Stop the non-sense: Save the Children

In a world that enjoys ever increasing wealth, it is often forgotten how many still live in poverty and how high child mortality remains. Fortunately according to a new report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), more children are now surviving beyond their 5th birthday. To be specific the number of deaths has fallen from 12.5m in 1990 to 8.8m in 2008, the lowest on record with dramatic falls in Latin America and the former Soviet Union while progress in Africa has been slower. The report notes big improvements in preventing malaria but much more needs to be done to treat the other 2 main causes of deaths: pneumonia and diarrhoea. In a world often obsessed by material wealth or consumed by big political battles about issues such abortion and climate change, it is unacceptable to lose sight of the most urgent issue, saving our children who die from diseases we know how to defeat. This will not be achieved only by offering yet more financial aid to poor nations. The key remains getting the governments of those countries most affected by child mortality to honestly provide decent basic public services to their citizens. This battle requires money and goodwill of different nations working together but this is the war that we should be fighting and winning.

The Value of an Education

Good news students! A new report from the OECD was able to measure how much more graduates can expect to earn compared to job seekers without a degree. In the U.S. the lifetime gross earnings of male graduates are almost $370,000 higher than those without degrees. This is a nice payback for the ever inflating  cost of  a university education. The trend is similar in other countries but perhaps the best value of an education should not be measured in terms of financial benefits but rather in terms of other personal and social benefits.  Knowledge in an ever complex world allows perhaps individuals to make better informed decisions on all sorts of matters and societies that are better educated may be a better steward of freedom and democracy. Knowledge and education however do not always guarantee those benefits, it may be worth to remember that while  many individuals without college education have achieved great success, a few highly read intellectuals have led humanity straight down to a path of madness (socialism, eugenics, etc).

The Damage Done on Sept. 11th

On yet another anniversary of the tragedy on Sept. 11th, humanity has much to reflect on its aftermath. That fateful day which will live in infamy,  terrorists who attacked America did not bring down only the New York’s World Trade Center towers. On that day, the prospects of peace in a world which had seen the end of the cold war era and collapse of communism,  crumbled like the Towers’ beams. On that day the Middle East conflict graduated from its regional status to a global one with far reaching consequences. Thousands of lives have been lost in wars and terrorist attacks without remarkable improvements to any of the people involved. In the end the aftermath of 9/11 comes at a huge cost paid not only by those who have lost their lives, but by all of us as governments around the world have restrained freedoms (spying  on us, torturing and jailing individuals without due process) and wasted billions of dollars in the name of security. Most important of all, we are left with the huge opportunity cost of not being able to shift, after the end of the cold war, the world’s minds and resources to more vital challenges (poverty, child mortality, development, climate change, etc). The damage done on 9/11 is that our entire planet is still crumbling under the weight of yet more senseless wars and our species’ gift for continuously falling short of its potential.

The Aging World and the Coming Storm

Despite the complaints about health care, the reality is that people over the last century have gotten healthier not just wealthier. We are living longer just as the rise of the middle class and women entering the workforce in mass, have led fertility rates to decline. The resulting sustantial increase in the  number of elderly people will create serious problems in coming years as a growing number of them will rely on a smaller labor pool (generally referred to an increase in the old-age dependency ratio). As the chart atop shows by 2050 Japan and major European countries could have a dependency ratio close or above 50% meaning that about 2 workers will have to bear the high cost of supporting social services for the elderly. This will be impossible unless payroll taxes rise to punitive levels or benefits are significantly reduced which may not be politically viable given the large share of the elderly voting in democracies. Although China and the United States are in slightly better shape, the trend is evident worldwide and as emerging countries become richer, the dependency ratio for the world is on the track to more than double to over 25% by 2050. Today it is popular to bash business for the bursting of the financial bubble but when citizens will discover that their highly indebted governments have overpromised benefits that cannot be delivered they may turn on democratic politicians and political parties which thrives on promising gullible voters utopian visions of prosperity for the purpose of gaining power. If you though pandemic flu and economic crisis were enough just wait for the coming storm that may threaten the core of world’s democracies.

Abruzzo Quake Reminds us of our Fragility

Earthquakes are common on planet earth but in the age of abundant internet videos & photos, experiencing these tragedies can aquire a deeper meaning: the web brings people living far away much closer to places and events that are quite distant in reality. As images and news arrived from Italy’s Abruzzo region with over 200 deaths and thousands wounded and homeless, we can almost experience the sadness and awe at the destruction. Crumbled brick buildings remind us of the power of nature always changing through shiting tectonic plates or evolving ecosystems. More powerfully, hands and bodies buried in the rubble remind us that life like earth itself is precious and yet fragile. It takes often tragedies to awaken our minds from the narrow focus of our daily lives and to be reminded that life should be treasured every day. As these images fade in memory unfortunately so does our appreciation for how quickly it could all end and for the simple great things that life offers every day: from the smile of a child to a sunset that fades into a distant and yet stunning horizon line.

