News for June 26
June 26, 2009 by Barbara
Filed under News and Analysis
Too Poor to Make the News? | Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blog
The human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler,” smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.
But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility – the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.
- Related link: Ethics in Poverty? | The Xenia Institute’s A Closer Look
Conflict Cell Phones | Truthdig
You’ve heard of conflict diamonds, but did you know there might be blood on your cell phone? This PSA brings a little-known aspect of the conflict in Eastern Congo to light and offers a suggestion on how global consumers can help.
What is the Human Cost of Racism? | Carmen Van Kerckhove
As I follow the discussion we’re having here at TPMCafe, I keep thinking about The Mother Teresa Effect, a concept based on her quote: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
Jae Ran Kim explains:
“In 2004, Carnegie Mellon University conducted an experiment to see if this quote held true in real life. They gave participants five $1 bills to participate in a fictional survey, then presented half of the participants with a fact sheet about starving children in Africa along with an envelope for a donation. The other half of the participants received the same envelope, but instead of a fact sheet, they were given a photo of a young girl named Rokia and a paragraph about how her life would benefit from the participant’s donation.
As you might expect, those with the picture of Rokia gave more than twice as much as those with just the fact sheet.
The researchers tried the experiment again, this time giving one group the fact sheet and the story about Rokia and the other group just the story about Rokia. Again, those with just the story of Rokia donated more than the group with both the story and the facts.”
In other words, not only are we more likely to do something to help an individual than an abstract problem, the inclusion of factual evidence actually reduces our ability to empathize and take action.
U.S. Prostitution Laws Are Awful and Can’t Be Changed | Alas, a Blog
I was reading an article about Mexican brothel laws. Mexican brothels apparently use the “legal, but heavily regulated, including medical testing of prostitutes” approach to prostitution I’ve heard Americans advocate (and which is the approach used by Nevada).
I’ve also heard Americans advocate for the New Zealand approach (legal, and basically no more regulated than any other business), and for the Swedish approach (prostitution is legal, but being a John is illegal).
But so far, I’ve never heard an American advocate for the US system. The US system doesn’t eliminate prostitution — according to Patty Kelly, the author of the article on Mexican brothels, 30 percent of single American men over 30 admit to having paid for sex,1 “and according to the National Task Force on Prostitution, 1 percent of women claim to have worked as erotic service providers at some point in their lives.” The system is brutal to sex workers, encourages corruption in cops, and wastes tax money on useless enforcement. No matter what you think the goal of prostitution policy ought to be, the US policy fails.
Paul Collier’s New Rules for Rebuilding a Broken Nation | TEDTalks
Long conflict can wreck a country, leaving behind poverty and chaos. But what’s the right way to help war-torn countries rebuild? At TED@State, Paul Collier explains the problems with current post-conflict aid plans, and suggests 3 ideas for a better approach.
News for June 10
June 10, 2009 by Barbara
Filed under News and Analysis
Light posting this week, but feel free to spice things up by commenting on the news!
The Economics of Summer Vacation | The Atlantic Correspondents
In response to yesterday’s post on the subject, a thoughtful commenter emailed me a paper — “An Economic Explanation for the Summer School Vacation” by Dartmouth’s William Fischel — that, as its title suggests, offers an economic explanation for summer vacation. (Here’s a pdf.) Fischel gives two reasons for why the summer vacation developed as it did. The first is the advent of “graded schooling” (grades had an advent!) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries:
graded schooling required regular attendance by all students, because long or frequent absences would require costly remedial attention. Thus compulsory attendance laws and a standard school year were complementary with the concept of graded schooling. Indeed, prior to graded schooling, the concept of a “school year” was not especially meaningful. Students in ungraded schools just attended until they learned whatever the teacher could offer, assuming the value of the time spent learning exceeded that spent working on the farm or elsewhere.
So why did September become the most common start time across the nation?
The Future of Philanthropy | The American Prospect
Back in 2006, philanthropist sisters Swanee Hunt and Helen LaKelly Hunt struck up a partnership with the Women’s Funding Network, an umbrella group for over 145 organizations that fund “women’s solutions” globally. Together, they decided that they would strive to raise $150 million in three years for women’s funds across the world. It felt like a real stretch, an outlandish number even for a group of women known for giving generously and having far reaching networks of like-minded philanthropists.
Little did they know that the economy was on its way to tanking and they were about to be in competition with the most highly fundraised presidential election in history. But despite it all, Women Moving Millions — as they would dub their unreasonable campaign — managed to exceed its initial goal. One hundred women and men committed at least $1 million to one or more of the 145 members of the Women’s Funding Network, bringing the total raised to $176,170,506.
Women Moving Millions is the most dramatic recent example of the way in which women are asserting their philanthropic power at unprecedented levels and in unprecedented numbers. And it’s not just women who are shifting the giving paradigm. A new generation of wealthy, progressive youth are reinventing philanthropy to reflect their faith in the grassroots. The future of philanthropy has arrived. And it’s very different: less male, less old, and less top-down and strings-attached than ever before.
Empathy, Sotomayor, and Democracy | George Lakoff @DailyKos
The Sotomayor nomination has given radical conservatives new life. They have launched an attack that is nominally aimed at Judge Sotomayor. But it is really a coordinated stealth attack — on President Obama’s central vision, on progressive thought itself, and on Republicans who might stray from the conservative hard line.
There are several fronts: Empathy, feelings, racism, activist judges. Each one has a hidden dimension. And if progressives think conservative attacks are just about Sotomayor, they may wind up helping conservatives regroup.
Conservatives believe that Sotomayor will be confirmed, and so their attacks may seem irrational to Democrats, a last gasp, a grasping at straws, a sign that the party is breaking up.
Actually, something sneakier and possibly dangerous is going on.
Hurting or Helping the Hungry? | RaceWire
Targeted food aid is widely seen as both a necessity and a moral obligation of the international community. But United States, a leading supplier to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), has drawn mounting criticism for relying on in-kind donations. Unlike cash-based aid, in-kind aid centers on donations of U.S. agricultural products, rather than fostering production within poorer countries.
A recent Government Accountability Office audit seems to affirm concerns about aid policies impeding sustainable development in the Global South:
We found that locally and regionally procured food costs considerably less than U.S. in-kind food aid for sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, though the costs are comparable for Latin America…. the average cost of WFP’s local procurements in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia was 34 percent and 29 percent lower, respectively, than the cost of food aid shipped from the United States…. Additionally, about 95 percent of WFP local procurements in sub-Saharan Africa and 96 percent in Asia cost less than corresponding U.S. in-kind food aid.In-kind donations are also fraught with high overhead costs and agonizing inefficiency. Compared to local and regional purchases, the delivery time for international donations averaged more than 100 days longer.
Activists have challenged “free market” aid policies for exacerbating global economic and racial inequality.
Climate Change: The Poor Get Poorer | Salon: How the World Works
Fact for the day:
National income per-capita falls 8.5 percent on average per degree Celsius rise in temperature.
The assertion comes from research conducted by Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones, and Benjamin Olken and summarized in a column at VoxEu. But here’s the kicker, which is disguised by the word “average”: The results only hold for poor countries. “In rich countries, changes in temperature had no discernible effect on growth.”
The conclusion is depressing. Rich countries — the nations responsible for generating the vast majority of the greenhouse gases that are raising temperatures worldwide — will suffer the least, at least as measured in terms of economic growth rates. But poor countries will get hammered.
