Sunday, June 16, 2019
how people think
44:21 we make every decision based on either fear or love.
44:25 Others say you make your decision based on fear of loss.
44:29 Whichever of those two areas that you fall into,
44:33 the bottom line is fear and fear of loss
44:35 are a big determinant in how people think.
https://youtu.be/guZa7mQV1l0?t=2659
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22:30
Why we do what we do | Tony Robbins
(( emotion is the force of life ))
https://youtu.be/Cpc-t-Uwv1I?t=83
https://youtu.be/Cpc-t-Uwv1I?t=83
(( people work in their self-interest. ))
https://youtu.be/Cpc-t-Uwv1I?t=97
https://youtu.be/Cpc-t-Uwv1I?t=97
(( you don't work in your self-interest at all time. ))
https://youtu.be/Cpc-t-Uwv1I?t=105
https://youtu.be/Cpc-t-Uwv1I?t=105
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpc-t-Uwv1I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpc-t-Uwv1I
TED
Published on Jan 16, 2007
Tony Robbins discusses the "invisible forces" that make us do what we do -- and high-fives Al Gore in the front row.
([ the law of the minimum ])
resources resourcefulness
time creativity
money determination
technology love/caring
contacts curiosity
experience passion
management resolve
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/leadershipmomentsforprinciplameetingjune2011-111003220744-phpapp01/95/leadership-moments-for-principla-meeting-june-2011-5-728.jpg
source:
https://www.slideshare.net/martinzhughes/leadership-moments-for-principla-meeting-june-2011
([
“ Once a development path is set on a particular course, then network externalities, the learning process of organizations, and the historical derived modelling of the issues reinforces the course.”
― Douglas North
• Uncertainty and path dependence
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfkQW7_-Pg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfkQW7_-Pg
1:42:42
The Predictioneer's Game
42:47 (start)
https://youtu.be/XfE0ih-6fi8?t=2567
https://youtu.be/XfE0ih-6fi8?t=2567
44:00 (stop)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfE0ih-6fi8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfE0ih-6fi8
NYUAD Institute
Published on Sep 15, 2015
The Predictioneer's Game
December 9, 2009
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita will discuss how applied game theory can be used to anticipate policy choices whether in business or in government.
The Predictioneer's Game
https://slideplayer.com/slide/4437069/
])
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14:22
Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message - 1977 part 1 v 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw
mywebcowtube
Published on Aug 9, 2011
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([ the law of the minimum ])
resources resourcefulness
time creativity
money determination
technology love/caring
contacts curiosity
experience passion
management resolve
notes ([ the law of the minimum ])
Thinking in systems
a primer
Donella H. Meadows
Edited by Diana Wright
sustainability institute
2008
p.101
A patch of growing grain needs:
• sunlight
• air
• water
• nitrogen
• phosphorus
• potassium
• dozens of minor nutrients
• a friable soil and the services of a microbial soil community
• some system to control the weeds and pests ([ ideally without pesticides, insecticides, herbicides or any chemical of that sort ])
• protection from the wastes of the industrial manufacturer
It was with regard to grain that Justus von Liebig came up with his famous “law of minimum.” It doesn't matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what's short is phosphorus. It does not no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.
Bread will not rise without yeast, no matter how much flour it has. Children will not thrive without protein, no matter how many carbohydrates they eat. Companies can't keep going without energy, no matter how many customers they have──or without customers, no matter how much energy they have.
This concept of a limiting factor is simple and widely misunderstood.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WfELt4nDPdNt0HCUQ4UNJON5a_sdLkiE
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WfELt4nDPdNt0HCUQ4UNJON5a_sdLkiE/view
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18:01
Start with why -- how great leaders inspire action | Simon Sinek | TEDxPugetSound
https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA?t=28
https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA?t=28
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA
TEDx Talks
Published on Sep 28, 2009
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Neuroticism,
Agreeableness and
Extrovertedness,
Conscientiousness,
OCEAN, Openness, <=== (( START HERE ))
Conscientiousness,
Extrovertedness,
Agreeableness and
Neuroticism,
source:
56:39
Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris interviewed by Wired
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0sWeLZ8PXg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0sWeLZ8PXg
Yuval Noah Harari
Published on Dec 3, 2018
Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris are interviewed by Wired's editor-in-chief, Nicholas Thompson.
https://youtu.be/v0sWeLZ8PXg?t=979
16:19 But this talk is about the erosion of that,
16:21 that we can point a camera at your eyes
16:23 and see when your eyes dilate,
16:25 which actually detects cognitive strains
16:26 when your having a hard time understanding something
16:28 or an easy time understanding something.
16:30 And we can continually adjust this
16:32 based on your heart rate, your eye dilation.
16:47 your big five personality traits,
16:50 if I know Nick Thompson's personality
16:53 through his openness, OCEAN, openness, conscientiousness,
16:56 extrovertedness, agreeableness and neuroticism,
16:59 that gives me your personality,
17:00 and based on your personality
17:02 I can tune a political message to be perfect for you.
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https://youtu.be/guZa7mQV1l0?t=2634
43:54 So if I understand that dynamic, if they're
43:57 expressing themselves in any way,
43:59 there are things they want to have happen.
44:00 There are things they don't want to have happen.
44:02 All I've got to do is sort of flip it the other way around
44:05 and make them worried about the things
44:06 that they don't want to have happen.
44:08 And then that changes their behavior.
44:09 Because fear of loss is the number one driving-- myself,
44:14 a lot of psychologists believe the fear of loss
44:16 is the number one thing that drives our decisions.
https://youtu.be/guZa7mQV1l0?t=2659
44:19 Psychologists usually fall into one or two camps--
44:21 we make every decision based on either fear or love.
44:25 Others say you make your decision based on fear of loss.
44:29 Whichever of those two areas that you fall into,
44:33 the bottom line is fear and fear of loss
44:35 are a big determinant in how people think.
44:38 So I just recognize that and then just use the tools
44:42 that I'm given.
source:
50:43
Chris Voss: "Never Split the Difference" | Talks at Google
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guZa7mQV1l0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guZa7mQV1l0
Talks at Google
Published on May 27, 2016
Everything we’ve previously been taught about negotiation is wrong: people are not rational; there is no such thing as ‘fair’; compromise is the worst thing you can do; the real art of negotiation lies in mastering the intricacies of No, not Yes. These surprising tactics—which radically diverge from conventional negotiating strategy—weren’t cooked up in a classroom, but are the field-tested tools FBI agents used to talk criminals and hostage-takers around the world into (or out of) just about any scenario you can imagine.
In NEVER SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator Chris Voss breaks down these strategies so that anyone can use them in the workplace, in business, or at home.
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What's Not On The Test: The Overlooked Factors That Determine Success
May 13, 2019
5:58 PM ET
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-test-the-overlooked-factors-that-determine-success
Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, Laura Kwerel, and Thomas Lu. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain.
notes ([ The Overlooked Factors That Determine Success ])
Thinking in systems
a primer
Donella H. Meadows
Edited by Diana Wright
sustainability institute
2008
p.101
A patch of growing grain needs:
• sunlight
• air
• water
• nitrogen
• phosphorus
• potassium
• dozens of minor nutrients
• a friable soil and the services of a microbial soil community
• some system to control the weeds and pests ([ ideally without pesticides, insecticides, herbicides or any chemical of that sort ])
• protection from the wastes of the industrial manufacturer
It was with regard to grain that Justus von Liebig came up with his famous “law of minimum.” It doesn't matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what's short is phosphorus. It does not no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.
Bread will not rise without yeast, no matter how much flour it has. Children will not thrive without protein, no matter how many carbohydrates they eat. Companies can't keep going without energy, no matter how many customers they have──or without customers, no matter how much energy they have.
This concept of a limiting factor is simple and widely misunderstood.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WfELt4nDPdNt0HCUQ4UNJON5a_sdLkiE
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WfELt4nDPdNt0HCUQ4UNJON5a_sdLkiE/view
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1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
source:
The Atlantic
content | june 2016 | vol. 317-no. 5
How kids really succeed
by Paul Tough
p.58
And it has become clear, a the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading--indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom. This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop noncognitive capacities?
p.60
For children who grow up without significant experiences of adversity, the skill-development process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it's supposed to: Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents and other caregivers create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills. Just as early stress sends signals to the nervous system to maintain constant vigilance and prepare for a lifetime of trouble, early warmth and responsiveness send the opposite signals: You're safe; life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. BE curious about the world; it's full of fascinating surprises. These messages trigger adaptations in children's brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly trade immediate gratification for promise of long-term benefits.
We don't always think of these abilities as academic in nature, but in fact they are enormously beneficial in helping kids achieve academic success in kindergarten and beyond.
p.62
C. Kirabo Jackson
A few years ago, a young economist at Northwestern University named C. Kirabo Jackson began investigating how to measure educators' effectiveness. In many school systems these days, teachers are assessed based primarily on one data point: the standardized-test scores of their students. Jackson suspected that the true impact teachers had on their students was more complicated than a single test score could reveal. So he found and analyzed a detailed database in North Carolina that tracked the performance of every single 9th-grade student in the state from 2005 to 2011--a total of 464,502 students. His data followed their progress not only in 9th-grade but throughout high school.
p.62
But then Jackson did something new. He created a proxy measure for students' noncognitive ability, using just four pieces of existing administrative data: attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA. Jackson's new index measured, in a fairly crude way, how engaged students were in school--whether they showed up, whether they misbehaved, and how hard they worked in their classes. Jackson found that this simple noncognitive proxy was, remarkably, a better predictor than students' test scores of whether the students would go on to attend college, a better predictor of adult wages, and better predictor of future arrests.
p.62
Jackson had access to students' scores on the statewide standardized test, and he used that as a rough measure of their cognitive ability.
p.62
Jackson found that some teachers were reliably able to raise their students' standardized-test scores year after year. These are the teachers, in every teacher-evaluation system in the country, who are the most valued and most rewarded. But he also found that there was another distinct cohort of teachers who were reliably able to raise their students' performance on his noncognitive measure. If you were assigned to the class of a teacher in this cohort, you were more likely to show up to school, more likely to avoid suspension, more likely to move on to the next grade. And your overall GPA went up--not just your grades in that particular teacher's class, but your grades in your other classes, too.
Jackson found that these two groups of successful teachers did not necessarily overlap much; in every school, it seemed, there were certain teachers who were especially good at developing cognitive skills in their students and other teachers who excelled at developing noncognitive skills. But the teachers in the second cohort were not being rewarded for their success in their students--indeed, it seemed likely that no one but Jackson even realized that they were successful. And yet those teachers, according to Jackson's calculations, were doing more to get their students to college and raise their future wages than were the much-celebrated teachers who boosted students' test scores.
p.62
Jackson's data showed that spending a few hours each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher changed something about students' behavior. And that was what mattered. Somehow these teachers were able to convey deep messages--perhaps implicitly or even subliminally--about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students' psychology, and thus on their behavior.
The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions--to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student's school day. And those decisions improved their lives in meaningful ways.
p.64
C. Kirabo Jackson
What Kirabo Jackson seems to have discovered is that certain educators have been able to create such an environment in their own classroom, regardless of the climate in the school as a whole.
p.63
Camille A. Farrington, a former inner-city high-school teacher who now works at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research
p.63
That mind-set is the product of countless environmental forces, but research done by Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, and others has shown that teachers can have an enormous impact on their students' mind-sets, often without knowing it. Messages that teachers convey--large and small, explicit and implicit--affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.
p.63
Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in the classroom:
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
p.64
Instead, it conveys opposite warnings, at car-alarm volume: I don't belong here. This is enemy territory. Everyone in this school is out to get me.
p.64
Add to this is the fact many children raised in adversity, by the time they get to middle or high school, are significantly behind their peers academically and disproportionately likely to have a history of confrontations with school administrators. These students, as a result, tend to be the ones placed in remedial classes or subjected to repeated suspensions or both--none of which makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.
p.64
These efforts target students' beliefs in two separate categories, each one echoing items on Farrington's list: first, students' feelings about their place in the school (I belong in this academic community), and then their feelings about the work they are doing in class (my ability and competence grow with my effort; I can succeed at this; this work has value for me).
Paul Tough is the author of the new book Helping Children Succeed: what works and why, from which this article is adapted. This work was funded in part by a grant from the CityBridge Foundation, the education-focused foundation of Katherine and David Bradley, who also own The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/how-kids-really-succeed/480744/
https://www.paultough.com/articles/
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16:54
'What if Finland's Great Teachers Taught in Your Schools?' Pasi Sahlberg - WISE 2013 Focus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERvh0hZ6uP8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERvh0hZ6uP8
WISE Channel
Published on Aug 8, 2014
Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn their school systems around for higher rankings in the international league tables. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their attention to teachers, believing that if only they could attract "the best and the brightest" into the teaching profession the quality of education would improve. This presentation argued that just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students' learning outcomes. Lessons from Finland and other high-performing school systems suggest that we should also protect schools from prescribed teaching, toxic accountability, and unhealthy competition, so that all teachers can use their professional knowledge and skills in the best interests of their pupils.
13:11
Top 10 Reasons FINLAND Has the World’s Best SCHOOL SYSTEM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmG4smezeME
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmG4smezeME
TopTenz
Published on May 3, 2017
While it is almost impossible to say a single nation’s schools are the best in the world, one country that consistently performs extremely well on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams for math, reading and science, may come as a surprise to many. Finland, a tiny nation of 5.5 million people, consistently makes the top 5 performers across those categories, making it the top educational performer in Europe and one of the strongest in the world. (Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are also strong performers, and China did not submit consolidated results for the most recent test.) Finland?! What?!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's law
organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
— M. Conway[2]
[2] Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?, Copyright 1968, F. D. Thompson Publications, Inc.
http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html
informal version of Conway's law: Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. This turns out to be a principle with much broader utility than in software engineering, where references to it usually occur.
“ ... organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. ... ”
How Do Committees Invent?
By Melvin E. Conway
Copyright 1968, F. D. Thompson Publications, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of Datamation magazine,
where it appeared April, 1968.
... ... ...
Conclusion
The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. We have seen that this fact has important implications for the management of system design. Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.
This criterion creates problems because the need to communicate at any time depends on the system concept in effect at that time. Because the design which occurs first is almost never the best possible, the prevailing system concept may need to change. Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design.
Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible. There is need for a philosophy of system design management which is not based on the assumption that adding manpower simply adds to productivity. The development of such a philosophy promises to unearth basic questions about value of resources and techniques of communication which will need to be answered before our system-building technology can proceed with confidence.
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Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013
p.146
We can find the right biomarkers (???), but to do so will require a dramatic reorganization of the search enterprise. (???) That, however, is just step one.
p.255
At the first of these meetings, Kathy [Giusti] recalls, “I was sitting there in disbelief that these guys had never talked to each other.... There were then no drugs for multiple myeloma. None of the academics knew anybody [on the drug-development side], let alone how to work with them. They were hopeless at it. So over time, we ended up doing a lot of these roundtables, just to bring these different worlds together. You'd think that was simple. There was nothing complex about it. Any moron could do it.”
