It's really weird to me how commonplace the attitude of "It is what it is" and "Government can't do anything".
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.
The creation of the EPA, (and OSHA, Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, Highway Safety Act, FOIA) was created because people demanded it, not because a Republican President was benevolent.
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.
"Government can't do anything" meme tends to be pushed by organizations that actively want less government.
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.
American progressives can be just as guilty, if less organized. They tend to view big business with suspicion and incorrectly think that the American government is hopelessly corrupt and in the pocket of "Big Business and/or Wall Street".
In what sense is that view incorrect? The cost of access to the political process in America is astronomically high and keeps increasing, and acquiring the amount of money it now takes to be competitive in an election requires adopting a set of positions that are friendly to whatever industries have the most money to give.
What part of that analysis is wrong? What counterexample can you offer?
While money buys political access, a large part of the responsibility does rest with the voters (who are mostly ordinary people, not big money) who keep voting for reps (or don't vote) who support regressive policies. Also big money doesn't control the govt -- there are lots of times where they don't get their way -- immigration reform being a prime example where nativist sentiment has stalled it for more than a decade even though the business community is largely for it.
>Also big money doesn't control the govt -- there are lots of times where they don't get their way -- immigration reform being a prime example where nativist sentiment has stalled it for more than a decade even though the business community is largely for it.
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.
I think you are insufficiently cynical to understand immigration reform.
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.
I think you are too cynical to be able to understand it.
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).
You only get to vote for a tiny number of people, the groups with early access to pick who runs have far more power than the 'popular' vote. "I voted for Kodos." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_and_Kodos
PS: Obama might have been a better option, but I disagree with over half of what he has done.
You get to vote for a lot of people, but most people simply ignore this. Take Obama - started as a state senator, ran for Congress, then ran for the Senate, then for the presidency. In each of these elections he had to get through both a primary and general election. In each of these elections he also had to rely on a network of supporters and surrogates, the most important of which are other elected officials (many at the local level). He also had to work with the state party (also elected).
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.
You're still ignoring the role of money here. Yes, there are a lot of elections, and in every election, the amount of money a candidate is able to spend is a huge influencing factor on whether they can beat their opponents. This is also true in primaries, and in state legislature elections, and governor's races, and everywhere else. If you can't buy advertising to get in front of people, you can't get name recognition, which means you don't poll well, which means the media won't cover you, and nobody will think of you when it comes time for them to vote. It's all very straightforward.
But that's the thing - no matter the amount of money poured in, the vast majority of campaigns still feature candidates ignored by almost everyone. For most campaigns, the money doesn't affect someone's opinion of the candidates, because they aren't even aware of the candidates.
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.
There are ~320 million people in the US the first filter that drops 99.99% of them is by far the most important. EX: Pro life democrat or pro choice republican running for president = good luck.
Further, I don't think a great president looks much like a great senator.
Contrast the treatment of bank executives after the S&L crisis, and after the recent financial crisis. They got away with murder (not quite literally) this time.
No, I don't think I ever hear American progressives assert that they want less government.
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 would support a plan of re distributive basic income. The plan I would support would involve shrinking existing government.
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.
Apologies for the political observation, but I'm a history buff and I found your comment interesting.
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?"
The side with the real power - the voters. You can blame businesses or activists or interest groups or governments or whatever but America still has a democracy and American people actually do choose the outcomes they get. You personally might not want them, but most of your fellow Americans either do want them or succumb to some personal greed to make them happen.
I disagree very much. The fact that concentrated interests win out over dispersed interests is not some failure of the population to educate itself and vote hard enough. It's an extremely basic game theoretical inevitability.
No. The electorate chooses from a set of outcomes that are chosen long before they get a chance to vote on any of them. The political process starts a very long time before a typical citizen gets to vote.
Thinking that the political process begins and ends with voting is one of the key components of despair and cynicism in a democracy.
What are you referencing in regards to poverty? I would have guessed that the recent reduction in poverty is largely attributable to wealthy nations reducing efforts to centrally plan the economies of poor nations.
The conceit of the article -- borne out by economic history -- is exactly that: it's the reduction of efforts to centrally plan, and the rise of entrepreneurial, capitalistic efforts to advance, that has reduced poverty. [1] [2]
The article is actually fairly silent on the reasons so read into it what you will. If anything the author is endorsing his friend's book without giving away the thesis and if the link is accurate it covers a wide range of factors.
