Tag Archives: developing countries

Lee Kuan Yew

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Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and long-time leader of modern Singapore, passed away on March 23. I regret I never saw him in person, but I did live in Singapore from 2010-13 and read his memoir From Third World to First. His accomplishments are extraordinary whatever you think of him. The western press is a little unfair in constantly calling him an “autocrat”. It’s true that he outlawed short skirts and long hair for a time, censored foreign publications, and locked up a few Communists for decades without a proper trial. But that was the Cold War, and before you judge, you have to consider the utter chaos and climate of fear that was going on all around Singapore in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Korea, China, and pretty much the rest of Asia at the time. Singapore stayed relatively calm, peaceful, safe, and eventually became prosperous on his watch. Singapore has a parliament with regular elections. They are dominated by one party that only considers a narrow range of policies, partly because that party is popular and has served the people well, and partly because there are strong barriers to entry built into the system for opposition parties that might consider a wider range of policies. But replace that one party with two parties that are only slightly apart on the narrow range of policies they consider, keep the barriers to entry, and you have the U.S. system.

Economically, Singapore took full advantage of its critical location in the global shipping network. They focused on foreign direct investment to build industry first in low wage manufacturing, and gradually built up to advanced industries today such as refining, chemicals, drugs, technology, finance, etc. They have something called the “central provident fund” – this is a personal social security account that people save their money in (it’s not optional) for retirement, housing, and medical care. This money gets invested in the local and global economies and earns a good rate of return. Almost all housing is developed by the government and subsidized – but it is not exactly “public housing” as we think of it in the U.S., because it is owned rather than rented. So it’s more like a condo where the government is your condo association. You can buy your first unit at a discount to the market price, then resell it later at the market price, although the government puts some limits on who can buy where and when. So the combination of this housing scheme and savings scheme has built a fairly broad base of wealth for the population without resorting to a large income redistribution or social insurance scheme like we see in Europe and the Anglo-American countries. Lee famously believed that this would be counter to “Asian values”, part of which is maintaining very tight family units that take care of each other in times of need.

Although I enjoyed my personal time in Singapore, it was a little too cold and corporate for my taste. Too many people seemed to view accumulating wealth and designer handbags as the primary objective of everyday life. Although I agree that people were tolerant of religious and ethnic diversity, I perceived a coldness between strangers on the street, and even between neighbors, that I found disturbing compared to the way people treat each other in the U.S. and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. People sometimes expressed petty racial and class-based attitudes that would at least engender some guilt in other places. Sometimes I felt that Singaporeans have allowed themselves to become the perfect example of the new Homo economicus species described in the economics textbooks. The country also has some demographic challenges – fertility rates are low partly because women have so many more career and life options available to them than in the past. This is great, but because Singapore is so small it is going to mean a dramatic drop in the native-born population. Immigration can compensate in terms of numbers, but the culture and sense of nationhood will somehow have to adjust to this. A shared love of designer handbags is not a good cultural foundation for a nation.

Singapore has an unbelievable PR machine. You should assume that things there are never quite as rosy as the propaganda they put out, nor as bad as the western press sometimes accuses. Regardless, it is pretty amazing to think how far it has come since the ashes of World War II, and hard to point to another figure who has created a prosperous modern country through sheer force of will like Lee Kuan Yew.

antibiotics on the farm

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Here’s a journal article about antibiotic use on farms worldwide. Pigs get the highest doses relative to their body size, followed closely by chickens, then cows as a distant third. Developing countries are expected to increase their use by a lot as their populations grow and demand more meat.

Demand for animal protein for human consumption is rising globally at an unprecedented rate. Modern animal production practices are associated with regular use of antimicrobials, potentially increasing selection pressure on bacteria to become resistant. Despite the significant potential consequences for antimicrobial resistance, there has been no quantitative measurement of global antimicrobial consumption by livestock. We address this gap by using Bayesian statistical models combining maps of livestock densities, economic projections of demand for meat products, and current estimates of antimicrobial consumption in high-income countries to map antimicrobial use in food animals for 2010 and 2030. We estimate that the global average annual consumption of antimicrobials per kilogram of animal produced was 45 mg⋅kg−1, 148 mg⋅kg−1, and 172 mg⋅kg−1 for cattle, chicken, and pigs, respectively. Starting from this baseline, we estimate that between 2010 and 2030, the global consumption of antimicrobials will increase by 67%, from 63,151 ± 1,560 tons to 105,596 ± 3,605 tons. Up to a third of the increase in consumption in livestock between 2010 and 2030 is imputable to shifting production practices in middle-income countries where extensive farming systems will be replaced by large-scale intensive farming operations that routinely use antimicrobials in subtherapeutic doses. For Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the increase in antimicrobial consumption will be 99%, up to seven times the projected population growth in this group of countries. Better understanding of the consequences of the uninhibited growth in veterinary antimicrobial consumption is needed to assess its potential effects on animal and human health.