Kathy even brought a how-to guide for moderators at the bookstore, and opened up one of the meetings with a “leader's question”: “We will be successful in our effort if we do what?”
p.255
“And then one of the industry guys said, ‘If you give us tissue in which we can validate a drug.’”
pp.256-257
p.256
The words shot right through her:
I didn't realize at the time that every academic center had is own tissue
bank. I didn't know until 2002 that they were hoarding tissue. I didn't
know the crappy quality of the tissue they had in their freezers. But I can
tell you, I knew the importance of it. I was always giving bone marrow at
Dana Farber, as was my sister. Because we are identical twins, this was a
great resource for looking at genomic issues. And as they would fill these
huge tubes of marrow ... I would notice the techs standing right outside
the door. It hit me then how fresh this needed to be; how fragile these
myeloma cells are. You can't kill them in the body, ironically, but they die
right away outside of it. I had seen this all, personally, as a patient. And
now I was hearing it at a [foundation] roundtable. I realized right away
that we had to get tissue. And I realized that industry was not going to
believe in us, or bother with this [uncommon] disease, until we started
showing them we could bank tissue──and prove that we could help them
get clinical trials done faster. And so I decided to do the tissue banking
first.
(Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013, )
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's law
organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
— M. Conway[2]
[2] Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?, Copyright 1968, F. D. Thompson Publications, Inc.
http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html
informal version of Conway's law: Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. This turns out to be a principle with much broader utility than in software engineering, where references to it usually occur.
“ ... organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. ... ”
“ ... organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to [co-produce] designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. ... ”
“ ... organizations which [evolve] systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to [co-produce and iterate] designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. ... ”
“ ... [nations, states, countries, cities, counties, regions, republics, kingdoms, tribes, teams, clans, communities, companies, corporations, services, partnerships, researches, institutions, commissions, agencies (agencys), administrations, bureaus (bureaux), families, entities, churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, gods, deities, demigods, individuals, units, centers, foundations, etc ...] which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. ... ”
how people think
how a person think
how a person from a different culture think
how a person speaking a different language think
how a person from the mid-west think
how a person from the east coast think
how a person of a certain station in life think
how the poor think
how the rich think
how the person who was rich, who then becomes poor, who then becomes rich, who then again becomes poor think (how is this possible)
nations, states, countries, cities, counties, regions, republics, kingdoms, tribes, teams, clans, communities, companies, corporations, services, partnerships, researches, institutions, commissions, agencies (agencys), administrations, bureaus (bureaux), families, entities, churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, gods, deities, demigods, individuals, units, centers, foundations
how a nation think
how a state think
how a country think
how a city think
how a region think
how a republic think
how a kingdom think
how a tribe think
how a team think
how a group think
how a clan think
how a community think
how a company think
how a corporation think
how a service think
how a partnership think
how a research think
how a paper (monograph) think
how an institution think
how a commission think
how an agency think
how an administration think
how a bureau think
how a family think
how a baby think
how dad think
how mom think
how a child think
how grandma think
how grandpa think
how a fictional character think
how a historical person think
how history think
how herstory think
how a historical fictional person think
how I think
how an entity think
how a church think
how a temple think
how a mosque think
how a synagogue think
how god think
how a deity think
how a demigod think
how an individual think
how a unit think
how the center think
how the left think
how the right think
how a foundation think
how an organization think
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Friday, May 31, 2019
global poor
Gabriel Zucman
Thirty-two-year-old French economist Gabriel Zucman scours spreadsheets to find secret offshore accounts.
https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/BLM7828005774
https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/BLM7828005774?selected=BLM3218777474
Bloomberg
Businessweek
Listen to the Story
Our editors bring you the most interesting reporting from this week in the world of business, finance, tech, and politics.
The Wealth Detective
May 23, 2019, 2:00 AM PDT
The Wealth Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich
Thirty-two-year-old French economist Gabriel Zucman scours spreadsheets to find secret offshore accounts.
By Ben Steverman
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-23/the-wealth-detective-who-finds-the-hidden-money-of-the-super-rich?srnd=businessweek-v2
The Wealth Detective
The rich know how to keep their money secret. Gabriel Zucman knows how to find it.
By Ben Steverman
Tue, 21 May 2019 16:28:43
Bloomberg News
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/BLM3218777474.mp3
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News & Events
Massachusetts Hospitals Stockpile $1.6 Billion in Cayman Islands and other Offshore Accounts; Nurses Call for Financial Transparency
05.30.2019
https://www.massnurses.org/news-and-events/p/openItem/11324
CANTON, Mass. – Hospital corporations across Massachusetts have placed at least $1.6 billion in the Cayman Islands and other well-known offshore tax havens, leading nurses and lawmakers to call for legislation requiring financial transparency from hospitals and the returning of excess profits and CEO pay to the public good.
“We can improve our health care system by shining a light on hospital finances, limiting excessive CEO pay and ensuring that the public has a stronger voice in shaping how our health care dollars are spent,” said Karen Coughlin, a 35-year RN from Mansfield and Vice President of the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
The Hospital Profit Transparency and Fairness Act (S. 714/H. 1144) requires hospitals to disclose financial holdings and profits, including money kept in offshore accounts. It will also claw back excessive profits and CEO pay and return that money to the public good through a newly created Medicaid Reimbursement Enhancement Fund. Massachusetts hospitals are both largely non-profit organizations and publicly funded through tax dollars.
... ... ...
To address this issue, The Hospital Profit Transparency and Fairness Act (S. 714/H. 1144) will:
• Require hospitals to be transparent about their financial holdings and other activities.
• Assess any hospital receiving taxpayer dollars that has an annual operating margin above a specific, predetermined cap.
• Assess any hospital receiving taxpayer dollars that provides a compensation package for its CEO that is greater than 100 times that of the hospital's lowest paid employee.
• Deposit assessments in a newly created Medicaid Reimbursement Enhancement Fund to increase Medicaid reimbursement rates to eligible hospitals as a way to claw back excess profits and ensure that taxpayer dollars are dedicated exclusively to safe patient care and necessary services for all communities in the commonwealth.
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2:06
Panama Papers explained like you were five
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e87OxZAkgmY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e87OxZAkgmY
Teriyakuza
Published on Apr 5, 2016
Panama Papers explained like you were five, with piggy banks
source:
https://www.vox.com/2016/4/4/11361780/the-panama-papers-cartoon
2:06
The Panama Papers, explained with piggy banks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2APYPjTWZ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2APYPjTWZ8
https://youtu.be/k2APYPjTWZ8
https://youtu.be/k2APYPjTWZ8
Vox
Published on Apr 5, 2016
A massive document leak reveals the secrets of shell companies. Matt Yglesias explains, adapting an analogy from reddit user DanGliesack:
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2:47
‘This is not an elitist issue’: AOC on Republican inaction on climate change –video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5M8vvEhCFI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5M8vvEhCFI
Guardian News
Published on Mar 26, 2019
Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gives a fiery speech during a committee hearing in response to Republicans push-back on her climate change policy, The Green New Deal. ‘You want to tell people that their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist?’, yells a impassioned Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country … You’re telling those kids that they are trying to get on a plane to Davos? People are dying!'
9:02
The Biggest Lie About Climate Change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbW_1MtC2So
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbW_1MtC2So
AsapSCIENCE
Published on Mar 14, 2019
17:51
James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8
TED
Published on Mar 7, 2012
19:27
Green New Deal: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDcro7dPqpA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDcro7dPqpA
LastWeekTonight
Published on May 12, 2019
With the Green New Deal sparking a national conversation about all the ways to combat climate change, John Oliver looks at a few potential solutions.
6:03
Greta Thunberg | Special Address, Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7dVF9xylaw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7dVF9xylaw
World Economic Forum
Published on Jan 25, 2019
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Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Inequality-Matters-Capital-in-21st-Century-Review
Capital in the twenty-first century / Thomas Piketty ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
1. capital.
2. income distribution.
3. wealth
4. labor economics.
HB501.P43613 2014
332'.041—dc23
2013 in France (la France), 2014 in United States
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=fr&text=France
Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
First published as Le capital au XXI siècle, copyright © 2013 Éditions du Seuil
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Income and Capital
1. Income and Output
2. Growth: Illusions and Realities
Part Two: The Dynamics of the Capital/Income Ratio
3. The Metamorphoses of Capital
4. From Old Europe to the New World
5. The Capital/Income Ratio over the Long Run
6. The Capital-Labor Split in the Twenty-First Century
Part Three: The Structure of Inequality
7. Inequality and Concentration: Preliminary Bearings
8. Two Worlds
9. Inequality of Labor Income
10. Inequality of Capital Ownership
11. Merit and Inheritance in the Long Run
12. Global Inequality of Wealth in the Twenty-First Century
Part Four: Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century
13. A Social State for the Twenty-First Century
14. Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax
15. A Global Tax on Capital
16. The Question of the Public Debt
Conclusion
Notes
Contents in Detail
List of Tables and Illustrations
Index
Acknowledgments
This book is based on fifteen years of research (1998–2013) devoted essentially to understanding the historical dynamics of wealth and income. Much of this research was done in collaboration with other scholars.
Conclusion
I have presented the current state of our historical knowledge concerning the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income since the eighteenth century, and I have attempted to draw from this knowledge whatever lessons can be drawn for the century ahead.
The sources on which this book draws are more extensive than any previous author has assembled, but they remain imperfect and incomplete. All of my conclusions are by nature tenuous and deserve to be questioned and debated. It is not the purpose of social science research to produce mathematical certainties that can substitute for open, democratic debate in which all shades of opinion are
represented.
The Central Contradiction of Capitalism: r > g
The overall conclusion of this study is that a market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.
The principal destabilizing force has to do with the fact that the private rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g.
The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.
The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the return on capital varies directly with the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.
The problem is enormous, and there is no simple solution. Growth can of course be encouraged by investing in education, knowledge, and nonpolluting technologies. But none of these will raise the growth rate to 4 or 5 percent a year. History shows that only countries that are catching up with more advanced economies—such as Europe during the three decades after World War II or China and other emerging countries today—can grow at such rates. For countries at the world technological frontier—and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole—there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1–1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted.1
With an average return on capital of 4–5 percent, it is therefore likely that r > g will again become the norm in the twenty-first century, as it had been throughout history until the eve of World War I. In the 20th century, it took two world wars to wipe away the past and significantly reduce the return on capital, thereby creating the illusion that the fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism (r > g) had been overcome.
... ... ...
Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.
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by Stephen Chen
https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/beyond-yellow-river-dna-records-tell-new-story-han-chinese-origins/article/3011457
Dr Li Yuchun, lead author of the paper, said the findings helped trace the history of Han to the dawn of civilization, the emergence of agriculture and the sustainable growth of population.
“Increasing food led to a population boom in these areas. We can see it in the separate path of gene evolution,” Li said.
The research also found that women were able to preserve their genetic story better than men as they stayed at home to tend the fields, while men went to explore, trade or wage war.
Stephen is a contributor to Inkstone. He covers science and its impact on society, as well as the environment, military, geopolitics and business for the South China Morning Post.
© 2019 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Hans Rosling explains demographic
16:36
Why the world population won’t exceed 11 billion | Hans Rosling | TGS.ORG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
THINK Global School
Published on Dec 1, 2015
In part 5 of a 6-part lecture, Hans Rosling uses statistics to give an overview of population growth and an explanation of why the total human population will never reach 11 billion, as others predict and fear.
child mortality and babies born per woman
2:50
#BillsLetter
Hans Rosling: The River of Myths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYpX4l2UeZg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYpX4l2UeZg
Bill Gates
Published on Jan 31, 2013
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EPA Plans To Get Thousands of Pollution Deaths Off the Books by Changing Its Math (nytimes.com)
Posted by msmash on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @11:30AM from the how-about-that dept
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/05/22/1530213/epa-plans-to-get-thousands-of-pollution-deaths-off-the-books-by-changing-its-math
in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.
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The Atlantic
"Breakfast Food" is a Lie - Americans eat a narrower variety of foods for breakfast than anyone else (514 words)
By Amanda Mull
May 14, 2019
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/what-is-breakfast/589411/
According to Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University, that’s consistent with how much of the world still approaches the day’s first meal. “Poorer people everywhere, especially in places like India and China, eat the same kind of food for meal after meal,” he says. “The strict differentiation of meals is partly an American thing, but partly a thing of upward mobility.” Breakfast food, as a concept, is a luxury.
... ... ...
The first half of the 20th century is when breakfast’s class elements start to take hold in the U.S., Ray says. Refrigeration was a luxury, and although the ingredients in cereal might be cheap and nutritionally hollow, brand-name versions have always been pricey. “The most expensive part of cereal-making is shoving it down people’s throats by advertising,” he explains. “I don’t think cereal would have been successful without the massive propaganda of the industry.”
source:
https://tildes.net/~food
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Leonard-Barton, Dorothy
Wellsprings of Knowledge : building and sustaining the sources of innovation / Dorothy Leonard-Barton
1. information technology——management
2. information resources management
3. management information systems
copyright © 1995
HD30.2.L46 1995
658.4'038——dc20
p.205
Schwartz tells how Smith & Hawken, a mail-order garden tool business, sharpened its focus when the company decided, in the late 1970s, to consider possible futures. It constructed three scenarios: (1) "more of the same but better," (2) "worse" (decay and depression), and (3) "different but better" (fundamental change). The company determined that the first two scenarios both suggested direct mail as the best approach, since either people would be wealthy enough to buy but too busy to get to the store, or the market would disappear and capital-intensive retail operations would be highly risky. Scenario 3, fundamental change, implied a concern for the environment and distrust of throwaway tools. The 1980s turned out to be a mixture of the three scenarios, with both yuppie wealth and homelessness in the United States and a growth in concern for the environment. Although none of the scenarios exactly played out, the company was better positioned because its managers had thought through which steps to take under the various conditions.49
(Leonard-Barton, Dorothy, copyright © 1995, HD30.2.L46 1995, 658.4'038——dc20)
(Wellsprings of Knowledge : building and sustaining the sources of innovation / Dorothy Leonard-Barton, 1. information technology——management, 2. information resources management, 3. management information systems, )
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6:25
Why Japan's Homeless are Different from North America's (Part 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK--oCVP18A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK--oCVP18A
Life Where I'm From
Published on Aug 16, 2017
One day while walking around Shinjuku, a major hub for government and business in Tokyo, Japan, I noticed a shelter built by a homeless man. It looked semi-permanent, but more importantly, had solar panels on it. I thought this was very different than the homeless I encountered in my former city of Vancouver, Canada, so I started to investigate homelessness in Japan.
I was lucky enough to interview Professor Tom Gill, who has researched homelessness and other societal issues in Japan for many years.
This is part 1 of a series of videos I'm making about the homeless in Japan. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave in the comments. Thanks for watching.