As for Deirdre McCloskey, as Noah Smith says,"do not believe things that Deirdre McCloskey says just because she says them."
While this article was more focused on poverty, the other major theme was that things and people are better now in many respects that people think it is.
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.
> reducing efforts to centrally plan the economies
"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.
Yes. And I think the following sentence best explains why:
> 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.
It's the classic tragedy of the commons. Nobody owns the waterways and the air, and hence individuals have neither the power nor incentive to protect them.
It is reasonable to believe that the tragedy of the commons is caused by society being organized around private ownership, not the nature of the commons itself.
Without private ownership, resources cannot be traded to their highest utility. Politicians ultimately are left to figure that out (when they get around to it, of course).
> Without private ownership, resources cannot be traded to their highest utility.
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'.
Externalities can only exist with public goods, such as the commons or air pollution. The more public goods, the more chances of externalities.
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 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.
How am I not forthright about my assumptions? I started this all off by simply stating that privately owned resources can be traded to their highest utility, and you seem to have a roundabout way of challenging that claim. Empirical evidence would be the most direct way.
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.
The original statement of the Tragedy of the Commons implies that ownership of grazing land leads to better outcomes. Whether that applies in similar cases when it is invoked depends. Pigou taxes are proposed as a bridge technology to gain the benefits of private ownership for common goods.
>"It's the classic tragedy of the commons. Nobody owns the waterways and the air, and hence individuals have neither the power nor incentive to protect them."
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.
Yes, and I actually just had dinner with some humans working on figuring it out. One possibility is that an invasive species of seaweed is throwing their diet out of whack.
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).
Fair enough. I'm not sure why I was downvoted. I'm not suggesting regulation or the EPA is bad.
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.
While I don't disagree government has been at time effective (in making life better and improving the world), one doesn't have to look very hard to find to find instances where they have not been effective or even counterproductive. The government of today isn't necessarily the government of 30 years ago. It's bigger. Maybe slower. Maybe filled with worse people. I don't know that all these things are true but as they say in the stock trading commercials... "past performance is no guarantee of future success".
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?
Yes, a vast number of the world's poorest population have been raised out of nominal abject poverty, this is true.
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.
Again, the positive side of this is, 50 years back the resources of China and India could only support may be 1/5th of their current population. However with green revolution, white revolution, cheaper energy sources living has been sustainable. I will agree that US is not relatively as rich compared to other nations as it was once before, but that is not the point Kristof is making, he is talking about how most people in the world are making the cut to reach a basic std of living (which I think is more important than some rich countries slightly backsliding?).
> 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.
Bubbles always go higher than anyone expects, and those who attempt to call the top always look like fools for a time. Fossil fuel extraction is a bubble. That's just grade school math: finite supply, constant and increasing demand.
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."
It won't "pop" because that's not how economics works.
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.
"At some point, certain sources of oil will become economically viable which aren't now."
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.
I keep pointing this out to a friend of mine. It's not like one day someone's going to say "oh, shit! we ran out! sorry, no more oil." It will just get more and more expensive.
> It's not like one day someone's going to say "oh, shit! we ran out! sorry, no more oil."
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.
You're assuming that the alternatives are actually physically able to meet demand. If that's the case, then great -- what you describe would occur. If not then the only alternative is demand destruction. We can handle some amount of demand destruction in the form of cutting wasteful consumption, but too much would very rapidly disintegrate into... well... actual destruction.
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.
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.
The "fuel in the tank" (resource discoveries) has _not_ been increasing. Coal discoveries peaked early in the 20th century if not before, and if you follow BP's annual energy review, the actual coal reserves have declined markedly since the 1990s (decadal estimates are given).
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.
Given current rates of nuclear electricity generation, and conventional reserves, about 75-80 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.
More than that 90% of the world still live on less than $10 a day. If you incorporate inflation into the 1981 $1 a day world bank poverty threshhold it would be about $2.50 a day now. At that $2.50 there are something like 300 million more people living below that absolute poverty line than there were when it was created.