Chinese “Crackup”

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The Wall Street Journal is predicting the “crackup” of the Chinese government.

We cannot predict when Chinese communism will collapse, but it is hard not to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase. The CCP is the world’s second-longest ruling regime (behind only North Korea), and no party can rule forever.

Looking ahead, China-watchers should keep their eyes on the regime’s instruments of control and on those assigned to use those instruments. Large numbers of citizens and party members alike are already voting with their feet and leaving the country or displaying their insincerity by pretending to comply with party dictates.

I don’t find any of the evidence the author gives all that convincing. For example, part of his evidence is that people are traveling, investing, and studying abroad, while I wouldn’t consider any of those things unpatriotic. He interprets facial expressions at a party meeting to mean people are bored and insincere, but my own experiences trying to interpret facial expressions in cultures other than my own have been humbling. Finally, he suggests that restrictions on political speech are incompatible with a modern, innovation-driven economy. I think that may be true if “innovation” means truly creative system-based problem solving. But if it just means inventing new patentable objects that can be profitably sold, then I think narrow, highly specialized thinking may suffice, and the education system may be able to produce that without sparking a high level of political engagement.

water and social unrest

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This interview with “British-born novelist and author Rana Dasgupta” talks briefly about economic growth, inequality, and water in India:

There is the potential for immense wealth creation in India in the next 40 or 50 years, so there will be money and resources to redistribute and resources and as long as the tides of poverty and violence are not too catastrophic, then I think probably the system can readjust itself. Right now, within India, without anything else happening outside, there’s enough prospects for growth. In 40 to 50 years, economies of the West are going to be in dramatic decline, and in the longer term, I think the global system as a whole will face some sort of crisis and that will affect India, too. But in the medium term, India has pretty good growth prospects and hopefully there’s the quality of leadership and ideas that can redistribute some of that wealth and find livable solutions to some of these problems.

But inequality and the environment are going to be massive in Indian politics. Really, no one is talking about water, but giving 1.3 billion people clean water to drink is becoming very difficult. And you can’t survive for very long without it, so if a city of 25 million people — and there are at least two Indian cities that have that kind of number — has no water, the effects are immediate. When there’s no housing the effects could be years away, but when there’s no water, there are water riots immediately. People who don’t have it will steal it because they have to.

So water could be one of the triggering events in Indian cities for how a sort of mini-political revolution might happen and realization on the part of the middle classes that there is actually a wider world that is up against its limits.

democracy and development

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I don’t like to get too much into politics in this blog, and especially not the politics of countries other than my own, but this article about Thailand and Myanmar annoyed me a little bit. I suspect it was written by someone who doesn’t travel much, but is just trying to piece together a story based on things they read in the newspaper. The premise of the story is that there is a clear connection between a western parliamentary system and foreign investment in developing countries. I don’t think this is true – companies in the developed world love investing in developing countries they view as stable and predictable, whether they have representative government or not.

Thailand has made several attempts at a Western-style majority-rule parliamentary model but it simply hasn’t worked – it hasn’t resulted in consensus policies that are acceptable to enough of the various factions of society that they would let the country move forward. So what you see on TV is a somewhat unique way of having that long-term political struggle and trying to come up with something workable. There has been some sporadic violence and loss of life regrettably, but it is nothing remotely close to a “civil war” as some columnists would have us believe. Arguably, this is a democratic process although it is playing out over a long time frame and in a very odd, uniquely Thai way. By the way, there are very real human rights abuses, military violence against civilian protestors, and political repression that have occurred under Thai governments past and present, and I am not condoning any of that in this post.

You can understand why foreign multinational corporations, which have no loyalty or ideology other than profit seeking, might prefer a nearby country like Malaysia or Vietnam, which also offer infrastructure and cheap labor with less chance of the messy political process that is creating some uncertainty in Thailand. Indonesia is another example of a country that has been developing quickly under decades of conservative governments, but is now scaring international companies a little bit with its local brand of democracy. The Phillippines has an American-style constitution, but has never quite gotten its economy in gear.