12:01
DW is a German public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Berlin: homeless capital of Germany and other world stories | DW Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejK8IEvLjtQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejK8IEvLjtQ
DW Documentary
Published on Jan 18, 2018
5:21
DW is a German public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Germany: Homeless Students | European Journal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOsXLMo4I_s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOsXLMo4I_s
DW News
Published on Nov 29, 2012
Affordable housing is becoming increasingly hard to find in Germany's big cities. The main reason is the euro crisis; those who can afford it are buying - because property is seen as a safe investment. Big cities like Hamburg have a shortage of affordable housing. Students and trainees are hardest hit, as are low-income families.
2:02
Rising Rents and Homelessness in America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWOYSQ_6Juk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWOYSQ_6Juk
Zillow
Published on Sep 29, 2017
Rising Rents and Homelessness in America
Many factors contribute to homelessness, but one common issue goes overlooked: the impact of rising rents and decreasing median incomes.
9:54
Press TV is funded in whole or in part by the Iranian government.
10 Minutes: Homelessness in America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzdT390OCz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzdT390OCz4
PressTV Documentaries
Published on Dec 4, 2016
According to the recent 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress on a single night in 2016, over half a million people were experiencing homelessness in the United States of America.
12:00
DW is a German public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Germany’s poor pensioners | DW Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDveK6oWN5w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDveK6oWN5w
DW Documentary
Published on Jan 22, 2018
Poverty threatens more German seniors than ever. How to make ends meet, when pension isn’t enough?
12:07
([ professional ])
DW is a German public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Down and out in Russia: Fighting hunger | DW Reporter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AguJNdNCzao
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AguJNdNCzao
DW News
Published on Feb 6, 2016
About 60,000 homeless people live in St. Petersburg. Winter is an especially difficult time for them. The Nochlezhka charity organization helps them survive. A mobile van travels the city delivering meals to people in need.
22:50
Mediacorp is funded in whole or in part by the Singapore government.
Get Rea!: Cubicle Dreams (Hong Kong)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQF0-3-RupM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQF0-3-RupM
CNA
Published on Feb 17, 2014
54-year-old Yeung Suen is one of Hong Kong's 100,000 cubicle dwellers. He lives in a 35 square foot windowless space barely bigger than his bed. The irony is, he pays more per square foot in rent than someone living in a luxury apartment. In this episode, Get Real enters Hong Kong's world of cubicle dwellers, and asks if living in a cubicle is their only option.
22:19
LOVE & DRUGS ON THE STREETS S2 • E1
Britain's Homeless In Winter | Girls Living On The Streets Of Brighton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=746xJlIAHJ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=746xJlIAHJ4
BBC Three
Published on Feb 11, 2018
Kelly is 18 and has been homeless since leaving care a year and a half ago. 22-year-old Charlotte and her boyfriend Lance are sleeping rough having been evicted from their flat.
48:45
Bay Area Homeless - Concern or Crisis Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCaOeyjHgaE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCaOeyjHgaE
KTVU
Published on Sep 11, 2017
Part 1 of our special on homelessness in the Bay Area.
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16:33
How Sand Mining Destroys One Home to Build Another | Short Film Showcase
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpc3hhH1cas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpc3hhH1cas
National Geographic
Published on May 5, 2019
As Singapore dredges sand out from beneath Cambodia’s mangroves one woman is faced with the erasure of her beloved home.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southeast-asia-mining-sand/sand-mining-mafias-destroying-environment-livelihoods-u-n-idUSKCN1SD0KG
Asia
May 7, 2019 / 12:29 AM / Updated 18 hours ago
“Communities are losing their land and their homes because of sand mining, but they are split over the issue because some people make a living from it, while others say it is ruining their lives,”
Reporting by Rina Chandran @rinachandran; Editing by Michael Taylor. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change.
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U.S. data and trend on wealth and income distribution
Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed (Parts 1 & 2)
Ray Dalio
Published on April 5, 2019
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-reformed-parts-1-2-ray-dalio
Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue
Ray Dalio
Published on October 23, 2017
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-biggest-economic-social-political-issue-two-economies-ray-dalio
https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/raydalio
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https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/investment_manager_2014.html
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth.html
Wealth, Income, and Power
by G. William Domhoff
The Wealth Distribution
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2010, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details, drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2012).
Table 1: Distribution of net worth and financial wealth in the United States, 1983-2010
Total Net Worth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 33.8% 47.5% 18.7%
1989 37.4% 46.2% 16.5%
1992 37.2% 46.6% 16.2%
1995 38.5% 45.4% 16.1%
1998 38.1% 45.3% 16.6%
2001 33.4% 51.0% 15.6%
2004 34.3% 50.3% 15.3%
2007 34.6% 50.5% 15.0%
2010 35.4% 53.5% 11.1%
Financial (Non-Home) Wealth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 42.9% 48.4% 8.7%
1989 46.9% 46.5% 6.6%
1992 45.6% 46.7% 7.7%
1995 47.2% 45.9% 7.0%
1998 47.3% 43.6% 9.1%
2001 39.7% 51.5% 8.7%
2004 42.2% 50.3% 7.5%
2007 42.7% 50.3% 7.0%
2010 42.1% 53.5% 4.7%
Total assets are defined as the sum of: (1) the gross value of owner-occupied housing; (2) other real estate owned by the household; (3) cash and demand deposits; (4) time and savings deposits, certificates of deposit, and money market accounts; (5) government bonds, corporate bonds, foreign bonds, and other financial securities; (6) the cash surrender value of life insurance plans; (7) the cash surrender value of pension plans, including IRAs, Keogh, and 401(k) plans; (8) corporate stock and mutual funds; (9) net equity in unincorporated businesses; and (10) equity in trust funds.
Total liabilities are the sum of: (1) mortgage debt; (2) consumer debt, including auto loans; and (3) other debt. From Wolff (2004, 2007, 2010, & 2012).
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Chris Anderson, The long tail, 2006 [ ]
p.125
In the summer of 1897 an Italian polymath named Vilfredo Pareto busied himself in his university office in Switzerland, studying patterns of wealth and income in 19th-century England. It was the age of Marx, and the question of wealth distribution was in the air. Pareto found that the spread of wealth was indeed unequal in England--most of it went to a minority of the people. When he calculated the exact ratios, he found that about 20 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the wealth. More important, when he compared that with other countries and regions, he found that the ratio remained the same.
What Pareto had discovered is that there is a predictable mathematical relationship in the pattern of wealth and populations, something he called the Law of the Vital Few. It seemed constant over time, and across countries. Pareto was a brilliant economist, but he was a poor explainer, so not many understood the importance of his insight. He went on to write obscure sociological tracts about elites, which unfortunately were taken up at the end of his life by Mussolini's fascists. But the theory of unequal distribution took on a life of its own, and Pareto's observation is now known as the 80/20 Rule.
p.126
Powerlaws are family of curves that you can find practically anywhere you look, from biology to book sales. The Long Tail is a powerlaw that isn't cruelly cut off by bottlenecks in distribution such as limited shelf space and available channels. Because the amplitude of a powerlaw approaches but never reaches zero as the curve stretches out to infinity, it's known as a “long-tailed” curve, which is where I derived the name of this book.
pp.126-127
As far as consumer markets go, powerlaws come about when you have three conditions:
1. Variety (there are many different sorts of things)
2. Inequality (some have more of some quality than others)
3. Network effects such as word of mouth and reputation, which tend to amplify differences in quality.
In others words, powerlaw distributions occur where things are different, some are better than others, and effects such as reputation can work to promote the good and suppress the bad. This results in what Pareto called the “predictable imbalance” of market, culture, and society: Success breeds success.
(Anderson, Chris, The long tail : why the future of business is selling less of more / Chris Anderson.--1st ed., 1. market segmentation., 2. internet marketing., 3. marketing--technological innovation., 658.802 Anderson, 2006, )
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By Franklin Hiram King (author)
Excerpt from Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan
We have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling of the earth; yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition of civilization. If we are to assemble all the forces and agencies that make for the final conquest of the planet, we must assuredly know how it is that all the peoples in all the places have met the problem of producing their sustenance out of the soil.
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5350
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R5VHF6ARFZISG/
Raven
Farmers please read
May 6, 2011
Format: Kindle Edition
Verified Purchase
First published in 1911, with a preface by Dr. L. H. Bailey, Farmers of Forty Centuries is the kind of book that would be of interest to farmers and historians alike.
This book was written at time in society when 'better living through chemistry' was just starting to take hold as mainstream thinking. Reductionist science, pesticides, and fertilizer were gaining strength and agriculture was changing from a point of view that works with the natural processes to a system that conquers and controls plants natural impulses. Taking into account the time when this book was written, and one can see that it is an important book in the history of agriculture and an excellent reference for modern farmers that might have been lost if not for the dedication of people who converted it to e-text.
The preface by Dr Bailey, discusses where American agriculture stands at the turn of the last century (1900). It mentions how farming in the North America is very successful, and acknowledged that this is primarily because the population density of the continent is sparse and people have been cultivating the soil for a relatively short time. Bailey mentions that in order to properly conquer the land and turn it to our needs (common attitude of the time) we must be careful not to strip it of fertility. Chemical farming alone will do this over time; however, by examining agricultural practices that have sustained themselves for long periods without loosing soil fertility - then american farming can be even more productive (shame this wasn't taken to heart at the time).
The book itself is examines agricultural practices in some of the most densely populated areas of the world at the time in hopes of gleaming some useful information.
Given where we are now with industrialized farming, this book might just be what we need to help understand how we can regain some of the waste farmland that now has very little or no agricultural use thanks to poor management practices over the last 100 years.
The kindle version has no interactive menus, no way of quick navigation and no pictures. But there are no obvious errors in the text.
This book is perfect for both small farmers and large scale agri-business.
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5350
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notes ([ the law of the minimum ])
Thinking in systems
a primer
Donella H. Meadows
Edited by Diana Wright
sustainability institute
2008
p.101
A patch of growing grain needs:
• sunlight
• air
• water
• nitrogen
• phosphorus
• potassium
• dozens of minor nutrients
• a friable soil and the services of a microbial soil community
• some system to control the weeds and pests ([ ideally without pesticides, insecticides, herbicides or any chemical of that sort ])
• protection from the wastes of the industrial manufacturer
It was with regard to grain that Justus von Liebig came up with his famous “law of minimum.” It doesn't matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what's short is phosphorus. It does not no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.
Bread will not rise without yeast, no matter how much flour it has. Children will not thrive without protein, no matter how many carbohydrates they eat. Companies can't keep going without energy, no matter how many customers they have──or without customers, no matter how much energy they have.
This concept of a limiting factor is simple and widely misunderstood.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WfELt4nDPdNt0HCUQ4UNJON5a_sdLkiE
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WfELt4nDPdNt0HCUQ4UNJON5a_sdLkiE/view
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William Engdahl, A century of war: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order, 1992, 2004
pdf page: 24/314 (filename: Engdahl_Century_of_War_book.pdf)
Germany and the Geopolitics of the Great War
p.13
The German chemical industry, under the impulse of great researchers such as Justus von Liebig and others, grew from one vastly inferior to both the French and the British industries, to become the world's leader in analine dye production, pharmaceuticals and chemical fertilizers.
p.13
Introduction of scientific agriculture chemistry by von Liebig and others led to astonishing rates of productivity increase during this period for German agriculture. Going from a situation in the early decades of the 1800s which was literally desperate, with outbreaks of famine and harvest failure, when it seemed more economical to import grain from Russia or even Argentina, Germany reimposed a protective tariff blocking imports of cheap grain in the 1890s.
pp.13-14
The mechanization of farming began to show progress, going from 20,000 harvesting machines in 1882 to some 300,000 by 1907. Despite often inferior and sandy soils, German chemical fertilizer development led to improving harvest yields. Grain harvest yields had improved as a result, by 80 per cent at the time of the Great War, compared with the the period before 1887 when fertilizers were first introduced on a significant scale. By constrast, Russia, at the outbreak of the war, with 3 million acres more under grain cultivation, produced 19 million fewer tons of grain than Germany.
p.14
By 1913, Germany was 95 per cent self-sufficient in meat production, despite per capita meat consumption having doubled since 1870, while Britain in 1913 imported 45 per cent of her meat requirements.
p.14
Paralleling the expansion of its industry and agriculture, Germany went from a net emigration country in the early 1800s, to a country with strong population growth by the end of the century. Between 1870 and 1914 Germany's population increased almost 75 per cent, from 40,000,000 to more than 67,000,000.
p.14
Large industry grew after the 1880s in a symbiosis with large banks such as Deutsche Bank, under what became known as the Grossbanken model, or simply the ‘German model’ of interlocking ownership between major banks and key industrial companies.2
William Engdahl, A century of war: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order, 1992, 2004
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e0PVSremXnuf4Nkn4cY0xW8hF8SaL72-/view
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18:54
Will Technology Solve the Problems Caused by a Rising Population | Fortune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9elrJc-v7Mk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9elrJc-v7Mk
Fortune Magazine
Published on May 18, 2016
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17:49
Food Waste: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY
LastWeekTonight
Published on Jul 19, 2015
Producers, sellers, and consumers waste tons of food. John Oliver discusses the shocking amount of food we don’t eat.
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Food
Betting on Hunger: Is Financial Speculation to Blame for High Food Prices?
Food prices have been on the rise since 2007, thanks in part to bad weather and increasing demand from biofuels and developing nations. But there's one cause that hasn't gotten much attention: financial speculation in crop markets. Are bankers artificially inflating the price of food?
By Kharunya Paramaguru
@Kharunya
Dec. 17, 2012
http://science.time.com/2012/12/17/betting-on-hunger-is-financial-speculation-to-blame-for-high-food-prices/
Correction appended Dec. 17, 2012
Remember the food crisis of 2007 and 2008, when rapid and extreme increases in global food prices led to riots and civil unrest in 28 countries?
... ... ...
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Ann Berg, a former trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and now an adviser to the FAO, says that while this trend has been noted, you “cannot prove causality” between the role of these speculators and the artificially high prices.
Traders have always speculated on the agricultural-commodities futures market, just as they do in other commodities like copper or oil. Those with an actual commercial interest — food producers and buyers — use this market to bet against price increases and decreases as a form of insurance against volatility. But after 1999 and 2000, when sections of the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed and President Bill Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into law, investment banks and other financial actors began to bet on commodities as speculation, not as insurance. “Where we used to see something like 12% of the market made up of financial players, since deregulation, this number has now jumped to over 60%,” says Heidi Chow of the World Development Movement, a U.K.-based campaigning organization.
The statistics are impressive: the German NGO Foodwatch points out that investment in food commodities has jumped from $65 billion to $126 billion in the past five years. Perhaps a more revealing statistic is that speculative investment in these commodities in 2011 amounted to 20 times more than the total spent on agricultural aid by all countries combined.
... ... ...