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's a little ironic to say the poorest are not as poor, don't state countries, put a picture of African kids there and continue, when in the end it's these two countries we already know that they made progress.
"We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off."
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
Can putting those numbers side-by-side in such a way mislead people on the social impact of those events?
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.
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 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.
I absolutely agree that the raw numbers are important and they are quantifiable way to assess risk. But I very much dislike that they are directly compared to each other. The social impact of murders seems so different to death by smoking related disease that a comparison of the two numbers could be meaningless in determining which one is more "important" to reducing total death and suffering. They both seem incredibly important, despite one being much larger.
> 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.
Aren't you falling prey to the exact problem being brought up?
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?
Sorry, I didn't meant to get focused on the actual causes of death.
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.
You are correct that not all deaths are equal. Someone dying of cancer at 60 is losing maybe 20 years of life, while someone dying at 20 is losing their entire adult life. That's the concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which is sometimes used instead of just regular statistics.
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.
> Murder is rare, but it has a very high impact on society and the surrounding people.
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.
I'm just using my gut impression. Sorry for not being more clear.
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.
I respect the general thrust of your position in that we as a society must evaluate things like death on all axes including social impact. But until thing like social impact become less nebulous and more quantifiable I will continue to base my opinions on the the "raw" numbers because at least I can compare apples to apples.
I'm not suggesting we ignore "raw" numbers. Just that we should realise they are not directly comparable, as they are not all measuring sudden or violent terminations of life.
They are directly comparable as they both measure preventable deaths. If some types of death weigh more heavily on society than others, if there is some sort of X factor to be considered then how do we determine what it is?
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.
We may some methods for quantifying how impactful a death is. A brief search led me to [1, 2] which uses "years of potential life lost before 75 years (YPLL75)"
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.
The negative effects of mass shootings are largely because people don't understand the risks. So I think they'd go away if we realized they didn't matter.
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.
> 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.
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
That's right, but the negatives are presently having a large impact on society. There is a balance to be struck, but it's something that viewing the raw numbers can obscure.
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.
Smoking causes all sorts of harm besides "old age diseases" the happen to "old people." Smoking related deaths and disease effect all ages including fetuses as well as quality of life.
Context is dangerous to news & politics. Numbers are even more dangerous. So the likelihood of your wish coming true is almost nothing, at least in the mainstream news outlets. You'll get tons of context in long-format blogs and podcasts, where the purpose of the content is to educate. The primary purpose of media news is to make money, hence the bent toward entertainment more than anything.
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.
I'd have to agree with the other commentator on this, the BBC is hardly unbiased, it's under huge pressure to tow the conservative party line via threats to its funding and it's coverage is often populist (a lot of stuff about the royal family) and shallow, I gave up watching it years ago.
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 :(.
There are generational changes happening that are pretty profound. Younger generations don't trust the traditional media the same way older generations did, and are increasingly skeptical of the narratives being peddled by the media.
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.
This is very important to realize about "the news". The conceit is that consuming the news will make you informed about the state of the world in the present, that is utterly false. It's a tiny soda straw view of some of the more exceptional things happening around the world at any given time. Actually educating people about the overall state of what's going on around the world is a much more difficult task which most news media organizations more or less avoid doing.
I disagree. I think that qualifying every single news report with statement about how it fits into larger global/national trends would be annoying at best. It's assumed that journalists report on things that are out of the ordinary. Of course this creates a generally macabre view of reality, but on the other hand do you want everything to sound like this:
Came here to mention his lecture/BBC show Don't panic. Not only because it is interesting, but because a lecture that is produced like a TV show is a very interesting cross-over of genres.
> We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.
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.
I enjoy the fact that while they have a very clear opinion and bias (liberal economics and the free market), they avoid mudslinging, keep their criticisms factual, and are often quick to point out where their preferred system is failing.
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.
Heard an interview with the head of the investing arm of the Gates foundation. (Nerdist podcast interview with Bill Gates)
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...
Well an easy answer is to take a lot of that money people are earning in technology (I'm talking personal income or gifts from companies) and put it towards programs that either work towards ending poverty in those cases (through economic development, direct cash grants, etc) or improving health conditions, which often helps.
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.
Also whenever you earn more money, some the tax you pay goes towards programs like this whether you donate anything extra or not. So getting a high paying job alone helps.
