loss of loved ones; this is much harder to quantify but should not be ignored.
[1] http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/other/measuring... [2] http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/issue-briefs/is...
The raw numbers are important. People are actually surprised when you give them statistics like how rare murders actually are, or how rare shark attacks are, etc. That wouldn't be surprising if people already had an accurate model of the world. We should strive to inform people, not misinform them further. Knowing about the risk of auto accidents is far more important to the average person than knowing about the details of mass shootings.
The news actively misinforms people about risks. It creates irrational fears and behaviors. The "social impact" you are talking about exists because of the news misinforming people. It's an effect, not a cause. If the news reported on every traffic crash instead, mass shootings wouldn't have any impact on our society or people's behavior.
Maybe people living in such a society would be more likely to buckle their seatbelts, and less likely to own guns.
Our goal should absolutely be to minimize death and suffering. Everything else is secondary and subjective. We should strive to be more rational and consistent, not embrace our irrational fears of rare things.
> You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead.
The problem is we don't ignore mass shootings or airplane crashes. We are not ignoring them right now and they are affecting us deeply. And maybe we will never be able to ignore them. If that is the case (and I'm not saying it is) then there may be benefit to solving such things which is larger than the numbers would have us believe.
> The news actively misinforms people about risks. It creates irrational fears and behaviors. The "social impact" you are talking about exists because of the news misinforming people. It's an effect, not a cause. If the news reported on every traffic crash instead, mass shootings wouldn't have any impact on our society or people's behaviour.
I'm not sure I agree. A mass shooting is vastly more terrifying than a traffic crash, and seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.
I believe the "social impact" would exist regardless of the news. Social media already does a better job spreading this information as-it-happens, and events which are terrible and random will continue to be propagated by the humans who witness them. We can't rely on humans not to speak about such things as a solution to reducing the terror they cause because it is unlikely to happen. It would be best to formulate a solution which accounts for this reality.
> Our goal should absolutely be to minimize death and suffering. Everything else is secondary and subjective. We should strive to be more rational and consistent, not embrace our irrational fears of rare things.
I agree with you but my position is just that there isn't a direct path from the raw numbers to how we should attempt to minimise death and suffering.
You seem to be claiming murders have a bigger social impact than deaths by smoking. How can we know that's true? By what measure?
If we assume murdered people have on average the same number of social connections then 500000 smoking deaths have exactly 500k/16k more social impact than murders.
By focusing on the murders aren't we ignoring the much larger social impact?
My main point is that the numbers are not directly comparable, and that is misleading. The numbers are not measuring the same thing; all deaths are not equal.
It's quite logical to think murder is vastly more impactful than smoking deaths. For instance: with murder you have the burden of a police investigation, a court case, possibly many appeals, jail time for the convicted. Maybe even the death penalty (which is incredibly costly). You also have families torn apart by sudden and unexpected grief, as well as the families of those who go to prison now having that burden.
Deaths from smoke related disease are signalled a long way off. People have time to prepare, and adapt to the passing of their loved ones. There is definitely social cost, but I don't think it's irrational to expect it to be much lower than the social cost of a murder.
But even if deaths from smoking related disease are more impactful than murder, my point still stands: the two quantities are not directly comparable.
But even so, the QALYs lost to smoking is orders of magnitude larger than that lost to murders. And car accidents don't discriminate based on age too much
>seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.
It's not numbness. It's just loss of interest/novelty. People aren't becoming numb to mass shootings, they just aren't as interesting or novel. They are still afraid of them. Emergency responders who see accidents every day still buckle their seat belts. More than the general population.
Anyway I am not saying that we can get the news to stop reporting on mass shootings or make people uninterested in them. I am saying that we can correct perceptions that they are more likely than other risks. We can educate people better. We can fight our own biases and strive to be more rational.
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...
This is why everyone should read The Economist instead of The New York Times. The Economist does a phenomenal job avoiding the selection bias and finding a way to cover mundane trends. It makes the mundane interesting, and gives a view of the world that's much closer to reality than any other publication I've ever seen. I'd strongly encourage everyone to give it a shot.
That being said, I've few issues with The New York Times.
There is some correlation between the quality of a publication and the quality of the comments section. NYT is head and shoulders above the Economist in this regard.
Some possibilities (although there are many others): http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
If you have a novel approach using technology, you should pursue it, but don't let a lack of a technological solution prevent you from doing anything right now.
The reality is federal programs aren't started or canceled based on total, let alone an individual's, tax revenue, so I call bullshit here.