A possible solution to curbing these investors’ impact on real-world prices has been written into the Dodd-Frank legislation, authorizing the CFTC to set limits on percentages of specific commodity products that can be held by a single entity. Michael Dunn, a former CFTC commissioner, expressed doubts about these limits, describing them as “a cure for a disease that does not exist, or at worst, a placebo for one that does.” His pronouncement is yet to be tested; in October, Judge Robert Wilkins of the Washington, D.C., district court struck down this rule. For its part, the CFTC plans on appealing his decision. It may be the case that by the time regulation is in place, investors have lost their interest in commodity speculation, if only because of the poor optics for banks. For the world’s starving, however, this may be too little, too late.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that President George W. Bush introduced the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. It was introduced during President Bill Clinton’s term.
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US & Canada
Betting the farm on hunger
Debate heats up whether financial speculation is spiking food prices and spelling disaster for millions of poor people.
by Robert Kennedy
28 Sept 2012
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/09/2012911125854157194.html
Financial investors betting on the price of food are dangerously driving up prices, threatening millions of impoverished people in food-importing countries who will go hungry, critics warn.
But the issue of food speculation by banks, hedge and pension funds is a controversial one, and many observers say there is no evidence that gambling on food causes price increases and volatility.
... ... ...
Chris Mahoney, agriculture director for commodity trader Glencore, recently told reporters the US drought would be good for business. "High prices, a lot of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities," said Mahoney.
Attitudes such as these define the core problem with food today, said Haigh. Corporate control over the global food system needs to stop, she said.
"Markets don't have morals," Haigh said. "The fundamental issue is markets care about people's ability to pay for food, not their need for it. We need to radically reform these power dynamics."
SOURCE: Al Jazeera
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Red Winter Wheat
U.S. Corn
Thai Broken Rice
U.S. Hard Red Winter Wheat
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/sites/default/files/casino_hunger_report_dec_2009.pdf
p.3 (pdf Sec1:3)
The biggest change from normal conditions in earlier years was the addition of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment money into the commodity futures markets. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development noted, “a major new element in commodity trading over the past few years is the greater weight on commodity futures exchanges of financial investors that consider commodities an asset class.”21 The additional excess speculation has magnified the volatility in food-staple prices that has contributed to the global food crisis and increased poverty.22
21 UNCTAD. “The Global Economic Crisis” at 24.
https://unctad.org/en/docs/gds20091_en.pdf
22 Collins, Ben. “Hot commodities, stuffed markets, and empty bellies.” Dollars & Sense. July/August 2008.
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Making Sense
Hot Commodities, Stuffed Markets, and Empty Bellies
What's behind higher food prices?
By Ben Collins
http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0708collins.html
... ... ...
The Consequences of Financializing Food
Facing political pressure by constituents over high oil and food prices, several members of Congress have sponsored legislation that would bar index investors from commodity markets. One bill proposed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Ind- Conn.) would prohibit public and private pension funds with more than $500 million in assets from trading in commodity futures, and other bills would limit the maximum number of futures contracts an index investor could hold. These bills may stem the flood of money from index investors into commodities, but comprehensive reform is needed to reverse the Commodity Futures Modernization Act's authorization of over-the-counter commodity trading. Absent an outright repeal of this so-called "Enron loophole," energy and agricultural commodities will continue to be traded outside the reach of government regulation, making future Enron- and Amaranth-style market disruptions inevitable.
Ultimately, eliminating unregulated commodity trading cannot address the fundamental causes of higher agricultural prices. Even if speculative buying is curtailed, supply and demand factors such as falling crop yields, destructive trade policies, and the growing use of biofuels have likely brought the age of cheap food to an end. However, if the critics of commodity index investment are correct, then these investors have amplified recent food price shocks and are needlessly contributing to the impoverishment of the world's poorest citizens. Even though commodity market transparency and regulatory oversight will not solve the global food crisis, eliminating unregulated commodity trading can help resolve the debate over the effects of index investors on commodity prices and restore the accountability of commodity markets to the social interests they were originally established to serve.
Ben Collins is a member of the Dollars & Sense collective and a research analyst at KLD Research & Analytics, a sustainable investment research company. Mr. Collins's views do not necessarily reflect those of KLD or its clients.
Sources: Michael Masters, Testimony before the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, United States Senate, May 20, 2008; Daniel P. Collins, CFTC to up spec limits, Futures, May 1, 2005; Paul Krugman, Fuels on the Hill, New York Times, June 27, 2008; Michael Frankfurter, The Mysterious Case of the Commodity Conundrum, Securitization of Commodities, and Systemic Concerns, Parts 1-3; Michael Frankfurter and Davide Accomazzo, Is Managed Futures an Asset Class? The Search for the Beta of Commodity Futures, December 31, 2007, Graziadio Business Report; Regulator Commits to Futures Tracking Volatility, Associated Press, June 4, 2008; Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC Announces Agricultural Market Initiatives, June 3, 2008; Michael Greenberger, Testimony before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, June 3, 2008; Sinclair Stewart and Paul Waldie, Who is responsible for the global food crisis? Globe and Mail, May 30, 2008; Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Agricultural Markets Roundtable, April 22, 2008; Ann Davis, "Commodities Regulator Under Fire—CFTC Scrutinized As Congress Looks Into Oil-Price Jump," Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2008; Ed Wallace, ICE, ICE, Baby, Houston Chronicle, May 19, 2008; Laura Mandaro, Lieberman plans would bar funds from commodities, Marketwatch, June 18, 2008; Our Confusing Economy, Explained, Fresh Air, April 3, 2008.
This article is from the July/August 2008 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.
http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0708toc.html
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Our Confusing Economy, Explained
39:07
April 3, 2008
11:20 AM ET
Fresh Air
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89338743
Perplexed by the U.S. economy? You're not alone. Law professor Michael Greenberger joins Fresh Air to explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, credit defaults, the shaky future of other types of loans and what we can expect from the U.S. financial markets.
Greenberger is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the director of the University's Center for Health and Homeland Security.
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20 January 2011
Causes of the 2007-2008 global food crisis identified
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/225na1_en.pdf
Source:
Headey, D and Fan, S. (2010) Reflections on the Global Food Crisis. How Did It Happen? How Has It Hurt? And How Can We Prevent the Next One?
International Food Policy Research Institute.
Research Monograph 165.
The report can be accessed at:
http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/rr165.pdf
http://cdm15738.contentdm.oclc.org/utils/getfile/collection/p15738coll2/id/5724/filename/5725.pdf
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2007–08 world food price crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_price_crisis
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William Engdahl, A century of war: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order, 1992, 2004
pdf page: 25/314 (filename: Engdahl_Century_of_War_book.pdf)
pp.14-15
p.14
In 1890, as a result of the near failure of the prestigious London merchant bank, Baring Brothers, arising from their huge losses in Argentine bond speculation and investment, and the ties of German banking to this Argentine speculation, a Berlin bank panic ensured, as the dominoes of an international financial pyramid began to topple.
p.14
Berlin, and German investors generally, had been caught up in international railroad speculation mania in the 1880s. With the crash of the elite Baring Bros., with some $75,000,000 invested in various Argentine bonds, down came the illusions of many Germans about the marvels of financial speculation.
pp.14-15
In the wake of the financial collapse of Argentina, a large wheat exporter to Europe, Berlin grain traders Ritter & Blumenthal had foolishly attempted to ‘corner’ on the entire German wheat market, planning to capitalize on the consequences of the financial troubles in Argentina. This only aggravated the financial panic in Germany as their scheme collapsed, bankrupting in its wake the esteemed private banking house of Hirschfeld & Wolf, and causing huge losses at the Rheinisch-Westphaelische Bank, further triggering a general run on German banks and a collapse of the Berlin stock market, lasting into the autumn of 1891.
p.15
Responding to the crisis, the Chancellor named a Commission of Inquiry of 28 eminent persons, under the chairmanship of Reichsbank President Dr. Richard Koch, to look into the causes and to propose legislative measures to prevent further such panics from occurring. The Koch Commission was composed of a broad and representatives cross-section of German economic society, including representatives from industry, agriculture, universities, political parties, as well as banking and finance.
p.15
The result of the commission's work, most of it voted into law by the Reichstag in the Exchange Act in June 1896, and the Depotgesetz of that July, was the most severe legislation restricting financial speculation of any industrial country of the time. Futures positions in grain were prohibited. Stock market speculation possibilities were severely constrained, one result of which has been the relative absence of stock market speculation since then as a major factor affecting German economic life.
p.15
The German Exchange Act of 1896 established definitively a different form of organization of finance and banking in Germany from that of Britain or America──Anglo-Saxon banking. Not only this, but many London financial houses reduced their activity in the restrictive German financial market after the 1890s as a result of these restrictions, lessening the influence of City of London finance over German economic policy. Significantly, to the present day, these fundamental differences between Anglo-Saxon banking and finance, and a ‘German model’ as largely practiced in Germany, Holland, Switzerland and Japan, are still somewhat visible.3
3. Friedrich List. The National System of Political Economy (1885 edition. London: Longman, Green). Reprinted New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966.
William Engdahl, A century of war: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order, 1992, 2004
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e0PVSremXnuf4Nkn4cY0xW8hF8SaL72-/view
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eon-LgnO0xBGwNocDzajA8hELTmWS1CR
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Howard W. French., Everything under the heavens : how the past help shape China's push for global power, 2017.
p.279
a German economist at Bretton Woods institution in Washington remarked to me,
p.279
to create a new global or regional economic and political institutional arrangements
United States, World Bank in 1944;
Japan, Asian Development Bank in 1966;
Germany, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991;
China, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(Everything under the heavens : how the past help shape China's push for global power / Howard W. French., first edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2017] | China──foreign relations──21st century.| China──foreign relations──Asia.| Asia──foreign relations──China.| strategic culture──China.| geopolitics──Asia., LCC JZ1734.F74 2017| DDC 327.51──dc23, https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021957, 2017, )
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UNITED NATIONS CONFERENCE ON TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT
The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies
Report by the UNCTAD Secretariat Task Force on Systemic Issues and Economic Cooperation
UNITED NATIONS
New York and Geneva, 2009
UNCTAD/GDS/2009/1
UNITED NATIONS PUBLICATION
Sales no. E.09.II.D.4
ISBN 978-92-1-112765-2
Copyright © United Nations, 2009
All rights reserved
https://unctad.org/en/docs/gds20091_en.pdf
https://unctad.org/en/docs/gds20091_en.pdf
Key messages
UNCTAD’s longstanding call for stronger international monetary and financial governance rings true in today’s crisis, which is global and systemic in nature. The crisis dynamics reflect failures in national and international financial deregulation, persistent global imbalances, absence of an international monetary system and deep inconsistencies among global trading, financial and monetary policies.
... ... ...
The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies
... ... ...
p.8 (pdf 23)
D. What should have been anticipated: the illusion of risk-free greed and profligacy
The global financial crisis arose amidst the neglect of international governance – the failure of the international community to give the globalized economy credible global rules. The sudden unwinding of speculative positions in the different segments of the financial market was triggered by the bursting of the house price bubble in the United States. But all these bubbles were unsustainable and would have burst sooner or later. For policy makers who should have known better than to continuously bet on “beating the bank” to now assert (with the benefit of hindsight) that greed ran amok, or that regulators were “asleep at the wheel”, is simply not credible.
The housing price bubble itself was the result of the deregulation of financial markets on a global scale, widely endorsed by Governments around the world. The spreading of risk and the severing of risk and the information about it was promoted by the use of “securitization” through instruments like residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) that seemed to satisfy investors’ hunger for double-digit profits. It is only at this point that greed and profligacy enter the stage. Without the economic “lifestyle” of deregulation of the last decades, and in the presence of more appropriate regulation, expectations on returns of purely financial instruments in the double-digit range would simply not have been possible (Kuttner, 2007; Davidson, 2008).
In real economies with single-digit growth rates those expectations are misguided from the beginning. However, human beings tend to believe that in their generation things may happen that never happened before, ignoring, at least temporarily, the lessons of the past. This happened in most recent memory during the stock market booms of the “new economy”. Despite the dot.com crash of 2000 a wide range of investors began to invest their funds into hedge funds and “innovative financial instruments”. These funds needed to ever increase their risk exposure for the sake of higher yields with more sophisticated computer models searching for the best bets, which actually added to the opaqueness of many instruments. It should have been clear from the outset that everybody can’t be above average (Kuttner, 2007: 21) and that the capacity of the real economy to cope with exaggerated real estate and commodity prices or misaligned exchange rates is strictly limited, but it is only now, through the experience of the crisis, that this is coming to be understood by many actors and policymakers.
A more important driver of this kind of “financial innovation”, however, was the naive belief in efficient market theories that did not recognize objective uncertainty but mistakenly assumed well-informed buyers and sellers and hence promised minimal risk (Davidson, 2008). But “securitization” of investment vehicles led to further risk concentration because it converted debtor-creditor relations (or insurer-insured relation) into capital flow transactions by packing different types of debt for onward sale to investors in form of bonds all around the world (Fabozzi et al., 2007), whose interest and return of principal are based on the value of the underlying assets. Due to the opaqueness of these complex bundled “products”, many “securitized” assets found their way into instruments qualified as low-risk. A global clientele invested in these bonds because the global imbalances had intensified the global financial relations and had created the need for financial institutions located in the countries with current account surpluses to hold much of the toxic paper. In the first flush of financial liberalization, the global distribution of these papers was seen as an indication of successful risk diversification.
p.9 (pdf 24)
Chapter I – A crisis foretold
But eventually the opposite happened: financial “innovation” resulted in a concentration of risk since most of the “vehicles” were “securitized” by using assets that had similar default risks (Kuttner, 2007: 21–22).
Needless to mention, that credit-rating agencies totally failed. But it is mainly due to the microeconomic approach they usually take and their ignorance concerning macroeconomic and systemic factors on a global scale that they misunderstood the risk of so many participants playing on the same fragile bridge between the small real economy and a bloated financial sector.
... ... ...
p.23 (pdf 38)
Chapter III Managing the financialization of commodity futures trading
A. Introduction: commodity markets and the financial crisis
... ... ...
p.24 (pdf 39)
Figure 3.1 COMMODITY PRICE CHANGES, 2002–2008
A. JUNE 2008 VS. JANUARY 2002
(Percentage change)
... ... ...
p.24 (pdf 39)
commodities as an asset class.
The depreciation of the dollar clearly was one such general cause for the surge in commodity prices. But a major new element in commodity trading over the past few years is the greater weight on commodity futures exchanges of financial investors that consider commodities as an asset class. Their possible role in exacerbating price movements away from fundamentals at certain moments and for certain commodities is the focus of the following sections.
... ... ...
p.25 (pdf 40)
Chapter III – Managing the financialization of commodity futures trading
B. The growing presence of financial investors in commodity markets
... ... ...