OK, how about this for starters: do you agree that the following two statements are inconsistent:
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.
We could use automation to reduce the total amount of work we have to do as a society for each individual to be safe and healthy, and then (and this is the hard part) share the benefit of that automation with the whole society, instead of concentrating it in the hands of a few people and kicking every person whose labor is now not essential to the curb.
Incidentally, the answer to this question has been the same since the advent of technology, going as far back as agriculture.
> what role could technology play in eliminating extreme poverty by 2030?
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.
Really disruptive tech: telepresence that's finally almost as good as the real thing.
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.
Never going to happen due to speed-of-light delay. Play TF2 on a server that's in a different continent if you don't know what I mean.
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.
Technology is the main driver of growth in GDP per capita. Technology is what makes wealthy countries wealthy in the first place, and gives them enough surplus that they can afford to help poorer countries (whose problems may not be lack of access to technology per se, but other issues specific to their societies, such as unstable government, lack of education, etc.)
By making the developed world richer, technology helps everyone.
GDP per capita can easily be increased without raising the median standard of living, or ending poverty. Increasing total wealth doesn't guarantee anything when the maldistribution of wealth is the underlying problem.
I think technology has a key role (as a tool) to play in reducing poverty. Obviously poverty is a complex problem and technology is jut one tool to be used as part of solutions. As Kentaro Toyama wrote in his excellent book, "Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology" [1], technology is an amplifier of intent.
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.
Long ago, I saw this TED talk as a Long Now talk. I still find it inspirational. The big take-away for me is that a for-profit company can make a lot of money by helping even extremely poor people become less poor.
Making education and communication more accessible would be a huge win. And that's something you could do with low cost (or subsidized) mobile devices.
Another big secret, is that the source of a lot of poverty being lifted is because of China. That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years. That is definitely a big secret of american media, and something that it neglects to report on, in favor of free speech violations, naval exercises, ip infringement, and "job stealing".
>That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years.
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."
You're right, China is only communist in name, not in practice for some time now. I emphasized the word only to point out how we treat anything associated with communism as something to be burned at the stake.
Anything associated with communism should be burned at stake. The sooner the better. God bless the Chinese for figuring it out and transitioning out of that retched system.
And most of them are sadly going to go right back into extreme poverty since factories are leaving China, capital is are outflowing, rich people are escaping. Then they realize the farm they left has been commandeered to build empty apartments, their environment polluted to where they will fall victim to diseases.
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.
The hypothesis seems dubious. Their manufacturing is less competitive because wages have risen like ten fold. It's like saying the Chinese will return to poverty because they have become too wealthy.
Not a secret to me. A great tragedy, and definitely a huge error on their record. However, what I said still stands: they lifted 500 million people out of poverty.
Great, so instead of starving to death they can live long boring lives full of grueling work enriching assholes who don't even let them have internet access or freedom of mobility within their own country.
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.
Haha have you been to China? It's really not as bad as you are imagining. The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media. I'm not sure where this mobility issue is coming from. If you're talking about poor factory workers being constrained, well poor people everywhere have a hard time being mobile. Although at least in China's case, they have some of the world's most developed high speed rails to get between places. Chinese New Year is the world's largest annual migration.
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]
I can see why your girlfriend would hate it so much, she's coming from Canadian, one of the highest standards of living in the world. You can't expect to go to China, and find that same level of comfort. It was a third world country 20 years ago! It's dirtier, it's poorer, and it's WAYY more crowded. It's polluted, and everyone speaks Chinese. I find it sad that she hated it though, sounds like deep down, she hates a part of herself as well.
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.
Don t forget theyr internet is RIAA Free. They get services better than netflix for video, free games, .... They may not have access to some foreign website but they get access to a lot of unknown services in the us.
> That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years.
Indeed, China's success has been a great testimony to the efficacy of centralized planning and communism...
Deng Xio Peng pivoted away from pure central planning. Whether it's actually... efficacious :) remains to be seen.
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.
I think you're right in your edit, the Community Party has only been in power for decades. Prior to that, China was in turmoil due to colonization and imperialism by the U.S., France, Britain, and other European states, as well as Japan.
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.
