Saturday, January 27th, 2018
Stephan: The surreal catastrophe that American federal governance has become is not occurring in a vacuum; media, politicians, and academics, as well as ordinary people from other countries are watching this mess. This is one small aspect of what they see happening. The result: a growing diminishment of America's stature in the world.
Credit: Louisa Barnes/The Daily Beast
The US government shutdown was, of course, massive international news — it’s essentially the world’s most powerful country and its largest economy going haywire. How does this chaos look through international eyes?
To find out, I spent the morning reading press coverage from a number of countries — from neighbors like Canada and Mexico to European allies to state-run media in Russia and China. What I found was a remarkable convergence on a single theme: The shutdown happened because there is something deeply wrong with the American political system.
“Canadians like to think their system of governance is better than the American one. If they want more evidence, they need only look at what’s happening now — a government shutdown in Washington — and be thankful their system doesn’t allow the same shenanigans,” writes Lawrence Martin, a columnist for Canada’s right-leaning Globe and Mail newspaper.
Reporters in democratic nations like Britain and France are stunned; authoritarian propagandists are downright giddy that America’s political system could collapse into chaos […]
1 Comment
Friday, January 26th, 2018
Eshe Nelson, Economics and Markets Reporter - Quartz
Stephan: For many years I have argued that based on social outcome data those societies that make social wellbeing their first priority, rather than profit, are healthier, more long-lived, happier, lower stressed, better educated, safer, and overall provide a much nicer life for their citizens. This difference is the reason why six times as many Americans move to Norway as Norwegians move to America.
Now economists are beginning to calibrate on the basis of this social data and I see this as good news. Here's the story.
Inclusive Development Index, top 10 countries
Advanced economies:
Emerging economies:
Norway
Lithuania
Iceland
Hungary
Luxembourg
Azerbaijan
Switzerland
Latvia
Denmark
Poland
Sweden
Panama
Netherlands
Croatia
Ireland
Uruguay
Australia
Chile
Austria
Romania
Source: WEF
By traditional standards, the global economy is experiencing something of a renaissance. For the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, every major region in the world is growing at the same time. But there remains a growing unease that measuring the health of an economy by GDP alone disguises the truly burning issues—namely, inequality.
Gross domestic product—the sum of the goods and services produced by a nation—is an insufficient measure of national economic performance, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is hosting its annual gathering of the global elite in Davos this week.
Dozens of political leaders will be at the conference, in high spirits given the strength of the global economy but not necessarily comfortable in their positions. Since last year’s gathering, for example, British prime minister Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority and German chancellor Angela Merkel is a last-minute addition to the schedule after cobbling together a governing coalition (probably), months after her country’s most recent election.
“Decades of prioritizing economic growth over social equity has led to historically high levels of wealth and income inequality,” the WEF report says. With these disparities comes unhappiness and […]
No Comments
Friday, January 26th, 2018
Stephan: In the surreal circus that is the American Federal government there is no oxygen in the media world to cover a number of trends that are affecting the daily lives of Americans. The social outcome data arising from these trends never seems to get covered beyond a brief mention.
One of the worst of these trends is the Gun Death Trend. Are you aware that there have been 11 school shootings in just the first 25 days of this year? Are you aware that school principals all over the country are now training their students how to respond to gun fire in their schools? Can't you just imagine what those faculty meetings must be like?
One of the reasons this death trend has become the new normal -- I can hardly believe I just wrote that sentence -- is the increasing prevalence of guns in normal society. The Republican Party and its thugs at the NRA openly are trying to pass into law something called the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. Did you know about that? This act would allow a person who could carry a concealed weapon in their state to carry in any state they might visit. The argument is, "An armed society is a polite society." Really. They actually say that.
So lets look at some actual data to see if that is true.
Armed Republicans in Cleveland
One of the most contentious arguments within the larger gun control debate is over whether right-to-carry laws that make it legal for gun owners to carry loaded weapons in public, usually concealed on their person, make people safer. Gun rights advocates argue that packing heat is a prevention against crime and violence, invoking slogans like, “An armed society is a polite society.” Gun control proponents, however, argue that a proliferation of loaded weapons is bound to lead to more violence, if only because people have easier access to the means to harm others.
John Donohue, a legal researcher who works for Stanford Law School, has been working on this question for the better part of two decades. “Turns out it’s a tricky question to answer through statistical means,” he told Salon. But now “this data [has] become complete enough, and some of the new statistical techniques have been implemented,” he continued.
The correlation between the passage of right-to-carry or RTC laws and violent crime has long been […]
2 Comments
Friday, January 26th, 2018
Joseph Erbentraut, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for years to have their water tested; you can no longer assume in America that your drinking water is safe, particularly if you live in an older urban area. Here is the latest on this trend.
Contamination map shows (in blue) where water systems have detected the chemicals and (in red) where contamination sites have been identified or suspected.
Credit: ENVIRONMENTAL WORKING GROUP/NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY
The PFC/PFOA
Some 15 million Americans across 27 states are drinking water that could be contaminated with potentially carcinogenic man-made chemicals without even realizing it.
According to a new analysis and map released Thursday by the Environmental Working Group and scientists at Northeastern University, perfluorochemicals (PFCs) — a class of chemicals including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFAS) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) — were detected in 162 U.S. drinking water systems in recent Environmental Protection Agency testing.
The toxic chemicals have been used over the years in a wide range of consumer products, like certain types of nonstick cookware, cleaning products and waterproof clothing, and have been linked to a number of health […]
1 Comment
Friday, January 26th, 2018
ANGUS DEATON, 2015 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University, and the presidential professor of economics at the University of Southern California - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is a follow up on the story I ran a few weeks ago about a United Nations survey of poverty in America (See SR archives). It is written by one of the world's leading economists, and I think should be taken very seriously. Large parts of the United States have social wellbeing economies similar to third world countries.
You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.
Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.
Properly interpreted, the numbers suggest that the United Nations has a point — and the United States has an urgent problem. They also suggest that we might rethink how we assist the poor through our own giving.
According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they […]
No Comments