Two common indexes are
the Standard & Poor’s Goldman Sachs Commodity Index(S&P GSCI) and
the Dow Jones-American International Group Commodity Index (DJ-AIGCI),
which are composites of weighted prices of a broad range of commodities, including energy products, agricultural products, and metals.9
... ... ...
p.25 (pdf 40)
The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies
That is why all the weaknesses in speculative activity have to be tackled at the same time. For example, dealing only with the national aspects of re-regulation to prevent housing bubbles and the creation of risky assets related to this area would only intensify in other areas like stocks. Preventing currency speculation through a new global monetary system with automatically adjusted exchange rates might redirect the short-term games towards commodities and increase volatility there. The same is true for regional success in fighting speculation, which might put other regions in the spotlight of speculators. Nothing short of closing down the big casino will provide a lasting solution.
It is obvious, a coherent and effective approach can only be found at the international level and with the inclusion of as many countries as possible. A broad international agreement about the distortional effects of large-scale speculation in different areas on growth and employment is absolutely crucial to create the framework for a globalization that has the potential to deliver rising living standards for all.
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https://www.zdnet.com/article/medicine-needs-to-embrace-open-source/
http://www.opensourcepharma.net/resources.html
What Is Open Source Pharma (and Why Should You Care)?
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday September 05, 2015 @04:50PM from the having-the-patience-to-help-patients dept.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/05/1825252/what-is-open-source-pharma-and-why-should-you-care
What is Open Source Pharma (and why should you care)?
Friday, September 4th, 2015 @ 12:36 PM EDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/articles/what-open-source-pharma-and-why-should-you-care
... ... ...
It has been observed that when one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but that when a million do, it’s a statistic. Perhaps the best way to bring the reality of non-existent and over-priced medications back into focus is to quote from an essay written by James Arinaitwe, one of the members of Open Source Pharma, the (so far) loosely affiliated group of individuals and organizations that have now met for the second year to further this cause:
I grew up in rural Western Uganda, where two of my siblings succumbed to measles before their fifth birthday and my father to HIV/AIDS before I turned 10. I often wondered why so many preventable and treatable diseases were still killing the world's poorest and most vulnerable people. Could it be possible that big pharmaceutical companies and big, bureaucracy-laden governments were so vertically aligned in their approach to bringing life-saving medicines to market, that they rarely saw any reason to find solidarity with the communities that would eventually benefit from their inventions and policies?
My father and my baby sisters did not die because the vaccines for measles or the antiretroviral drugs for HIV were not available. They died, in large part, because life-saving vaccines and medicines were priced beyond our reach.
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Goldman Sachs Asks: 'Is Curing Patients a Sustainable Business Model?'
Posted by msmash on Monday February 18, 2019 @07:30AM from the wow dept.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/18/100232/goldman-sachs-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model
Investing
Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’
Published Wed, Apr 11 2018 3:15 PM EDT
Updated Wed, Apr 11 2018 7:20 PM EDT
Tae Kim
@firstadopter
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
... ... ...
The report suggested three potential solutions for biotech firms:
“Solution 1: Address large markets: Hemophilia is a $9-10bn WW market (hemophilia A, B), growing at ~6-7% annually.”
“Solution 2: Address disorders with high incidence: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) affects the cells (neurons) in the spinal cord, impacting the ability to walk, eat, or breathe.”
“Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness) … Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets.”
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Hunter-gathering seems to have been easier than farming
Why does farming catch on when it dings health and quality of life?
Cathleen O'Grady - 5/24/2019, 8:37 AM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/adopting-agriculture-means-less-leisure-time-for-women/
For most of our history, humans got hold of food like any other animal: by hunting and foraging, moving around to find the best resources. Settling down in one place to cultivate crops is a comparatively recent development. But once it started around 12,000 years ago, agriculture spread through human cultures across the world, fundamentally changing our societies, genomes, and possibly even languages. In many ways, farming seems to have been terrible news for the people who adopted it, leading to poorer nutrition and greater social inequality—but it also resulted in higher fertility rates and a massive population expansion.
Understanding how and why this technological change was adopted remains a challenge. Studies mostly rely on fossil evidence, but there are also clues in the modern world, as some present-day groups of people are moving away from hunting, fishing, and gathering their food and toward agriculture.
A paper published in Nature Human Behaviour explores how this shift affects the time budgets of hunter-gatherers in the Philippines, finding that women who participate more in agricultural work have less leisure time—around half the leisure time of women who prioritize foraging. The results fall in line with past research that challenges the concept of hunting and foraging as arduous work with scant rewards, and this work contributes to a growing understanding of the social dynamics that go along with a shift to agriculture.
A natural experiment
The Agta people in the northern Philippines have sustained their traditions of hunting, fishing, and foraging for food to this day, preserving a huge body of knowledge. Many of them trade some of their high-protein catch with local rice farmers, getting high-calorie carbs in return. But some Agta people also spend some of their time working on local rice farms instead of foraging, which makes it possible to explore the consequences of a shift to farming playing out in real time.
Of course, this is not a perfect proxy for the change that people would have experienced 10,000 or 5,000 years ago. For one thing, the Agta are modern people who have been living alongside agriculturalists in an industrializing country for a very long time. Another crucial difference is that the agricultural techniques available to the Agta are a world apart from the sort of farming that was being developed millennia ago.
The social and political dynamics playing out between Agta and other Filipino populations are also going to be distinct from those of societies that have managed this transition in the past. Every set of social interactions has probably been distinct, so this isn't new—but the difference in social context matters.
With those caveats in mind, researchers gathered data on how Agta spent their time each day for months. Every day, they’d scan 359 people living across 10 camps—including 142 adults—and find out what they were up to, starting early in the morning and repeating every few hours until sundown.
Budgeting time
The results sketch out how sex and age make a difference to people’s time budgets. Beginning in adolescence, women and men both start spending more time on domestic chores, childcare, and “out-of-camp” work, which can include hunting, foraging, and agricultural work. For men, more of that time goes on out-of-camp work; for women, more goes on childcare and domestic work, but there’s some of each in the mix for everyone. Around the same time, leisure time takes a nosedive and doesn't pick up again until around middle age.
There were huge differences in the amount of agricultural work that people did—some did nothing, and for others, it was as high as 80 percent of their out-of-camp work time. It’s not well-understood why people make such different choices, says Abigail Page, one of the authors of the paper. Some camps are closer to rice farms than others, but camp membership is fluid among the Agta people, and they're able to move from one to another when they choose. So it could be that people who are more interested in farming choose to live in the camps that are nearer farms. It's not clear whether living nearer the farms could affect the wild resources that are available.
Being closer to non-Agta farming population could also mean “seeing the benefits of this lifestyle," she adds. For some Agta, preserving their culture and identity is central. But for others, farming is seen as higher-status, and some Agta mothers “talk about their desire to have kids that are educated and healthy,” says Page. Unfortunately, for Agta people, the transition to farming comes with worse health and higher infant mortality.
This research also shows leisure time takes a knock: women who engaged more in agriculture spent more time working out of camp, didn’t reduce their domestic load, and thus had less leisure time. “The transition away from foraging,” the researchers write, comes along with “a deteriorated standard of living.”
Time affluence
From the 1960s onward, anthropologists began to shift how they talked about hunter-gatherers. While they had previously been seen as living precarious lives filled with hardship, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued that their lifestyle was, in fact, one of abundance. They desired little, he argued, and their essential needs were met easily, allowing a workweek of just 12 hours in what Sahlins called the “original affluent society.” This framing has been challenged—the 12 hours of work per week estimate omits domestic chores and food processing. The hardships caused by natural disasters and other changes in resource availability from one year to the next also didn't figure in Sahlins' framework.
Still, it does seem to be true that moving away from foraging and toward farming goes along with poorer health and a lower standard of living—both for modern hunter-gatherers and for our Neolithic ancestors. Why, then, did farming catch on? The best explanation may involve calories and fertility: the readily available carbs of farmed cereals can make a huge difference to how many children a woman has, which makes it a strategy favored by the cold hard math of evolution.
Regardless of how they made their choices, our modern view of hunter-gatherers get stuck between “the naturalistic fallacy of everything they do being good” and a view that assumes their lives are “short and brutal,” says Page. In reality, the picture is more complicated. Even in a very marginal environment, people are still able to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and have a good amount of leisure time. Farming may bring them some advantages, either real or perceived, but it shouldn't be assumed to mean uncomplicated "progress."
In some ways, that's because we look to them to understand ourselves. “We tend to like using hunter-gatherers to reflect on our own nature,” says Page. Correlational data like this, based on one group of people, has its limitations in supporting navel-gazing, but it’s useful in understanding how prestige and fertility may have played a role in the spread of agriculture.
It's also important not to limit our perspective so that hunter-gathering is the only factor about a people we consider, which would miss out on really understanding the group of people in question. If the paper had been on land rights, “something that mattered to the Agta," she adds, "it wouldn’t have received half as much attention.”
Nature Human Behavior, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0614-6 (About DOIs).
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“There's a stable, robust relationship
between the patterns [of wealth and poverty that]
you've seen before and
what you encounter today.”;
── Adam Grant,
Originals: how non-conformists move the world,
2016, p.53
1:17:03
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez | SXSW 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU-SE5eNt04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU-SE5eNt04
SXSW
Published on Mar 10, 2019
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=682
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=682
([ an old trope, we're getting con ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=740
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=740
([ Trump has been able to fill a void ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=786
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=786
([ I'll kind of go back with a story ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=836
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=836
([ 10 per cent better than garbage ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1000
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1000
([ meh ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1058
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1058
([ Bechdel test? ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1071
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1071
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Thirty-two-year-old French economist Gabriel Zucman scours spreadsheets to find secret offshore accounts.
https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/BLM7828005774
https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/BLM7828005774?selected=BLM3218777474
Bloomberg
Businessweek
Listen to the Story
Our editors bring you the most interesting reporting from this week in the world of business, finance, tech, and politics.
The Wealth Detective
May 23, 2019, 2:00 AM PDT
The Wealth Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich
Thirty-two-year-old French economist Gabriel Zucman scours spreadsheets to find secret offshore accounts.
By Ben Steverman
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-23/the-wealth-detective-who-finds-the-hidden-money-of-the-super-rich?srnd=businessweek-v2
The Wealth Detective
The rich know how to keep their money secret. Gabriel Zucman knows how to find it.
By Ben Steverman
Tue, 21 May 2019 16:28:43
Bloomberg News
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/BLM3218777474.mp3
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News & Events
Massachusetts Hospitals Stockpile $1.6 Billion in Cayman Islands and other Offshore Accounts; Nurses Call for Financial Transparency
05.30.2019
https://www.massnurses.org/news-and-events/p/openItem/11324
CANTON, Mass. – Hospital corporations across Massachusetts have placed at least $1.6 billion in the Cayman Islands and other well-known offshore tax havens, leading nurses and lawmakers to call for legislation requiring financial transparency from hospitals and the returning of excess profits and CEO pay to the public good.
“We can improve our health care system by shining a light on hospital finances, limiting excessive CEO pay and ensuring that the public has a stronger voice in shaping how our health care dollars are spent,” said Karen Coughlin, a 35-year RN from Mansfield and Vice President of the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
The Hospital Profit Transparency and Fairness Act (S. 714/H. 1144) requires hospitals to disclose financial holdings and profits, including money kept in offshore accounts. It will also claw back excessive profits and CEO pay and return that money to the public good through a newly created Medicaid Reimbursement Enhancement Fund. Massachusetts hospitals are both largely non-profit organizations and publicly funded through tax dollars.
... ... ...
To address this issue, The Hospital Profit Transparency and Fairness Act (S. 714/H. 1144) will:
• Require hospitals to be transparent about their financial holdings and other activities.
• Assess any hospital receiving taxpayer dollars that has an annual operating margin above a specific, predetermined cap.
• Assess any hospital receiving taxpayer dollars that provides a compensation package for its CEO that is greater than 100 times that of the hospital's lowest paid employee.
• Deposit assessments in a newly created Medicaid Reimbursement Enhancement Fund to increase Medicaid reimbursement rates to eligible hospitals as a way to claw back excess profits and ensure that taxpayer dollars are dedicated exclusively to safe patient care and necessary services for all communities in the commonwealth.
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2:06
Panama Papers explained like you were five
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e87OxZAkgmY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e87OxZAkgmY
Teriyakuza
Published on Apr 5, 2016
Panama Papers explained like you were five, with piggy banks
source:
https://www.vox.com/2016/4/4/11361780/the-panama-papers-cartoon
2:06
The Panama Papers, explained with piggy banks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2APYPjTWZ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2APYPjTWZ8
https://youtu.be/k2APYPjTWZ8
https://youtu.be/k2APYPjTWZ8
Vox
Published on Apr 5, 2016
A massive document leak reveals the secrets of shell companies. Matt Yglesias explains, adapting an analogy from reddit user DanGliesack:
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2:47
‘This is not an elitist issue’: AOC on Republican inaction on climate change –video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5M8vvEhCFI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5M8vvEhCFI
Guardian News
Published on Mar 26, 2019
Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gives a fiery speech during a committee hearing in response to Republicans push-back on her climate change policy, The Green New Deal. ‘You want to tell people that their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist?’, yells a impassioned Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country … You’re telling those kids that they are trying to get on a plane to Davos? People are dying!'
9:02
The Biggest Lie About Climate Change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbW_1MtC2So
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbW_1MtC2So
AsapSCIENCE
Published on Mar 14, 2019
17:51
James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8
TED
Published on Mar 7, 2012
19:27
Green New Deal: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDcro7dPqpA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDcro7dPqpA
LastWeekTonight
Published on May 12, 2019
With the Green New Deal sparking a national conversation about all the ways to combat climate change, John Oliver looks at a few potential solutions.
6:03
Greta Thunberg | Special Address, Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7dVF9xylaw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7dVF9xylaw
World Economic Forum
Published on Jan 25, 2019
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Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Inequality-Matters-Capital-in-21st-Century-Review
Capital in the twenty-first century / Thomas Piketty ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
1. capital.
2. income distribution.
3. wealth
4. labor economics.
HB501.P43613 2014
332'.041—dc23
2013 in France (la France), 2014 in United States
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=fr&text=France
Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
First published as Le capital au XXI siècle, copyright © 2013 Éditions du Seuil
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Income and Capital
1. Income and Output
2. Growth: Illusions and Realities
Part Two: The Dynamics of the Capital/Income Ratio
3. The Metamorphoses of Capital
4. From Old Europe to the New World
5. The Capital/Income Ratio over the Long Run
6. The Capital-Labor Split in the Twenty-First Century
Part Three: The Structure of Inequality
7. Inequality and Concentration: Preliminary Bearings
8. Two Worlds
9. Inequality of Labor Income
10. Inequality of Capital Ownership
11. Merit and Inheritance in the Long Run
12. Global Inequality of Wealth in the Twenty-First Century
Part Four: Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century
13. A Social State for the Twenty-First Century
14. Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax
15. A Global Tax on Capital
16. The Question of the Public Debt
Conclusion
Notes
Contents in Detail
List of Tables and Illustrations
Index
Acknowledgments
This book is based on fifteen years of research (1998–2013) devoted essentially to understanding the historical dynamics of wealth and income. Much of this research was done in collaboration with other scholars.