Burma/Myanmar is interesting because it is somewhat of a blank slate. It could be a laboratory where truly sustainable economic, social, and ecological development policies could be tested and refined if the political leadership really understood and wanted to do that. I think it will more likely just be the next Thailand, with its people richer, healthier, and better educated a decade from now, but missing a portion of the rich culture and natural wonder it used to have. I wish the people of both countries all the best.

fiddling while Sao Paulo burns

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Sao Paulo officials knew the city was running out of water, and did nothing, says Jeffry Sachs.

One year ago, I was in Brazil to launch the Brazilian chapter of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), an initiative of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The main message I heard that day was that São Paulo was suffering from a mega-drought, but that state and local politicians were keeping it quiet. This is a reality around the world: too many political leaders are ignoring a growing environmental crisis, imperiling their own countries and others.

In the case of Brazil, state and local officials had other things on their mind in 2014: hosting the World Cup soccer tournament in June and July and winning elections later in the year. So they relied on a time-tested political tactic: hide the bad news behind a “feel-good” message.

Sao Paulo Water Crisis

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The New York Times has an article about an impending absolute water shortage in Sao Paulo, a metropolitan area of 20 million people.

As southeast Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving São Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cutoffs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week.

We know mega-cities in the poorest countries struggle to provide water and other basic services, particularly to the poorest people, and climate change is going to make that worse. But this might be the first example of drought and climate change moving up the income scale, affecting relatively affluent people in a relatively affluent (though certainly unequally distributed) city and country. You can say it is due to poor planning or an absence of planning, but that suggests long-term climate change planning is not something any city or country can afford to ignore, no matter how secure its water situation might seem now.

critical natural capital

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This article in Ecological Economics is about the idea of critical natural capital. Critical natural capital is meant to bridge the gap between strong sustainability, which says manufactured capital cannot be substituted for natural capital, and weak sustainability, which says it can. Critical natural capital says that some, but not all, of it can be substituted, because some of it is, well, critical.

The other theme of this paper is the “capability approach”, which is based on the ideas of Amartya Sen. Reading Amartya Sen is on my list of things to do eventually someday, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.

This article is an attempt to conceptually improve the notion of strong sustainability by creating a rapprochement between its core concept, critical natural capital, and the capability approach. We first demonstrate that the capability approach constitutes a relevant framework for analysing the multiple links between human well-being and critical natural capital. Second, we demonstrate that the rapprochement between critical natural capital and the capability approach can form both the normative basis and the informational basis for a deliberative approach to human development which embraces a strong sustainability perspective. This conceptual rapprochement, as illustrated in our case study, opens up avenues of research towards the practical implementation of human development projects from a strong sustainability perspective.

2014 Report Card

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It’s taken me a while to get out a “year in review” post for 2014, but anyway, here it is. This won’t be a masterpiece of the essay form. I’m just going to ramble on about some interesting trends and themes from the year, along with a few relevant links.

The critical question this blog tries to answer is, is our civilization failing or not? I’ll talk about our human economy, our planetary system, and make some attempt to tie the two together.

Overall Human Health and Wellbeing. First, there are some very happy statistics to report. For example, worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. What better measure of progress could there be than more happy, healthy childhoods? And it’s not just about increasing wealth – people in developing countries today have much better health outcomes at the same level of wealth compared to developing countries of the past (for example, Indonesia today vs. the United States when it passed the same income level). It’s hard to argue against the idea that economic growth and technological change have obviously eliminated a lot of human suffering. So, I think the important questions are, will these trends continue? Is the system stable? Can the natural environment continue to support this trend indefinitely? There may also be an important question of whether we had the right to exploit the natural environment to get us to the point where we are now, but that is an academic question at this point.

Financial System Instability. Let’s talk about the stability of our human economic system. The U.S. economy may finally seem to be picking up from the aftermath of the severe 2007-8 financial crisis, but it is certainly far below where it would be if that hadn’t happened and the prior growth trend had just continued since then. The rest of the world isn’t doing so well, however – Europe and Japan are looking particularly slow if not in an outright deflationary spiral, at the same time developing countries appear to be slowing down. Some are calling this a “new normal” for the world economy. More scary than that, the industry-written regulations and perverse incentives allowing the excessive risk taking that caused the crisis have not been fully addressed and the whole episode could recur in the short term.