The Middle Class Engine of Growth

One of the greatest achievements of globalization has been the lifting of billions of people out of poverty and into the middle class which is the engine of economic growth. By the 1960s the middle class consisted of about a third of the world’s population, now more than 50% can be counted as middle class according to research by Surjit Bhalla, an Indian economist, with most of the growth coming from China. People in the middle class are generally more open-minded, more concerned about the future of their children, and prefer free markets and democracy which are better to balancing conflicting interests and promote growth. The middle class is also more likely to invest in education, new products and technologies, start new businesses which can generate jobs and are vital to prosperity.  With the economic crisis rolling around the globe and the risk of reversing globalization, the rise of the middle class could stop or reverse leaving the whole of humanity much worse off and a lot poorer potentially leading to instability and conflict.

An oath in the bleakest of winters

America swore in its 44th president, the first black man to takes charge of the White House, not even a century after black Americans were still living in segregation. In an age where the American dream appears to be fading fast, this day marking another peaceful transition of power in an often bloody world served a powerful reminder about America’s amazing ability to renew itself. Beyond the celebration however this president faces huge challenges that will require tough decisions in order to solve major problems such as failing schools, poor health care, lost jobs and tackling global warming. Accomplishing all of this in a time of economic crisis and soaring public deficits will be an even bigger challenge and Mr. Obama knows this comparing the current crisis to the bleakest winter of the Republic’s history, when George Washington’s battered army lay at bay at Valley Forge. He promised an end to “putting off unpleasant decisions” but we shall see how these good intentions will fare against taking on the well entrenched interests and lobbies that are at the core of this amazing and yet sometimes seemingly doomed modern American Republic.

The quickly depleting seas

Oceans have provided humanity with a rich source of food and economic well being. Rampant overfishing however has caused fish stocks to fall everywhere. The global catch exploded to 93m tonnes in 2006, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, compared with just 19m in 1950. Better technology has enabled fishermen to catch more, smaller fish and recent research by Scripps, a marine-science research organisation, speculates that fish species may have declined by up to 80% from their original state. This is a disaster given how important fish is to human diet and the well being of entire communities around the globe. The tragedy is that depleting the seas is unnecessary and completely avoidable. Creating a global system of granting property and trading rights to fishermen, societies could encourage conservation and better use of scarce resources but narrow minded nationalism still prevails and until a big disaster strikes we fear inertia will prevail and proper safeguards may come too late.

Offshoring and rationing medical care

As economies falter protectionism in on the rise and will hurt everyone. Americans who often are afraid of seeing their jobs offshored have been quite happy to soak up Asian savings and cheap products to raise their standard of living. Now even more of them are discovering the benefits of medical tourism. With 46m Americans lacking health insurance, and millions more facing huge out-of-pocket medical expenses, Americans are increasingly heading overseas to cheaper facilities where many treatments can be done in world-class hospitals abroad for a fractions of the price charged by American hospitals. Recent research shows that American health tourists will rise from 2m in 2009 to 10m by 2012.

People voting with their feet are sending a clear message to the health care industy and the American government which overregulates this sector stifling innovation. Although many in America would love the expansion of government run health care beyond the already huge Medicare system (operated with gargantuan deficits), the reality is that Americans do not want to face up to the trade offs and compromises required to provide health care to all. Those who are well covered by subsidized company plans are keen to protect their privileges until of course they find themselves out of a job and without coverage.

A modern society however should not tolerate having millions of people without basic health coverage because this hurts everyone by lowering productivity and imposing hefty costs on taxpayers. In a world of unlimited demands and scarce resources the clear solution remains rationing care. This is already done by the hated HMOs, and any other system whether run by private entities or governments would continue to face the hard choice of measuring costs versus benefits. The clear challenge is to tackle privileges  and realign services and resources more rationally. Clearly even rich societies cannot afford to provide unlimited medical care to everyone, but they owe it to themselves for financial and ethical reasons to provide at least some basic health care services to all its citizens. It would be too much however to hope that political rhetoric will allow a proper debate about this very sensitive topic so we expect more American to happily travel seeking excellent medical care at a lower cost in foreign facilities far away from the hypocrisy.

The Madness of Man and War

The marking today of the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I gives us time to reflect on the madness of man. Nature and the animal kingdom are filled with examples of cruelty in the battle for survival, man however, a species supposedly blessed by a  superior intelligence, excels above all in the art of killing and warfare. History is littered with bloodshed, some caused by inevitable natural disasters, but most is the result of the belligerence man that has not been tamed by the painful lessons of the past. In World War I for example some 20 million soldiers and civilians are thought to have lost their lives (70,000 died just in 1 day in the battle of Somme). Although ancient history through the middle ages and modern times have seen numerous conflicts and death, the 20th century was by far the bloodiest. Over 70 million people, the majority of them civilians were killed in World War II making it the deadliest conflict in human history. Trench warfare of course pales in comparison with the deadliness of the nuclear bombings by America of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which claimed 140,000 and 85,000 lives. By far the worse however were the slow extermination by Nazi Germany under Hitler of millions of jews and europeans in gas chambers and concentration camps. On an even grander and more disgusting scale were the millions more of russians and chinese who died in gulags, labor camps or of famine under the madness of communist cultural revolutions created in Stalin’s Soviet empire and Mao’s China. As we write today, conflicts are still flaring in almost all of earth’s continents, some small others far bigger, pointing to a future where humanity’s tears and blood will still flow abundantly as if to prove that man is a species whose madness still far surpasses its own limited intelligence.