Conclusion
I have presented the current state of our historical knowledge concerning the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income since the eighteenth century, and I have attempted to draw from this knowledge whatever lessons can be drawn for the century ahead.
The sources on which this book draws are more extensive than any previous author has assembled, but they remain imperfect and incomplete. All of my conclusions are by nature tenuous and deserve to be questioned and debated. It is not the purpose of social science research to produce mathematical certainties that can substitute for open, democratic debate in which all shades of opinion are
represented.
The Central Contradiction of Capitalism: r > g
The overall conclusion of this study is that a market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.
The principal destabilizing force has to do with the fact that the private rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g.
The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.
The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the return on capital varies directly with the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.
The problem is enormous, and there is no simple solution. Growth can of course be encouraged by investing in education, knowledge, and nonpolluting technologies. But none of these will raise the growth rate to 4 or 5 percent a year. History shows that only countries that are catching up with more advanced economies—such as Europe during the three decades after World War II or China and other emerging countries today—can grow at such rates. For countries at the world technological frontier—and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole—there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1–1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted.1
With an average return on capital of 4–5 percent, it is therefore likely that r > g will again become the norm in the twenty-first century, as it had been throughout history until the eve of World War I. In the 20th century, it took two world wars to wipe away the past and significantly reduce the return on capital, thereby creating the illusion that the fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism (r > g) had been overcome.
... ... ...
Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.
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by Stephen Chen
https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/beyond-yellow-river-dna-records-tell-new-story-han-chinese-origins/article/3011457
Dr Li Yuchun, lead author of the paper, said the findings helped trace the history of Han to the dawn of civilization, the emergence of agriculture and the sustainable growth of population.
“Increasing food led to a population boom in these areas. We can see it in the separate path of gene evolution,” Li said.
The research also found that women were able to preserve their genetic story better than men as they stayed at home to tend the fields, while men went to explore, trade or wage war.
Stephen is a contributor to Inkstone. He covers science and its impact on society, as well as the environment, military, geopolitics and business for the South China Morning Post.
© 2019 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Hans Rosling explains demographic
16:36
Why the world population won’t exceed 11 billion | Hans Rosling | TGS.ORG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
THINK Global School
Published on Dec 1, 2015
In part 5 of a 6-part lecture, Hans Rosling uses statistics to give an overview of population growth and an explanation of why the total human population will never reach 11 billion, as others predict and fear.
child mortality and babies born per woman
2:50
#BillsLetter
Hans Rosling: The River of Myths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYpX4l2UeZg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYpX4l2UeZg
Bill Gates
Published on Jan 31, 2013
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EPA Plans To Get Thousands of Pollution Deaths Off the Books by Changing Its Math (nytimes.com)
Posted by msmash on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @11:30AM from the how-about-that dept
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/05/22/1530213/epa-plans-to-get-thousands-of-pollution-deaths-off-the-books-by-changing-its-math
in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.
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The Atlantic
"Breakfast Food" is a Lie - Americans eat a narrower variety of foods for breakfast than anyone else (514 words)
By Amanda Mull
May 14, 2019
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/what-is-breakfast/589411/
According to Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University, that’s consistent with how much of the world still approaches the day’s first meal. “Poorer people everywhere, especially in places like India and China, eat the same kind of food for meal after meal,” he says. “The strict differentiation of meals is partly an American thing, but partly a thing of upward mobility.” Breakfast food, as a concept, is a luxury.
... ... ...
The first half of the 20th century is when breakfast’s class elements start to take hold in the U.S., Ray says. Refrigeration was a luxury, and although the ingredients in cereal might be cheap and nutritionally hollow, brand-name versions have always been pricey. “The most expensive part of cereal-making is shoving it down people’s throats by advertising,” he explains. “I don’t think cereal would have been successful without the massive propaganda of the industry.”
source:
https://tildes.net/~food
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Leonard-Barton, Dorothy
Wellsprings of Knowledge : building and sustaining the sources of innovation / Dorothy Leonard-Barton
1. information technology——management
2. information resources management
3. management information systems
copyright © 1995
HD30.2.L46 1995
658.4'038——dc20
p.205
Schwartz tells how Smith & Hawken, a mail-order garden tool business, sharpened its focus when the company decided, in the late 1970s, to consider possible futures. It constructed three scenarios: (1) "more of the same but better," (2) "worse" (decay and depression), and (3) "different but better" (fundamental change). The company determined that the first two scenarios both suggested direct mail as the best approach, since either people would be wealthy enough to buy but too busy to get to the store, or the market would disappear and capital-intensive retail operations would be highly risky. Scenario 3, fundamental change, implied a concern for the environment and distrust of throwaway tools. The 1980s turned out to be a mixture of the three scenarios, with both yuppie wealth and homelessness in the United States and a growth in concern for the environment. Although none of the scenarios exactly played out, the company was better positioned because its managers had thought through which steps to take under the various conditions.49
(Leonard-Barton, Dorothy, copyright © 1995, HD30.2.L46 1995, 658.4'038——dc20)
(Wellsprings of Knowledge : building and sustaining the sources of innovation / Dorothy Leonard-Barton, 1. information technology——management, 2. information resources management, 3. management information systems, )
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6:25
Why Japan's Homeless are Different from North America's (Part 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK--oCVP18A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK--oCVP18A
Life Where I'm From
Published on Aug 16, 2017
One day while walking around Shinjuku, a major hub for government and business in Tokyo, Japan, I noticed a shelter built by a homeless man. It looked semi-permanent, but more importantly, had solar panels on it. I thought this was very different than the homeless I encountered in my former city of Vancouver, Canada, so I started to investigate homelessness in Japan.
I was lucky enough to interview Professor Tom Gill, who has researched homelessness and other societal issues in Japan for many years.
This is part 1 of a series of videos I'm making about the homeless in Japan. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave in the comments. Thanks for watching.
12:01
DW is a German public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Berlin: homeless capital of Germany and other world stories | DW Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejK8IEvLjtQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejK8IEvLjtQ
DW Documentary
Published on Jan 18, 2018
5:21
DW is a German public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Germany: Homeless Students | European Journal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOsXLMo4I_s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOsXLMo4I_s
DW News
Published on Nov 29, 2012
Affordable housing is becoming increasingly hard to find in Germany's big cities. The main reason is the euro crisis; those who can afford it are buying - because property is seen as a safe investment. Big cities like Hamburg have a shortage of affordable housing. Students and trainees are hardest hit, as are low-income families.
2:02
Rising Rents and Homelessness in America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWOYSQ_6Juk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWOYSQ_6Juk
Zillow
Published on Sep 29, 2017
Rising Rents and Homelessness in America
Many factors contribute to homelessness, but one common issue goes overlooked: the impact of rising rents and decreasing median incomes.
9:54
Press TV is funded in whole or in part by the Iranian government.
10 Minutes: Homelessness in America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzdT390OCz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzdT390OCz4
PressTV Documentaries
Published on Dec 4, 2016
According to the recent 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress on a single night in 2016, over half a million people were experiencing homelessness in the United States of America.
12:00
DW is a German public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Germany’s poor pensioners | DW Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDveK6oWN5w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDveK6oWN5w
DW Documentary
Published on Jan 22, 2018
Poverty threatens more German seniors than ever. How to make ends meet, when pension isn’t enough?
12:07
([ professional ])
DW is a German public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Down and out in Russia: Fighting hunger | DW Reporter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AguJNdNCzao
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AguJNdNCzao
DW News
Published on Feb 6, 2016
About 60,000 homeless people live in St. Petersburg. Winter is an especially difficult time for them. The Nochlezhka charity organization helps them survive. A mobile van travels the city delivering meals to people in need.
22:50
Mediacorp is funded in whole or in part by the Singapore government.
Get Rea!: Cubicle Dreams (Hong Kong)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQF0-3-RupM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQF0-3-RupM
CNA
Published on Feb 17, 2014
54-year-old Yeung Suen is one of Hong Kong's 100,000 cubicle dwellers. He lives in a 35 square foot windowless space barely bigger than his bed. The irony is, he pays more per square foot in rent than someone living in a luxury apartment. In this episode, Get Real enters Hong Kong's world of cubicle dwellers, and asks if living in a cubicle is their only option.
22:19
LOVE & DRUGS ON THE STREETS S2 • E1
Britain's Homeless In Winter | Girls Living On The Streets Of Brighton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=746xJlIAHJ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=746xJlIAHJ4
BBC Three
Published on Feb 11, 2018
Kelly is 18 and has been homeless since leaving care a year and a half ago. 22-year-old Charlotte and her boyfriend Lance are sleeping rough having been evicted from their flat.
48:45
Bay Area Homeless - Concern or Crisis Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCaOeyjHgaE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCaOeyjHgaE
KTVU
Published on Sep 11, 2017
Part 1 of our special on homelessness in the Bay Area.
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16:33
How Sand Mining Destroys One Home to Build Another | Short Film Showcase
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpc3hhH1cas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpc3hhH1cas
National Geographic
Published on May 5, 2019
As Singapore dredges sand out from beneath Cambodia’s mangroves one woman is faced with the erasure of her beloved home.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southeast-asia-mining-sand/sand-mining-mafias-destroying-environment-livelihoods-u-n-idUSKCN1SD0KG
Asia
May 7, 2019 / 12:29 AM / Updated 18 hours ago
“Communities are losing their land and their homes because of sand mining, but they are split over the issue because some people make a living from it, while others say it is ruining their lives,”
Reporting by Rina Chandran @rinachandran; Editing by Michael Taylor. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change.
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U.S. data and trend on wealth and income distribution
Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed (Parts 1 & 2)
Ray Dalio
Published on April 5, 2019
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-reformed-parts-1-2-ray-dalio
Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue
Ray Dalio
Published on October 23, 2017
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-biggest-economic-social-political-issue-two-economies-ray-dalio
https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/raydalio
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https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/investment_manager_2014.html
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth.html
Wealth, Income, and Power
by G. William Domhoff
The Wealth Distribution
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2010, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details, drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2012).
Table 1: Distribution of net worth and financial wealth in the United States, 1983-2010
Total Net Worth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 33.8% 47.5% 18.7%
1989 37.4% 46.2% 16.5%
1992 37.2% 46.6% 16.2%
1995 38.5% 45.4% 16.1%
1998 38.1% 45.3% 16.6%
2001 33.4% 51.0% 15.6%
2004 34.3% 50.3% 15.3%
2007 34.6% 50.5% 15.0%
2010 35.4% 53.5% 11.1%
Financial (Non-Home) Wealth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 42.9% 48.4% 8.7%
1989 46.9% 46.5% 6.6%
1992 45.6% 46.7% 7.7%
1995 47.2% 45.9% 7.0%
1998 47.3% 43.6% 9.1%
2001 39.7% 51.5% 8.7%
2004 42.2% 50.3% 7.5%
2007 42.7% 50.3% 7.0%
2010 42.1% 53.5% 4.7%
Total assets are defined as the sum of: (1) the gross value of owner-occupied housing; (2) other real estate owned by the household; (3) cash and demand deposits; (4) time and savings deposits, certificates of deposit, and money market accounts; (5) government bonds, corporate bonds, foreign bonds, and other financial securities; (6) the cash surrender value of life insurance plans; (7) the cash surrender value of pension plans, including IRAs, Keogh, and 401(k) plans; (8) corporate stock and mutual funds; (9) net equity in unincorporated businesses; and (10) equity in trust funds.
Total liabilities are the sum of: (1) mortgage debt; (2) consumer debt, including auto loans; and (3) other debt. From Wolff (2004, 2007, 2010, & 2012).
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Chris Anderson, The long tail, 2006 [ ]
p.125
In the summer of 1897 an Italian polymath named Vilfredo Pareto busied himself in his university office in Switzerland, studying patterns of wealth and income in 19th-century England. It was the age of Marx, and the question of wealth distribution was in the air. Pareto found that the spread of wealth was indeed unequal in England--most of it went to a minority of the people. When he calculated the exact ratios, he found that about 20 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the wealth. More important, when he compared that with other countries and regions, he found that the ratio remained the same.
What Pareto had discovered is that there is a predictable mathematical relationship in the pattern of wealth and populations, something he called the Law of the Vital Few. It seemed constant over time, and across countries. Pareto was a brilliant economist, but he was a poor explainer, so not many understood the importance of his insight. He went on to write obscure sociological tracts about elites, which unfortunately were taken up at the end of his life by Mussolini's fascists. But the theory of unequal distribution took on a life of its own, and Pareto's observation is now known as the 80/20 Rule.
p.126
Powerlaws are family of curves that you can find practically anywhere you look, from biology to book sales. The Long Tail is a powerlaw that isn't cruelly cut off by bottlenecks in distribution such as limited shelf space and available channels. Because the amplitude of a powerlaw approaches but never reaches zero as the curve stretches out to infinity, it's known as a “long-tailed” curve, which is where I derived the name of this book.
pp.126-127
As far as consumer markets go, powerlaws come about when you have three conditions:
1. Variety (there are many different sorts of things)
2. Inequality (some have more of some quality than others)
3. Network effects such as word of mouth and reputation, which tend to amplify differences in quality.
In others words, powerlaw distributions occur where things are different, some are better than others, and effects such as reputation can work to promote the good and suppress the bad. This results in what Pareto called the “predictable imbalance” of market, culture, and society: Success breeds success.
(Anderson, Chris, The long tail : why the future of business is selling less of more / Chris Anderson.--1st ed., 1. market segmentation., 2. internet marketing., 3. marketing--technological innovation., 658.802 Anderson, 2006, )
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By Franklin Hiram King (author)
Excerpt from Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan
We have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling of the earth; yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition of civilization. If we are to assemble all the forces and agencies that make for the final conquest of the planet, we must assuredly know how it is that all the peoples in all the places have met the problem of producing their sustenance out of the soil.
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5350
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R5VHF6ARFZISG/
Raven
Farmers please read
May 6, 2011
Format: Kindle Edition
Verified Purchase
First published in 1911, with a preface by Dr. L. H. Bailey, Farmers of Forty Centuries is the kind of book that would be of interest to farmers and historians alike.
This book was written at time in society when 'better living through chemistry' was just starting to take hold as mainstream thinking. Reductionist science, pesticides, and fertilizer were gaining strength and agriculture was changing from a point of view that works with the natural processes to a system that conquers and controls plants natural impulses. Taking into account the time when this book was written, and one can see that it is an important book in the history of agriculture and an excellent reference for modern farmers that might have been lost if not for the dedication of people who converted it to e-text.
The preface by Dr Bailey, discusses where American agriculture stands at the turn of the last century (1900). It mentions how farming in the North America is very successful, and acknowledged that this is primarily because the population density of the continent is sparse and people have been cultivating the soil for a relatively short time. Bailey mentions that in order to properly conquer the land and turn it to our needs (common attitude of the time) we must be careful not to strip it of fertility. Chemical farming alone will do this over time; however, by examining agricultural practices that have sustained themselves for long periods without loosing soil fertility - then american farming can be even more productive (shame this wasn't taken to heart at the time).