Thoughts on Ecosystem and Economic “Pulsing”. 2007-8 was a textbook financial crisis – although it was caused by novel forms of money and risk taking beyond the direct reach of government regulators and central banks, it was not that different from crises caused by plain old speculation and over-lending back when there were no central banks around. It’s hard to draw a direct link from the financial crisis to ecosystem services, climate change, or natural resource scarcity. However, if we think about natural ecosystems, they are resilient to outside stressors up to a point – say, moderate fluctuations in temperature, hydrology, or pressure from non-native species. However, say a major fluctuation happens such as a major flood or fire that causes serious damage. In the absence of major outside stressors, the system will eventually recover to its original state, but in the presence of major outside stressors, even if they did not cause the flood or fire, it may never bounce back all the way. In the same way, our human economy may appear resilient to the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion, and so forth for a long time, but then when something comes out of left field, like a major financial crisis, war, or epidemic, we may not be able to recover to our previous trend. This probably also applies to the effects of technology on employment, as discussed below. In the absence of major shocks coming from outside the system, we’ll see a long, slow slide in employment and possibly a long, slow rise in energy and food prices, with so much noise in the signal that it will be easy for the naysayers to hold sway for long periods of time. But when those major events happen, we may see sudden, painful changes that we have no obvious way of mitigating quickly.

Technological Change: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Automation, and Employment. After decades of slow but steady progress, these technologies are really coming into their own. Robots are being used to keep miners in line and to drive cars, for example. Manufacturing has become a high-tech industry. As computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example), there is gradually less demand for the medium-skilled workers who used to do those jobs. High-skilled workers like computer programmers are doing very well, although I presume the automation will gradually creep higher and higher up the chain, so today’s safer jobs will be less safe tomorrow. At the same time these medium-skilled workers in developed countries are getting squeezed out, developing countries are not benefiting like they used to from their large pools of low-skilled workers as manufacturing becomes more and more automated, and can be done cost-effectively closer to consumers in richer countries.

Will our society recognize and solve this employment problem? American corporate society, and its admirers around the world, are unlikely to. Something very similar to this happened with agricultural automation in the early- to mid-20th century, and with globalization in the mid- to late-20th century. As agriculture became more automated, many displaced workers moved from rural areas in the U.S. southeast to urban areas in the U.S. northeast, looking for factory work. Unfortunately, the factory jobs that existed previously were being moved to developing countries with abundant low-wage labor. The pockets of poverty, unemployment, and social problems created by these forces have not been adequately addressed to this day. To the individual worker, it doesn’t much matter whether your job is being taken by a local robot or an overseas human. Unemployment created by technological forces today could resemble what was created by globalization yesterday, only on a much larger scale. We can only hope that the larger scale will drive real political solutions, such as better education and training, sharing of available work, and more widespread ownership of the labor-saving technology.

Of course, one of the earliest and probably the most shameful example of a modern capitalist system generating wealth for an elite few at the expense of workers is the American slavery system of the 18th and 19th centuries. We just can’t trust amoral, self-interested private enterprise to maximize welfare in the absence of a strong moral compass coming from the larger society. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

Another example of extreme corporate immorality: Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook.

The Gospel of Shareholder Value. There is an important debate over whether people who run corporations have any ethical responsibility to anything other than profit seeking. Well duh, everyone on Earth has an ethical responsibility. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned. There is even evidence that the ideology of profit maximization is a drag on innovation. Except billions of people out there who have worshiped at business schools would disagree with me. And I don’t want to offend anyone’s religion. Noam Chomsky had a quote that I particularly loved, so I am going to repeat it here:

In market systems, you don’t take account of what economists call externalities. So say you sell me a car. In a market system, we’re supposed to look after our own interests, so I make the best deal I can for me; you make the best deal you can for you. We do not take into account the effect on him. That’s not part of a market transaction. Well, there is an effect on him: there’s another car on the road; there’s a greater possibility of accidents; there’s more pollution; there’s more traffic jams. For him individually, it might be a slight increase, but this is extended over the whole population. Now, when you get to other kinds of transactions, the externalities get much larger. So take the financial crisis. One of the reasons for it is that — there are several, but one is — say if Goldman Sachs makes a risky transaction, they — if they’re paying attention — cover their own potential losses. They do not take into account what’s called systemic risk, that is, the possibility that the whole system will crash if one of their risky transactions goes bad. That just about happened with AIG, the huge insurance company. They were involved in risky transactions which they couldn’t cover. The whole system was really going to collapse, but of course state power intervened to rescue them. The task of the state is to rescue the rich and the powerful and to protect them, and if that violates market principles, okay, we don’t care about market principles. The market principles are essentially for the poor. But systemic risk is an externality that’s not considered, which would take down the system repeatedly, if you didn’t have state power intervening. Well there’s another one, that’s even bigger — that’s destruction of the environment. Destruction of the environment is an externality: in market interactions, you don’t pay attention to it. So take tar sands. If you’re a major energy corporation and you can make profit out of exploiting tar sands, you simply do not take into account the fact that your grandchildren may not have a possibility of survival — that’s an externality. And in the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grandchildren — and of course it’s not your grandchildren, but everyone’s.

