by Jules Evans | Feb 7, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Nice to see Keith Olbermann reads Global Dashboard. In January, shortly before MSNBC fired him, Olbermann did a story on the US Army’s ambitious resilience training programme, which I reported on back in October 2009. Olbermann reports that some atheist soldiers are objecting to the ‘spiritual fitness’ aspect of the programme, which rates to what extent soldiers feel ‘connected to humanity’ and guided by ‘a sense of meaning’ etc. Olbermann then quotes my interview with the programme’s director, Rhonda Cornum, where she says ‘every time you say the S-P-I-R word you’re going to get sued’. If you look really carefully under the photo of Cornum, you can see ‘Source: globaldashboard.org’.
To be fair to Cornum and the programme’s designer, Martin Seligman of Penn University, I would not say the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme is ‘religious’, or ‘Christian’. Martin Seligman is Jewish, for one thing. But he does believe, and has evidence to show, that part of being a resilient person is having a sense of meaning in one’s life. That’s not the same as religion. I would have thought atheists could see that…
But I thought that the politics of wellbeing would get into these problems. As soon as a liberal government backs one version of the Good Life, it’s going to be accused of violating the freedom of conscience and religious belief. That’s the challenge facing pluralist, multicultural societies – how to create a sense of unity, cohesion and common values in our society (including in our armies) without being accused of forcing your beliefs onto other people. Still, this seems a pretty unbalanced news story to me.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNfBPXi5rUA[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | Feb 7, 2011 | Economics and development, Influence and networks
Over at the World Bank blog, Adam Wagstaff’s been playing with Google Trends data from 2004 to today, to try to determine whether anyone’s actually paying any attention to flagship development reports like the World Development Report and Human Development Report.
He has some interesting findings on the relative popularity of different reports (the WDR only got googled 60% as often as the HDR from 2004 to now, for instance) – but what stands out most is how searches for international development per se have fallen. The graph below illustrates relatively frequency of searches, with 1 as the average over the full seven year period:
By contrast, searches for a control group – Wagstaff uses internet searches for a range of German cars – stayed pretty much level.
by Andy Sumner | Feb 5, 2011 | Economics and development
Quite a bit it seems judging by the poverty projections in the new Brookings paper that shows what’s possible if inequality is unchanging. In short, much, much faster poverty reduction (and thus a cheaper aid budget too).
Not surprising perhaps, inequality seems to be very much back on the political radar judging by recent voices in the Economist, the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund. Meanwhile the UN are promoting equity approaches to the MDGs with both UNICEF and UNDP leading the wider UN body.
The main trends are said to be rising inequality within many countries but falling inequality in some highly unequal countries across Latin America thanks to a mixture of cash transfers to the poor and expansion of education.
Inequality matters to poverty reduction because rising inequality reduces the effectiveness of growth for poverty reduction as well as having linkages to greater fragility/conflict via horizontal or group inequalities.
But exactly how much does inequality matter to global poverty reduction? Now we have a something of an answer – in an interesting study by Chandy and Gertz at Brookings.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Feb 4, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Latin America and the Caribbean
That’s the gist of a new paper in Science, reported in the Guardian yesterday:
Billions of trees died in the record drought that struck the Amazon in 2010, raising fears that the vast forest is on the verge of a tipping point, where it will stop absorbing greenhouse gas emissions and instead increase them.
The dense forests of the Amazon soak up more than one-quarter of the world’s atmospheric carbon, making it a critically important buffer against global warming. But if the Amazon switches from a carbon sink to a carbon source that prompts further droughts and mass tree deaths, such a feedback loop could cause runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences.
“Put starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world’s largest forest,” said tropical forest expert Simon Lewis, at the University of Leeds, and who led the research published today in the journal Science. Lewis was careful to note that significant scientific uncertainties remain and that the 2010 and 2005 drought – thought then to be of once-a-century severity – might yet be explained by natural climate variation.
“We can’t just wait and see because there is no going back,” he said. “We won’t know we have passed the point where the Amazon turns from a sink to a source until afterwards, when it will be too late.”
If we are in positive feedback territory on climate change, then all bets really are off.
by Alex Evans | Feb 3, 2011 | Economics and development
Edward Carr has an arresting thought on the impact of high food prices in developing countries (which hit yet another new record on yesterday’s monthly FAO food price index data, by the way): it may be richer consumers in poor countries who are most exposed to price volatility, whereas poor people may by contrast enjoy a higher degree of resilience.
This, Carr argues, is because richer people tend to live in urban areas, have diets richer in processed foods, and “typically [have] the most limited options when food prices begin to get unstable”. Poor people, on the other hand, are more concentrated in rural areas, and “have the ability to effect a temporary partial, or even complete, disengagement from the global market”.
So in both Ghana and Ethiopia, he continues, there seems to be evidence that
…temporary deglobalization is a coping strategy that at least some people … use to guard against the vagaries of markets. Ironically, those best positioned to effect such a strategy are the poorest, and therefore they are better able to manage the impact of price instability on food markets
And if you really want a counter-intuitive extrapolation of this argument, try this excerpt that Carr lifts from a recent paper on Ethiopia by Marc Bellemare, Chris Barrett and David Just:
…contrary to conventional wisdom, the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility would be concentrated in the upper 40 percent of the income distribution, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.
Read the whole post, especially for the excellent synthesis discussion on the role of speculation; see also Carr’s new book. (H/t Geoff Dabelko at New Security Beat.)