The book itself is examines agricultural practices in some of the most densely populated areas of the world at the time in hopes of gleaming some useful information.
Given where we are now with industrialized farming, this book might just be what we need to help understand how we can regain some of the waste farmland that now has very little or no agricultural use thanks to poor management practices over the last 100 years.
The kindle version has no interactive menus, no way of quick navigation and no pictures. But there are no obvious errors in the text.
This book is perfect for both small farmers and large scale agri-business.
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5350
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notes ([ the law of the minimum ])
Thinking in systems
a primer
Donella H. Meadows
Edited by Diana Wright
sustainability institute
2008
p.101
A patch of growing grain needs:
• sunlight
• air
• water
• nitrogen
• phosphorus
• potassium
• dozens of minor nutrients
• a friable soil and the services of a microbial soil community
• some system to control the weeds and pests ([ ideally without pesticides, insecticides, herbicides or any chemical of that sort ])
• protection from the wastes of the industrial manufacturer
It was with regard to grain that Justus von Liebig came up with his famous “law of minimum.” It doesn't matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what's short is phosphorus. It does not no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.
Bread will not rise without yeast, no matter how much flour it has. Children will not thrive without protein, no matter how many carbohydrates they eat. Companies can't keep going without energy, no matter how many customers they have──or without customers, no matter how much energy they have.
This concept of a limiting factor is simple and widely misunderstood.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WfELt4nDPdNt0HCUQ4UNJON5a_sdLkiE
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WfELt4nDPdNt0HCUQ4UNJON5a_sdLkiE/view
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William Engdahl, A century of war: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order, 1992, 2004
pdf page: 24/314 (filename: Engdahl_Century_of_War_book.pdf)
Germany and the Geopolitics of the Great War
p.13
The German chemical industry, under the impulse of great researchers such as Justus von Liebig and others, grew from one vastly inferior to both the French and the British industries, to become the world's leader in analine dye production, pharmaceuticals and chemical fertilizers.
p.13
Introduction of scientific agriculture chemistry by von Liebig and others led to astonishing rates of productivity increase during this period for German agriculture. Going from a situation in the early decades of the 1800s which was literally desperate, with outbreaks of famine and harvest failure, when it seemed more economical to import grain from Russia or even Argentina, Germany reimposed a protective tariff blocking imports of cheap grain in the 1890s.
pp.13-14
The mechanization of farming began to show progress, going from 20,000 harvesting machines in 1882 to some 300,000 by 1907. Despite often inferior and sandy soils, German chemical fertilizer development led to improving harvest yields. Grain harvest yields had improved as a result, by 80 per cent at the time of the Great War, compared with the the period before 1887 when fertilizers were first introduced on a significant scale. By constrast, Russia, at the outbreak of the war, with 3 million acres more under grain cultivation, produced 19 million fewer tons of grain than Germany.
p.14
By 1913, Germany was 95 per cent self-sufficient in meat production, despite per capita meat consumption having doubled since 1870, while Britain in 1913 imported 45 per cent of her meat requirements.
p.14
Paralleling the expansion of its industry and agriculture, Germany went from a net emigration country in the early 1800s, to a country with strong population growth by the end of the century. Between 1870 and 1914 Germany's population increased almost 75 per cent, from 40,000,000 to more than 67,000,000.
p.14
Large industry grew after the 1880s in a symbiosis with large banks such as Deutsche Bank, under what became known as the Grossbanken model, or simply the ‘German model’ of interlocking ownership between major banks and key industrial companies.2
William Engdahl, A century of war: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order, 1992, 2004
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e0PVSremXnuf4Nkn4cY0xW8hF8SaL72-/view
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18:54
Will Technology Solve the Problems Caused by a Rising Population | Fortune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9elrJc-v7Mk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9elrJc-v7Mk
Fortune Magazine
Published on May 18, 2016
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17:49
Food Waste: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY
LastWeekTonight
Published on Jul 19, 2015
Producers, sellers, and consumers waste tons of food. John Oliver discusses the shocking amount of food we don’t eat.
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Food
Betting on Hunger: Is Financial Speculation to Blame for High Food Prices?
Food prices have been on the rise since 2007, thanks in part to bad weather and increasing demand from biofuels and developing nations. But there's one cause that hasn't gotten much attention: financial speculation in crop markets. Are bankers artificially inflating the price of food?
By Kharunya Paramaguru
@Kharunya
Dec. 17, 2012
http://science.time.com/2012/12/17/betting-on-hunger-is-financial-speculation-to-blame-for-high-food-prices/
Correction appended Dec. 17, 2012
Remember the food crisis of 2007 and 2008, when rapid and extreme increases in global food prices led to riots and civil unrest in 28 countries?
... ... ...
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Ann Berg, a former trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and now an adviser to the FAO, says that while this trend has been noted, you “cannot prove causality” between the role of these speculators and the artificially high prices.
Traders have always speculated on the agricultural-commodities futures market, just as they do in other commodities like copper or oil. Those with an actual commercial interest — food producers and buyers — use this market to bet against price increases and decreases as a form of insurance against volatility. But after 1999 and 2000, when sections of the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed and President Bill Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into law, investment banks and other financial actors began to bet on commodities as speculation, not as insurance. “Where we used to see something like 12% of the market made up of financial players, since deregulation, this number has now jumped to over 60%,” says Heidi Chow of the World Development Movement, a U.K.-based campaigning organization.
The statistics are impressive: the German NGO Foodwatch points out that investment in food commodities has jumped from $65 billion to $126 billion in the past five years. Perhaps a more revealing statistic is that speculative investment in these commodities in 2011 amounted to 20 times more than the total spent on agricultural aid by all countries combined.
... ... ...
A possible solution to curbing these investors’ impact on real-world prices has been written into the Dodd-Frank legislation, authorizing the CFTC to set limits on percentages of specific commodity products that can be held by a single entity. Michael Dunn, a former CFTC commissioner, expressed doubts about these limits, describing them as “a cure for a disease that does not exist, or at worst, a placebo for one that does.” His pronouncement is yet to be tested; in October, Judge Robert Wilkins of the Washington, D.C., district court struck down this rule. For its part, the CFTC plans on appealing his decision. It may be the case that by the time regulation is in place, investors have lost their interest in commodity speculation, if only because of the poor optics for banks. For the world’s starving, however, this may be too little, too late.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that President George W. Bush introduced the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. It was introduced during President Bill Clinton’s term.
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US & Canada
Betting the farm on hunger
Debate heats up whether financial speculation is spiking food prices and spelling disaster for millions of poor people.
by Robert Kennedy
28 Sept 2012
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/09/2012911125854157194.html
Financial investors betting on the price of food are dangerously driving up prices, threatening millions of impoverished people in food-importing countries who will go hungry, critics warn.
But the issue of food speculation by banks, hedge and pension funds is a controversial one, and many observers say there is no evidence that gambling on food causes price increases and volatility.
... ... ...
Chris Mahoney, agriculture director for commodity trader Glencore, recently told reporters the US drought would be good for business. "High prices, a lot of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities," said Mahoney.
Attitudes such as these define the core problem with food today, said Haigh. Corporate control over the global food system needs to stop, she said.
"Markets don't have morals," Haigh said. "The fundamental issue is markets care about people's ability to pay for food, not their need for it. We need to radically reform these power dynamics."
SOURCE: Al Jazeera
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Red Winter Wheat
U.S. Corn
Thai Broken Rice
U.S. Hard Red Winter Wheat
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/sites/default/files/casino_hunger_report_dec_2009.pdf
p.3 (pdf Sec1:3)
The biggest change from normal conditions in earlier years was the addition of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment money into the commodity futures markets. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development noted, “a major new element in commodity trading over the past few years is the greater weight on commodity futures exchanges of financial investors that consider commodities an asset class.”21 The additional excess speculation has magnified the volatility in food-staple prices that has contributed to the global food crisis and increased poverty.22
21 UNCTAD. “The Global Economic Crisis” at 24.
https://unctad.org/en/docs/gds20091_en.pdf
22 Collins, Ben. “Hot commodities, stuffed markets, and empty bellies.” Dollars & Sense. July/August 2008.
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Making Sense
Hot Commodities, Stuffed Markets, and Empty Bellies
What's behind higher food prices?
By Ben Collins
http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0708collins.html
... ... ...
The Consequences of Financializing Food
Facing political pressure by constituents over high oil and food prices, several members of Congress have sponsored legislation that would bar index investors from commodity markets. One bill proposed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Ind- Conn.) would prohibit public and private pension funds with more than $500 million in assets from trading in commodity futures, and other bills would limit the maximum number of futures contracts an index investor could hold. These bills may stem the flood of money from index investors into commodities, but comprehensive reform is needed to reverse the Commodity Futures Modernization Act's authorization of over-the-counter commodity trading. Absent an outright repeal of this so-called "Enron loophole," energy and agricultural commodities will continue to be traded outside the reach of government regulation, making future Enron- and Amaranth-style market disruptions inevitable.
Ultimately, eliminating unregulated commodity trading cannot address the fundamental causes of higher agricultural prices. Even if speculative buying is curtailed, supply and demand factors such as falling crop yields, destructive trade policies, and the growing use of biofuels have likely brought the age of cheap food to an end. However, if the critics of commodity index investment are correct, then these investors have amplified recent food price shocks and are needlessly contributing to the impoverishment of the world's poorest citizens. Even though commodity market transparency and regulatory oversight will not solve the global food crisis, eliminating unregulated commodity trading can help resolve the debate over the effects of index investors on commodity prices and restore the accountability of commodity markets to the social interests they were originally established to serve.
Ben Collins is a member of the Dollars & Sense collective and a research analyst at KLD Research & Analytics, a sustainable investment research company. Mr. Collins's views do not necessarily reflect those of KLD or its clients.
Sources: Michael Masters, Testimony before the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, United States Senate, May 20, 2008; Daniel P. Collins, CFTC to up spec limits, Futures, May 1, 2005; Paul Krugman, Fuels on the Hill, New York Times, June 27, 2008; Michael Frankfurter, The Mysterious Case of the Commodity Conundrum, Securitization of Commodities, and Systemic Concerns, Parts 1-3; Michael Frankfurter and Davide Accomazzo, Is Managed Futures an Asset Class? The Search for the Beta of Commodity Futures, December 31, 2007, Graziadio Business Report; Regulator Commits to Futures Tracking Volatility, Associated Press, June 4, 2008; Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC Announces Agricultural Market Initiatives, June 3, 2008; Michael Greenberger, Testimony before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, June 3, 2008; Sinclair Stewart and Paul Waldie, Who is responsible for the global food crisis? Globe and Mail, May 30, 2008; Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Agricultural Markets Roundtable, April 22, 2008; Ann Davis, "Commodities Regulator Under Fire—CFTC Scrutinized As Congress Looks Into Oil-Price Jump," Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2008; Ed Wallace, ICE, ICE, Baby, Houston Chronicle, May 19, 2008; Laura Mandaro, Lieberman plans would bar funds from commodities, Marketwatch, June 18, 2008; Our Confusing Economy, Explained, Fresh Air, April 3, 2008.
This article is from the July/August 2008 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.
http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0708toc.html
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Our Confusing Economy, Explained
39:07
April 3, 2008
11:20 AM ET
Fresh Air
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89338743
Perplexed by the U.S. economy? You're not alone. Law professor Michael Greenberger joins Fresh Air to explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, credit defaults, the shaky future of other types of loans and what we can expect from the U.S. financial markets.
Greenberger is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the director of the University's Center for Health and Homeland Security.
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20 January 2011
Causes of the 2007-2008 global food crisis identified
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/225na1_en.pdf
Source:
Headey, D and Fan, S. (2010) Reflections on the Global Food Crisis. How Did It Happen? How Has It Hurt? And How Can We Prevent the Next One?
International Food Policy Research Institute.
Research Monograph 165.
The report can be accessed at:
http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/rr165.pdf
http://cdm15738.contentdm.oclc.org/utils/getfile/collection/p15738coll2/id/5724/filename/5725.pdf
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2007–08 world food price crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_price_crisis
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William Engdahl, A century of war: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order, 1992, 2004
pdf page: 25/314 (filename: Engdahl_Century_of_War_book.pdf)
pp.14-15
p.14
In 1890, as a result of the near failure of the prestigious London merchant bank, Baring Brothers, arising from their huge losses in Argentine bond speculation and investment, and the ties of German banking to this Argentine speculation, a Berlin bank panic ensured, as the dominoes of an international financial pyramid began to topple.
p.14
Berlin, and German investors generally, had been caught up in international railroad speculation mania in the 1880s. With the crash of the elite Baring Bros., with some $75,000,000 invested in various Argentine bonds, down came the illusions of many Germans about the marvels of financial speculation.
pp.14-15
In the wake of the financial collapse of Argentina, a large wheat exporter to Europe, Berlin grain traders Ritter & Blumenthal had foolishly attempted to ‘corner’ on the entire German wheat market, planning to capitalize on the consequences of the financial troubles in Argentina. This only aggravated the financial panic in Germany as their scheme collapsed, bankrupting in its wake the esteemed private banking house of Hirschfeld & Wolf, and causing huge losses at the Rheinisch-Westphaelische Bank, further triggering a general run on German banks and a collapse of the Berlin stock market, lasting into the autumn of 1891.
p.15
Responding to the crisis, the Chancellor named a Commission of Inquiry of 28 eminent persons, under the chairmanship of Reichsbank President Dr. Richard Koch, to look into the causes and to propose legislative measures to prevent further such panics from occurring. The Koch Commission was composed of a broad and representatives cross-section of German economic society, including representatives from industry, agriculture, universities, political parties, as well as banking and finance.
p.15
The result of the commission's work, most of it voted into law by the Reichstag in the Exchange Act in June 1896, and the Depotgesetz of that July, was the most severe legislation restricting financial speculation of any industrial country of the time. Futures positions in grain were prohibited. Stock market speculation possibilities were severely constrained, one result of which has been the relative absence of stock market speculation since then as a major factor affecting German economic life.
p.15
The German Exchange Act of 1896 established definitively a different form of organization of finance and banking in Germany from that of Britain or America──Anglo-Saxon banking. Not only this, but many London financial houses reduced their activity in the restrictive German financial market after the 1890s as a result of these restrictions, lessening the influence of City of London finance over German economic policy. Significantly, to the present day, these fundamental differences between Anglo-Saxon banking and finance, and a ‘German model’ as largely practiced in Germany, Holland, Switzerland and Japan, are still somewhat visible.3
3. Friedrich List. The National System of Political Economy (1885 edition. London: Longman, Green). Reprinted New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966.