Very interesting that you've actually experienced this first hand while doing research for a class. I find that the difference in reporting on the same subject matter can be so wildly different, and I find that so confusing. It's so easy to twist stories for your own purpose. I wish there was a better solution.
While changes may be afoot, the one-party system has bred open and notorious corruption and censorship for 30+ years. The Party is also jeopardizing the global economy with its treatment of the market correction, mostly in the interest of defending its own position. I don't think negative American sentiment towards the Party is entirely misplaced.
If it wasn't for Britain and the Opium wars, China would be in a worse position now. China was very closed and very corrupt towards the end of the Manchurian's rule. Britain did exploit China, but their policy was very different than the policy in India, for example, or in NA.
This weak justification for imperialism is dangerous for our future generations. The subjugation and exploitation of technologically weaker peoples for PROFIT, usually under the guise of some self-righteous religion, mandated by god, is something that I hope humanity is done with.
In this case, it was a war fought to force a drug trade. Pathetic.
Yeah, it's a little more complicated than that. The Chinese demanded silver and nothing else whatsoever for their goods, creating MASSIVE trade deficit with all of Europe, sucking practically all of the silver there and then some (from Mexico and Brazil). The traders found a way to get silver from the Chinese (in exchange for opium). Trade loomed even more. Then the Chinese decided to forcefully stop the Opium trade, which would crush their trading partners. This lead to the first Opium war, which was quickly settled, but the Chinese broke their part of the contract which lead to the 2nd Opium war.
it sounds like you're trying to blame China for the Opium War. Fact is, if there was a war right now, fought to force trade of a highly addictive drug on another country, people wouldn't describe it as an opportunity for that country.
The traded goods don't matter. The Chinese government was being unreasonable in their policy. When you are unreasonable you face the consequences. Such is life, there are practicalities we need to consider. We don't live in a utopia.
What do you think will happen if the US suddenly decides to accept nothing else but gold for its dollar?
There's no point in arguing when you talk about historical matters as simply as a fight between your friends. Opium wars are a great example of Imperialism (which is not a good thing, although you seem to try very hard to twist and defend it)
Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.
"PPP" refers to Purchasing Power Parity. The default option is the PPP rates for consumption in 2005 estimated by the World Bank’s Development Data Group.
So yes, it does account for inflation, assuming equal inflation across whatever basket of goods was chosen as the reference point for PPP.
I came here to ask the same thing.
Taking in consideration they use the US$1.25/day measurement since 1981 [1], today this value should be US$3.28/day [2] (based on US inflation between 1981 and 2015).
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). :-)
Who is down-voting all the inflation related questions? This shouldn't have to be explained to someone with downvote-level karma, but disagreeing with a comment's point of view is not a good reason to downvote it.
Implied but not stated directly is that because vast reduction in disease and proportionate increase in life expectancy people are having fewer children so that the small resources people have don't have to be divided into smaller slices but rather into larger slices.
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.
Nit pick: This is not about income redistribution to the developing world. The poor of the world has simply become more productive and generated more of their own income.
Right, but would the hundreds of millions of destitute subsistence farmers of China have become more secure without the foreign investment and "job shipping" of developed countries like Japan, North Am and Europe?
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).
Ending illegal wars, the death penalty and torture are even more important. Why would our government which has no problem killing, maiming and even "torturing some folks" even begin to care about poverty, illiteracy and disease? You may disagree but as a whole our government has a strong proclivity to violence which implies a lack of regard for life. Dealing effectively with poverty, illiteracy and disease presupposes our government is sufficiently motivated to direct its attention to those issues. Pick any metric you like and it clearly shows our government has other priorities. Poverty is up, illiteracy is up, education is overall declining, university tuition skyrocketing, cost of healthcare skyrocketing, planned parenthood under attack etc. Our government just bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, executed a woman in Georgia who should have served a life sentence instead, is about to execute a man whose guilt is unclear and still tortures people in dark forgotten corners of the globe. I don't think there can be any meaningful change until bad people with no respect for life are removed from office and replaced with good people who do respect life. It's no coincidence that since the warmongers seized control of this country that education and healthcare took a dive. Dr. Strangelove doesn't care one whit about poverty, illiteracy and disease .