1. Increasing tax dollars does not benefit the world by increasing the services provided by the government.
2. Rich people should pay more taxes.
The fact that total tax revenue must ultimately equal total government expenditure in the long run, is not bullshit, it's basic accounting. And the things you listed don't come close to canceling out the benefits of aid (and what is wrong with the IMF in the first place?)
Total tax revenue does not need to equal total expenditures in the long run. Fiat currencies are created when the government spends money, and it's a choice (based on monetary schools of economics) to have them correlated with revenue. It is not a requirement. The government prints money.
The IMF is tasked with countering global inflation; anti-inflation policies disproportionately benefit those with cash and harm those with debts. In practice, structural adjustment has led to reductions in all sorts of public goods around the world, including education. Hence my inclusion of the IMF on a list with other government programs that increase, rather than reduce, wealth inequality.
She suggested that in a few years mobile phone technology has transformed Africa more than many more years of charity and monetary intervention. She suggested that services (like payment services) built on top of mobile technologies were the place to look.
The good news is, if you have a great idea along those lines, they might just invest...
Incidentally, the answer to this question has been the same since the advent of technology, going as far back as agriculture.
By making the developed world richer, technology helps everyone.
I expect luddite attempts to ban it as soon as they realize it means that everyone in the world is now free to work with anyone else, borders be damned. It would lead to massive economic growth as whole countries that have lacked access to high-productivity jobs suddenly gain access.
This is really just the technology version of a solution to ending poverty that we could apply today, if we wanted to: open borders. Let anybody work wherever they can find a job, and global poverty would end incredibly fast. By some credible estimates, it would double global GDP almost overnight, by letting workers go to where the work is.
Nothing will stop it working in relatively local areas (i.e. for anywhere within 1000 K's you'll be fine), but where you actually live will never be completely abstracted.
It'll massively increase productivity if it's accepted by society, though, I agree with that - everyone can now work in a CBD without the insane commute times.
https://www.ted.com/talks/iqbal_quadir_says_mobiles_fight_po...
http://longnow.org/seminars/02008/may/21/technology-empowers...
This is why we started engageSPARK (a not-for-profit social enterprise), aka "Twilio for Non-Techies", where we're building technology tools to help Non Profits/NGOs, Governments, and Civil Society Organizations globally amplify their work to engage the poor in ways that haven't been feasible for them before. These organizations already have money, intent, and people on the ground, but they don't have access to good technology tools to be more effective in their work.
Because most of the poor now have access to a mobile phone (note that most do not have smartphones nor regular access to the Internet), Voice Calls (pre-recorded in local languages) and two-way SMS are key mediums - which many people forget.
Some examples using interactive Voice & two-way SMS to engage the poor: 1) Education using Soap Operas delivered via phone calls: recipients get a phone call, answer, and hear a soap opera dialogue. A quiz at the end is used to reinforce the lesson and measure comprehension. In a study for 20,000 people to encourage them to save money, savings rates increased by 106%.
2) Information Retrieval: people dial into a phone number (or do a free Missed Call to get a call back) and press keys to retrieve information "Press 1 to learn about preventing Ebola, Press 2 to hear symptoms, etc".
3) Surveys: collect information from people quickly via SMS or Voice - "Press 1-5 to rate the training you received last week. Press 1 if you feel positive about finding a job, or 2 if you don't. Press the number of times your family had a meal last week".
Imagine the use cases in Health, Agriculture, Finance, Governance, Disaster Preparedness & Response to help the poor live healthier lives, grow better crops, increase income, have a voice in government, be more resilient to disasters, etc. - all by engaging them more effectively by leveraging technology.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Geek-Heresy-Rescuing-Social-Technology...
It will play all of it.
If you want particular ideas for small groups to get it sooner, as mentioned the big thing currently is the fact smart phones are going everywhere.
The current talked about tech is mircopayments.
So I'm assuming you're looking for an arbitrage. Western society will continue full paced but what is missing that the 1st world won't do (mircopayments being done)
Directly thinking - More translations of apps or better english learning apps to get a world language.
Cheaper and simpler versions (A free simple farmer logs, if it doesn't exist, perhaps totally based on rice or something)
Sideways thinking -
Small rewards or a lotto for watching public announcements like aids education, better heath. You could target cell phone areas. Rural different to inner city.
Wikis to design/create cheap as possible Chinese products of value to the poor. Google cardboard but wiki style.
Try and find ways to increase the value of garbage the poor scavenge. Could you recycle plastics in the backyard to new products with 3d printing or moulding or something.
These ideas are dumb but more trying to think what could be done, that isn't in the works.