William Engdahl, A century of war: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order, 1992, 2004
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e0PVSremXnuf4Nkn4cY0xW8hF8SaL72-/view
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eon-LgnO0xBGwNocDzajA8hELTmWS1CR
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Howard W. French., Everything under the heavens : how the past help shape China's push for global power, 2017.
p.279
a German economist at Bretton Woods institution in Washington remarked to me,
p.279
to create a new global or regional economic and political institutional arrangements
United States, World Bank in 1944;
Japan, Asian Development Bank in 1966;
Germany, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991;
China, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(Everything under the heavens : how the past help shape China's push for global power / Howard W. French., first edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2017] | China──foreign relations──21st century.| China──foreign relations──Asia.| Asia──foreign relations──China.| strategic culture──China.| geopolitics──Asia., LCC JZ1734.F74 2017| DDC 327.51──dc23, https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021957, 2017, )
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UNITED NATIONS CONFERENCE ON TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT
The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies
Report by the UNCTAD Secretariat Task Force on Systemic Issues and Economic Cooperation
UNITED NATIONS
New York and Geneva, 2009
UNCTAD/GDS/2009/1
UNITED NATIONS PUBLICATION
Sales no. E.09.II.D.4
ISBN 978-92-1-112765-2
Copyright © United Nations, 2009
All rights reserved
https://unctad.org/en/docs/gds20091_en.pdf
https://unctad.org/en/docs/gds20091_en.pdf
Key messages
UNCTAD’s longstanding call for stronger international monetary and financial governance rings true in today’s crisis, which is global and systemic in nature. The crisis dynamics reflect failures in national and international financial deregulation, persistent global imbalances, absence of an international monetary system and deep inconsistencies among global trading, financial and monetary policies.
... ... ...
The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies
... ... ...
p.8 (pdf 23)
D. What should have been anticipated: the illusion of risk-free greed and profligacy
The global financial crisis arose amidst the neglect of international governance – the failure of the international community to give the globalized economy credible global rules. The sudden unwinding of speculative positions in the different segments of the financial market was triggered by the bursting of the house price bubble in the United States. But all these bubbles were unsustainable and would have burst sooner or later. For policy makers who should have known better than to continuously bet on “beating the bank” to now assert (with the benefit of hindsight) that greed ran amok, or that regulators were “asleep at the wheel”, is simply not credible.
The housing price bubble itself was the result of the deregulation of financial markets on a global scale, widely endorsed by Governments around the world. The spreading of risk and the severing of risk and the information about it was promoted by the use of “securitization” through instruments like residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) that seemed to satisfy investors’ hunger for double-digit profits. It is only at this point that greed and profligacy enter the stage. Without the economic “lifestyle” of deregulation of the last decades, and in the presence of more appropriate regulation, expectations on returns of purely financial instruments in the double-digit range would simply not have been possible (Kuttner, 2007; Davidson, 2008).
In real economies with single-digit growth rates those expectations are misguided from the beginning. However, human beings tend to believe that in their generation things may happen that never happened before, ignoring, at least temporarily, the lessons of the past. This happened in most recent memory during the stock market booms of the “new economy”. Despite the dot.com crash of 2000 a wide range of investors began to invest their funds into hedge funds and “innovative financial instruments”. These funds needed to ever increase their risk exposure for the sake of higher yields with more sophisticated computer models searching for the best bets, which actually added to the opaqueness of many instruments. It should have been clear from the outset that everybody can’t be above average (Kuttner, 2007: 21) and that the capacity of the real economy to cope with exaggerated real estate and commodity prices or misaligned exchange rates is strictly limited, but it is only now, through the experience of the crisis, that this is coming to be understood by many actors and policymakers.
A more important driver of this kind of “financial innovation”, however, was the naive belief in efficient market theories that did not recognize objective uncertainty but mistakenly assumed well-informed buyers and sellers and hence promised minimal risk (Davidson, 2008). But “securitization” of investment vehicles led to further risk concentration because it converted debtor-creditor relations (or insurer-insured relation) into capital flow transactions by packing different types of debt for onward sale to investors in form of bonds all around the world (Fabozzi et al., 2007), whose interest and return of principal are based on the value of the underlying assets. Due to the opaqueness of these complex bundled “products”, many “securitized” assets found their way into instruments qualified as low-risk. A global clientele invested in these bonds because the global imbalances had intensified the global financial relations and had created the need for financial institutions located in the countries with current account surpluses to hold much of the toxic paper. In the first flush of financial liberalization, the global distribution of these papers was seen as an indication of successful risk diversification.
p.9 (pdf 24)
Chapter I – A crisis foretold
But eventually the opposite happened: financial “innovation” resulted in a concentration of risk since most of the “vehicles” were “securitized” by using assets that had similar default risks (Kuttner, 2007: 21–22).
Needless to mention, that credit-rating agencies totally failed. But it is mainly due to the microeconomic approach they usually take and their ignorance concerning macroeconomic and systemic factors on a global scale that they misunderstood the risk of so many participants playing on the same fragile bridge between the small real economy and a bloated financial sector.
... ... ...
p.23 (pdf 38)
Chapter III Managing the financialization of commodity futures trading
A. Introduction: commodity markets and the financial crisis
... ... ...
p.24 (pdf 39)
Figure 3.1 COMMODITY PRICE CHANGES, 2002–2008
A. JUNE 2008 VS. JANUARY 2002
(Percentage change)
... ... ...
p.24 (pdf 39)
commodities as an asset class.
The depreciation of the dollar clearly was one such general cause for the surge in commodity prices. But a major new element in commodity trading over the past few years is the greater weight on commodity futures exchanges of financial investors that consider commodities as an asset class. Their possible role in exacerbating price movements away from fundamentals at certain moments and for certain commodities is the focus of the following sections.
... ... ...
p.25 (pdf 40)
Chapter III – Managing the financialization of commodity futures trading
B. The growing presence of financial investors in commodity markets
... ... ...
Two common indexes are
the Standard & Poor’s Goldman Sachs Commodity Index(S&P GSCI) and
the Dow Jones-American International Group Commodity Index (DJ-AIGCI),
which are composites of weighted prices of a broad range of commodities, including energy products, agricultural products, and metals.9
... ... ...
p.25 (pdf 40)
The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies
That is why all the weaknesses in speculative activity have to be tackled at the same time. For example, dealing only with the national aspects of re-regulation to prevent housing bubbles and the creation of risky assets related to this area would only intensify in other areas like stocks. Preventing currency speculation through a new global monetary system with automatically adjusted exchange rates might redirect the short-term games towards commodities and increase volatility there. The same is true for regional success in fighting speculation, which might put other regions in the spotlight of speculators. Nothing short of closing down the big casino will provide a lasting solution.
It is obvious, a coherent and effective approach can only be found at the international level and with the inclusion of as many countries as possible. A broad international agreement about the distortional effects of large-scale speculation in different areas on growth and employment is absolutely crucial to create the framework for a globalization that has the potential to deliver rising living standards for all.
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https://www.zdnet.com/article/medicine-needs-to-embrace-open-source/
http://www.opensourcepharma.net/resources.html
What Is Open Source Pharma (and Why Should You Care)?
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday September 05, 2015 @04:50PM from the having-the-patience-to-help-patients dept.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/05/1825252/what-is-open-source-pharma-and-why-should-you-care
What is Open Source Pharma (and why should you care)?
Friday, September 4th, 2015 @ 12:36 PM EDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/articles/what-open-source-pharma-and-why-should-you-care
... ... ...
It has been observed that when one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but that when a million do, it’s a statistic. Perhaps the best way to bring the reality of non-existent and over-priced medications back into focus is to quote from an essay written by James Arinaitwe, one of the members of Open Source Pharma, the (so far) loosely affiliated group of individuals and organizations that have now met for the second year to further this cause:
I grew up in rural Western Uganda, where two of my siblings succumbed to measles before their fifth birthday and my father to HIV/AIDS before I turned 10. I often wondered why so many preventable and treatable diseases were still killing the world's poorest and most vulnerable people. Could it be possible that big pharmaceutical companies and big, bureaucracy-laden governments were so vertically aligned in their approach to bringing life-saving medicines to market, that they rarely saw any reason to find solidarity with the communities that would eventually benefit from their inventions and policies?
My father and my baby sisters did not die because the vaccines for measles or the antiretroviral drugs for HIV were not available. They died, in large part, because life-saving vaccines and medicines were priced beyond our reach.
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Goldman Sachs Asks: 'Is Curing Patients a Sustainable Business Model?'
Posted by msmash on Monday February 18, 2019 @07:30AM from the wow dept.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/18/100232/goldman-sachs-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model
Investing
Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’
Published Wed, Apr 11 2018 3:15 PM EDT
Updated Wed, Apr 11 2018 7:20 PM EDT
Tae Kim
@firstadopter
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
... ... ...
The report suggested three potential solutions for biotech firms:
“Solution 1: Address large markets: Hemophilia is a $9-10bn WW market (hemophilia A, B), growing at ~6-7% annually.”
“Solution 2: Address disorders with high incidence: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) affects the cells (neurons) in the spinal cord, impacting the ability to walk, eat, or breathe.”
“Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness) … Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets.”
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Hunter-gathering seems to have been easier than farming
Why does farming catch on when it dings health and quality of life?
Cathleen O'Grady - 5/24/2019, 8:37 AM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/adopting-agriculture-means-less-leisure-time-for-women/
For most of our history, humans got hold of food like any other animal: by hunting and foraging, moving around to find the best resources. Settling down in one place to cultivate crops is a comparatively recent development. But once it started around 12,000 years ago, agriculture spread through human cultures across the world, fundamentally changing our societies, genomes, and possibly even languages. In many ways, farming seems to have been terrible news for the people who adopted it, leading to poorer nutrition and greater social inequality—but it also resulted in higher fertility rates and a massive population expansion.
Understanding how and why this technological change was adopted remains a challenge. Studies mostly rely on fossil evidence, but there are also clues in the modern world, as some present-day groups of people are moving away from hunting, fishing, and gathering their food and toward agriculture.
A paper published in Nature Human Behaviour explores how this shift affects the time budgets of hunter-gatherers in the Philippines, finding that women who participate more in agricultural work have less leisure time—around half the leisure time of women who prioritize foraging. The results fall in line with past research that challenges the concept of hunting and foraging as arduous work with scant rewards, and this work contributes to a growing understanding of the social dynamics that go along with a shift to agriculture.
A natural experiment
The Agta people in the northern Philippines have sustained their traditions of hunting, fishing, and foraging for food to this day, preserving a huge body of knowledge. Many of them trade some of their high-protein catch with local rice farmers, getting high-calorie carbs in return. But some Agta people also spend some of their time working on local rice farms instead of foraging, which makes it possible to explore the consequences of a shift to farming playing out in real time.
Of course, this is not a perfect proxy for the change that people would have experienced 10,000 or 5,000 years ago. For one thing, the Agta are modern people who have been living alongside agriculturalists in an industrializing country for a very long time. Another crucial difference is that the agricultural techniques available to the Agta are a world apart from the sort of farming that was being developed millennia ago.
The social and political dynamics playing out between Agta and other Filipino populations are also going to be distinct from those of societies that have managed this transition in the past. Every set of social interactions has probably been distinct, so this isn't new—but the difference in social context matters.
With those caveats in mind, researchers gathered data on how Agta spent their time each day for months. Every day, they’d scan 359 people living across 10 camps—including 142 adults—and find out what they were up to, starting early in the morning and repeating every few hours until sundown.
Budgeting time
The results sketch out how sex and age make a difference to people’s time budgets. Beginning in adolescence, women and men both start spending more time on domestic chores, childcare, and “out-of-camp” work, which can include hunting, foraging, and agricultural work. For men, more of that time goes on out-of-camp work; for women, more goes on childcare and domestic work, but there’s some of each in the mix for everyone. Around the same time, leisure time takes a nosedive and doesn't pick up again until around middle age.
There were huge differences in the amount of agricultural work that people did—some did nothing, and for others, it was as high as 80 percent of their out-of-camp work time. It’s not well-understood why people make such different choices, says Abigail Page, one of the authors of the paper. Some camps are closer to rice farms than others, but camp membership is fluid among the Agta people, and they're able to move from one to another when they choose. So it could be that people who are more interested in farming choose to live in the camps that are nearer farms. It's not clear whether living nearer the farms could affect the wild resources that are available.
Being closer to non-Agta farming population could also mean “seeing the benefits of this lifestyle," she adds. For some Agta, preserving their culture and identity is central. But for others, farming is seen as higher-status, and some Agta mothers “talk about their desire to have kids that are educated and healthy,” says Page. Unfortunately, for Agta people, the transition to farming comes with worse health and higher infant mortality.
This research also shows leisure time takes a knock: women who engaged more in agriculture spent more time working out of camp, didn’t reduce their domestic load, and thus had less leisure time. “The transition away from foraging,” the researchers write, comes along with “a deteriorated standard of living.”
Time affluence
From the 1960s onward, anthropologists began to shift how they talked about hunter-gatherers. While they had previously been seen as living precarious lives filled with hardship, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued that their lifestyle was, in fact, one of abundance. They desired little, he argued, and their essential needs were met easily, allowing a workweek of just 12 hours in what Sahlins called the “original affluent society.” This framing has been challenged—the 12 hours of work per week estimate omits domestic chores and food processing. The hardships caused by natural disasters and other changes in resource availability from one year to the next also didn't figure in Sahlins' framework.
Still, it does seem to be true that moving away from foraging and toward farming goes along with poorer health and a lower standard of living—both for modern hunter-gatherers and for our Neolithic ancestors. Why, then, did farming catch on? The best explanation may involve calories and fertility: the readily available carbs of farmed cereals can make a huge difference to how many children a woman has, which makes it a strategy favored by the cold hard math of evolution.
Regardless of how they made their choices, our modern view of hunter-gatherers get stuck between “the naturalistic fallacy of everything they do being good” and a view that assumes their lives are “short and brutal,” says Page. In reality, the picture is more complicated. Even in a very marginal environment, people are still able to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and have a good amount of leisure time. Farming may bring them some advantages, either real or perceived, but it shouldn't be assumed to mean uncomplicated "progress."
In some ways, that's because we look to them to understand ourselves. “We tend to like using hunter-gatherers to reflect on our own nature,” says Page. Correlational data like this, based on one group of people, has its limitations in supporting navel-gazing, but it’s useful in understanding how prestige and fertility may have played a role in the spread of agriculture.
It's also important not to limit our perspective so that hunter-gathering is the only factor about a people we consider, which would miss out on really understanding the group of people in question. If the paper had been on land rights, “something that mattered to the Agta," she adds, "it wouldn’t have received half as much attention.”
Nature Human Behavior, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0614-6 (About DOIs).
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“There's a stable, robust relationship
between the patterns [of wealth and poverty that]
you've seen before and
what you encounter today.”;
── Adam Grant,
Originals: how non-conformists move the world,
2016, p.53
1:17:03
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez | SXSW 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU-SE5eNt04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU-SE5eNt04
SXSW
Published on Mar 10, 2019
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=682
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=682
([ an old trope, we're getting con ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=740
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=740
([ Trump has been able to fill a void ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=786
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=786
([ I'll kind of go back with a story ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=836
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=836
([ 10 per cent better than garbage ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1000
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1000
([ meh ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1058
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1058
([ Bechdel test? ])
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1071
https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04?t=1071
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