A minor note: the author refers to "Volkswagen corruption". I have not seen the company's actions called corruption elsewhere, nor was it justified in the provided link.
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 article is deceptive because it speaks of raw numbers rather than percentages. While the number of people living on less than a dollar a day went up throughout the 20th century, this was because populations were exploding over the same period. At the same time, the fraction of people living on less than a dollar a day plunged dramatically. In fact, this trend slowed after 1990 - since then this rate has declined less quickly than it did during the seventies, when it fell from almost 30% to less than 10% in 1985. See https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/capitalism.jp... e.g.
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.
Different definitions of extreme poverty might change the percentages; however, in all of these it ought to be clear that the rate of poverty declined throughout the twentieth century, it did not go up mid century as Kristof implies.
So this is where some folks on HN should come and complain and the raising inequalities, despite the fact that literally everyone is getting richer. Which is what ultimately matters.
Not everyone is getting richer. People aren't getting richer because of inequality. Even if they were they don't lose their right to a fair share. "What ultimately matter" is a weak argument that could be said to justify anything e.g. security over freedom.
> The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.
I assume this is adjusted for inflation, but I didn't see anything in the link. Does anyone know?
>One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years.
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.
Disasters and tragedies sell, and we now get to hear about them from all over the world, so selection bias is sadly inevitable. This is why millenarian religions like the Jehovah's Witnesses (and, perhaps, radical Islam) are able to so easily convince the gullible that the world is on its last legs.
It's just insane how good this is. Yeah, the middle class is hurting (worldwide, or pretty close), but the bottom is escaping poverty at an amazing rate.
No. The middle class in the US and other highly developed nations is hurting, but by any global measure, this group of people is actually relatively wealthy. The global middle class has experienced an unprecedented level of growth and prosperity over the past 25+ years. Of course, this has in many cases come at the expense of the first group.
I agree. The standard of living in the first world countries will meet the third world countries in the middle. This explains why wages haven't increased significantly in the past 25 years in the US.
Where it gets interesting is when equilibrium has been reached.
I think the average American is going to be shocked in the next couple of years when the rest of the world passes us by. The technological capability of developing nations has increased rapidly. Our rate of technological progress is slowing down. For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm.
To your specific point about semiconductor fabrication: It's much harder to scale 28nm down to 14nm than to go from say... 65nm to 32nm. Quantum effects become much more prevalent. All sorts of new materials and technologies must be used. Even with Qualcomm's help[1], SMIC's 28nm process was delayed by a year. The first chips came off the line last month, putting them 5 years behind modern fab tech. Though companies like SMIC are playing catch-up, it will take a lot of R&D to get to where Intel is today. Speaking of R&D: Intel's R&D budget is five times SMIC's revenue.[2]
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.
> For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm.
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.
China has plenty of "original thought[s]". I bet India does too. I always find it amazing that in the U.S. we tend to judge other countries as being "unoriginal" or "lacking creativity", simply because we are better right now. We forget to factor in that we are the wealthiest country in the world, have been for hundreds of years. We have the best resources, and that create a compounding effect for our accomplishments. Not to mention that a lot of our original ideas likely come from specifically China and India.
He talks about the culture of those countries. If you managed a typical Indian worker all you would ever hear is "yes, sir, I understood sir, it will get done, sir". Then an endless myriad of excuses and blame shifting and promises. People there are simply wired to always say "yes", never to question, never to doubt, never to criticize. I hope you can see why this might be a problem for transitioning to a "first world" economy, which relies on workers performing services, rather than standing on an assembly line.
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.
I don't really know much of Indian culture, but I doubt it's as simple as a "yes sir" from your "typical Indian worker". That sounds like a gross oversimplification.
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".
This journalistic impulse to sell the world as worse than it is will not end because a single journalist caught a quick (and likely fleeting) guilty conscience. It will continue until the profession recognizes that their addiction to narrative harms the entire population.
No, it will continue until it stops generating revenue. It is our appetite for this sort of journalism that feeds it; if all the journalists in the world suddenly stopped writing fear-baiting stories, then someone else would start writing those stories to fill the void.
The journalists aren't the ones with the addiction; it is their readers that have the addiction.
That article is a textbook example of cherry picking. If you pick the height of a boom as your baseline, of course poverty will increase during a major recession.
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.