[edit: it might be more fair to say decades here, if you believe we can only attribute "policy" to the Communist Party]
I believe it's more accurate to say that the American sentiment is derived from China being a rising world power ideologically backed by Communism, and an actual threat to America's dominance (by some methods, China's GDP has exceeded the U.S. already). As a Chinese American (I've lived in the U.S. all my life), it concerns me that American media shows such an insanely biased and untruthful view of China. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment is not a good thing for me, or my future children.
I actually find it ironic that we Americans believe that the Chinese population believes in false state communist propaganda, but in reality, we suffer from it ourselves, just from free corporate backed media instead.
When I was in junior high school, I had to do a project on propaganda. This was during the time of the USSR and I had the great idea to listen to Radio Moscow and compare it to western media. My project was to find examples of different kinds of proganda and I dutifully did so. Eventually I had to find an example of "the big lie". I singled out a story of a big military victory by the USSR (probably in Afghanistan, but I don't really remember). It was not reported in any other news outlet, so I used it as my example of "the big lie". Of course I got an A+ for the project.
Some weeks later, I happened to notice a one paragraph story buried in the back of the newspaper which finally reported the soviet victory. I then started to look for evidence that my other examples of propaganda were incorrect. I readily found such evidence.
I have always felt embarrassed by they episode. It was my first revelation that media outlets have political agenda and that they adjust the way they report news based on that political agenda. But even more important was that I had participated in that agenda by re-reporting that view of the world to my classmates.
It is amazing how easy it is to allow a mixture of arrogance, pride and prejudice to galvanize a view of the world that is just wrong. You then spread that false-certainty to others. Together you work tirelessly to maintain that fiction without ever knowing it.
I have often thought that I wish I could have redone my project on propaganda after I made these realizations. Such is the strength of propaganda, though, I'm quite sure my revised project would have resulted in an F.
The OP does not realize his error, I am quite sure. He probably can not be made to realize his error and will argue vehemently on behalf of the puppet masters pulling the strings of his belief. I think the best we can do is to try to notice the strings pulling our own limbs, for we are surely not immune to this problem.
In this case, it was a war fought to force a drug trade. Pathetic.
What do you think will happen if the US suddenly decides to accept nothing else but gold for its dollar?
Indeed, China's success has been a great testimony to the efficacy of centralized planning and communism...
One economic historian was asked to speak to the Politboro and when he got there, found out they wanted to know why it was that the government of Britain did not fall in the 1870s. These guys know they're riding the tiger.
It looks pretty good right now.
There is no secret to the communist China's playbook. They opened to the world a vast amount of workers, charging for them pennies a day. But once that has been used up and become too expensive, the end game is joblessness and destruction of their environments. And they still have a totalitarian government.
Also, from your tone it sounds like that is what you hope will happen. I hope that not to be the case.
There isn't anything recognizably communist about the Chinese system aside from the name. And the big spurt of growth didn't start until Deng's market-based reforms of the '70s.
So a better way to put it would be "After its Marxist fantasy economics resulted in the starvation of more than forty million Chinese people, the government wisely switched to capitalism, which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty."
It's hardly a free market paradise.
If you want a free market paradise with minimal government, try Somalia.
* http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12278628 * http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12285365
There's a good reason the vast majority of rich Chinese people move to the West. It's an awful place to live if you have a choice.
Although many are, the "vast majority" of rich Chinese people are not moving to the West, that's extreme hyperbole. China is full of terrible things: massive income inequality, pollution and smog, corruption, scams, copycat, scandals and more. But there are also amazing things: innovation, one of the world's richest histories, strong families, and a hunger for progress. Life has been improving there for the past 30+ years, not steadily improving, but improving at an explosive pace of progress. It's not "an awful place to live" (at least I hope not for the 1.3 billion people there), and there is far worse you could do on Earth right now.
No, and I have no intention to. My girlfriend spent the month of August there visiting her family and complained non-stop about how much she hated it and wanted to come home (and she's a well-off Canadian immigrant from Shanghai).
> The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media.
I write software for a living and it still took me hours to find and set up a VPN + traffic obfuscation solution so I could get my girlfriend on Facebook while she was there. Play Store and Google didn't work at all. Foreign sites that aren't blocked entirely barely function. Even developers at top Chinese tech firms routinely download XCode from sketchy Chinese versions of Dropbox because downloading them from Apple is too slow [1]
> If you're talking about poor factory workers being constrained, well poor people everywhere have a hard time being mobile.
I was referring to the Hukou system (aka the caste system of China) [2]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/09/21...
As for the VPN access, I also write software for a living, and it took me 5 minutes to get set up with a VPN. It was simply enough that my parents could figure it out as well. I get that the Play Store and Google don't work there, I was referring specifically to the fact that for most intents and purposes, a regular Chinese person could use the internet for most of its glory (porn, games, social, news, shopping).