Our Ecological Footprint. WWF issued an updated Living Planet Report in 2014 suggesting that our annual consumption of natural resources (including the obvious ones like energy and water extraction, straightforward ones like the ability to grow food, but also the less obvious ones like ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products) is continuing to exceed what the Earth can handle each year by at least 50%. We’re like spoiled trust fund babies – we have such incredible resources at our disposable, we never learn to live within our means and one day the resources run out, even if that takes a long time. As we recover from the financial crisis, we have a chance to do things differently, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future.

Other Big Stories from 2014:

  • World War I. 100 years ago, World War I was in full swing. Remember The Guns of August? Well, that was August 1914 they were talking about. Let’s hope we’re not about to blunder into another conflict. But (and I’m cheating a little here because I read this in 2015), the World Economic Forum named “interstate conflict” as both high probability and high consequence in its global risk report.
  • Ebola. Obviously, Ebola was a very bad thing that happened to a whole lot of people. To those of us lucky enough that we weren’t directly in its path, it is a chance to selfishly reflect whether Ebola or something even worse could be coming down the pike. Let’s hope not.
  • Severe Drought and Water Depletion in the Western U.S.: California has been in the midst of a historic drought, although they got some rain recently. Some are describing this as the new normal. Besides rainfall, glaciers, snowpack, and groundwater all seem to be disappearing in some important food-growing areas.
  • Solar grid parity is here! At least some places, some times…

Conclusion. Yes, I think we are on a path to collapse if nothing changes. And I don’t see things changing enough, or fast enough. There are glimmers of hope though. Lest you think I offer only negatives and no solutions, here are two solutions I harp on constantly throughout the blog:

  • Green infrastructure. This is how we fix the hydrologic cycle, close the loop on nutrients, begin to cleanse the atmosphere, protect wild creatures and genetic diversity, and create a society of people with some sense of connection to and stewardship over nature. Don’t act like it’s such a big mystery. It’s known technology. There has been plenty written about trees, design of wildlife corridors and connectivity, for examples. There is simply no excuse for cities to do such a crappy job with these things.
  • Muscle-Powered Transportation. Cars are clearly the root of all evil, the spawn of Mordor, as I pointed out several times (sorry, I just sat through 6+ hours of Hobbit movies). Unless you are perhaps that rare hobbit who can own a car without your morals being completed corrupted by its evil powers. But for the rest of us, I explained several times why getting rid of cars would be good. Here is just one example:

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

12-fold increase in U.S. solar capacity since 2008

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This article is called Nothing Can Stop the US Solar Industry Juggernaut Now. A couple quotes:

The US solar industry has engineered a 1200% increase in utility-scale capacity since 2008, according to a new blog post from the Energy Department. When you factor in the explosive rate of growth in small-scale solar, it’s clear that the current hiccup in the price of oil is not going to stop solar energy from advancing in the US market.

The only question now is how quickly the US solar industry can meet the growth in demand, and for that we turn to a pair of newly announced SunShot programs designed to help the US solar industry churn out — and install — more product than ever before…

If you’re not familiar with the Obama Administration’s 2011 SunShot initiative, that would be a 10-year plan to bring the cost of solar energy down to parity with fossil fuels.

Logically speaking, solar energy just has to be a big part of the sustainability solution. The cynic in me would say if you express an increase from a very small number in percentage terms, it may sound impressive, but it doesn’t mean much. I am a little disappointed if grid parity is really still 10 years out. I really thought we were closer than that. I will believe we are close when I walk out of my house and see it all around me, and/or when my electric bill tells me it is mostly or entirely solar. By the way, my house is in the United States, but I am lucky enough to be on vacation in Southeast Asia at the moment, and I don’t see it here either. What I see here is living standards and health conditions close to what we take for granted in the west (my current mild stomach trouble not withstanding), but it is very clear that relatively cheap, abundant oil, gas, and coal make it possible.