Hukou is unfortunate and controversial issue there. In some ways it makes sense though, you have a massive population and you want to moderate the effects of massive migration. In other ways it's cruel and unfair. I don't know what to do about that, but I don't know if the U.S. has proven a better method. The fact of the matter is that no government has been in the situation China is in right now. To me, that makes it hard to judge.
Overall, I still find your argument that "it's an awful place to live" uncompelling.
Maybe I'm missing something?
Given that, I'd love to know the real value. Maybe it is still a positive perspective, but I think it'd be more realistic (or, at least, accurate). :-)
See column titled "Pov.line (PPP$/day)"
Click on column title to bring up this text: http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/Docs/dictionary.htm...
And there they give you the definition of PPP, aka purchasing power parity, and tell you they are using 2005 rates of consumption.
So yes, it does account for inflation, assuming equal inflation across whatever basket of goods was chosen as the reference point for PPP.
Globalization, the boogeyperson of lots of people, has allowed some income redistribution to the developing world -has the developed world not globalized, it's not a given that had the developed world hoarded their industry and jobs the poor countries would have done as relatively well as they have.
It's also surprising to not see much comment on the interesting phenomenon where countries which had relatively good economies in the early 20th century (Mexico, Argentina, etc) went way down hill after WWii, partly severe corruption and simple non-investment due to antiquated policies and emphasis on natural resources rather than technologies.
Would Africa be emerging as much without the Chinese foreign investment?
How does India plan on getting its poor on better standing other than inviting firms from developed countries to invest in Indian manufacturing with the lure of lower labor costs --even syphoning jobs off from China now that China's workforce has become more expensive as they have become a rich country (the second largest economy in the world).
Volkswagen deliberately subverted regulations on emissions control. It would have been corruption if they also bribed officials to get away with it.
I'm not attempting to defend Volkswagen in any way, but the phrase is sensationalist and strictly incorrect, even if only very slightly so. This is interesting given the overall point of the article.
This one shows 20% as of 2010. And over 40% in 1990. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/USAID_Pr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
Also from that article. "n 1990, the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty was 43.1%, but in 2010, that percentage had dropped down to 20.6%." That doesn't line up AT ALL with your image which says 10% in 1985.
So I'm not sure what's going on here exactly. But I don't think it's as simple as absolute vs percentage deception.
I assume this is adjusted for inflation, but I didn't see anything in the link. Does anyone know?
Curious that the author attempts to attribute this to media sensationalism rather than, say, an increase in American poverty.
Or perhaps not, since Kristof is a fierce critic of the anti-sweatshop movement.
Sad, funny and completely unsurprising. At least this writer understands his profession's complicity in the stultifying of America.
Where it gets interesting is when equilibrium has been reached.
or the topics he covers: http://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof?action=click&...
It's much, much easier to "catch up" than to actually innovate.
With the education system and culture in China and India there's no way they're going to pass us by. Those are countries where having an original thought and arguing with your teacher gets you kicked out of school.
Hell, in China you need a license to put up a website.
Things in China are a bit different, but not quite. Chinese culture makes people very reluctant to admit they do not know something. In addition to that in Chinese culture it is the responsibility of the listener to understand what is being said, as opposed to western culture where it is the speaker's responsibility to make sure that he is understood. This makes transfer of knowledge en mass a very difficult task.
These simple, but fundamental differences are major hurdles for those economies going further.
Again, I reiterate that while cultural effects can be there, I think it's much more prudent to look first for the historical and social causes of differences (wealth, resources, times of prosperity & peace vs war and famine). I'd bet money that those effects are orders of magnitude greater than any cultural effects. It's not as simple as you make it out.
As a point of reference, I want to again point out that immigrants from India and China to the U.S., carrying that same culture, have created much of the innovation from America over the past 20-30 years. I don't think that would've happened with typical "yes, sir, I understood sir, it will get one, sir" attitude, that you are placing on the "typical Indian".
To your more general point about surpassing the US in "the next couple of years": I seriously doubt it. The US has many advantages that we take for granted. Developing countries have a huge problem with brain drain. Many of their most talented citizens immigrate to the US or EU. The US has relatively little corruption. It has a large, wealthy domestic market. It has the most prestigious universities. Lastly, the US has plenty of capital and a culture of entrepreneurship. We're so used to these things that we hardly even notice them. But for developing countries, these are massive issues.
1. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322988
2. Last quarter, Intel spent $3 billion on R&D. SMIC's revenue for the same quarter was $547 million: http://www.smics.com/eng/press/press_releases_details.php?id...
The journalists aren't the ones with the addiction; it is their readers that have the addiction.