from Alternet, a new theory on possible environmental causes of autism:
The children exposed to two substances were up to twice as likley as others to develop autism spectrum disorders. The first is styrene, which is used in plastics, paints and is also a product of gasoline combustion in automobiles. The second, chromium, is produced during the processes used in steel manufacturing and other industries.
Paul Krugman has weighed in with an anecdotal example of how companies can find ways to conserve energy:
After 2008, when oil prices rose sharply, shipping companies — which send massive container ships on regular “pendulum routes”, taking stuff (say) from Rotterdam to China and back again — responded by reducing the speed of their ships. It turns out that steaming more slowly reduces fuel consumption more than proportionately to the reduction in speed
Interesting, but Mark Buchanan makes the point that total energy use keeps increasing even as efficiency per unit of GDP decreases (the Krugman article was actually a response to this one):
Growth inevitably entails doing more stuff of one kind or another, whether it’s manufacturing things or transporting people or feeding electricity to Facebook server farms or providing legal services. All this activity requires energy. We are getting more efficient in using it: The available data suggest that the U.S. uses about half as much per dollar of economic output as it did 30 years ago. Still, the total amount of energy we consume increases every year.
Data from more than 200 nations from 1980 to 2003 fit a consistent pattern: On average, energy use increases about 70 percent every time economic output doubles. This is consistent with other things we know from biology. Bigger organisms as a rule use energy more efficiently than small ones do, yet they use more energy overall. The same goes for cities. Efficiencies of scale are never powerful enough to make bigger things use less energy.
I have yet to see an economist present a coherent argument as to how humans will somehow break free from such physical constraints. Standard economics doesn’t even discuss how energy is tied into growth, which it sees as the outcome of interactions between capital and labor.
Brian Czech further attacks the Krugman article:
Let’s not let Krugman delude us. “Growing real GDP” isn’t about an efficiency gain here and there. It means increasing production and consumption of goods and services in the aggregate. It entails a growing human population and/or per capita consumption. It means growing the whole, integrated economy: agriculture, extraction, manufacturing, services, and infrastructure. From the tailpipe of all this activity comes pollution.
Krugman seems to have fallen for the pixie dust of “dematerializing” and “green growth” in the “Information Economy.” He may want to revisit Chapter 4 of The Wealth of Nations, where Adam Smith pointed out that agricultural surplus is what frees the hands for the division of labor. In Smith’s day that included the likes of candle-making and pin manufacturing. Today it includes everything from auto-making to information processing, but the fundamentals haven’t changed. No agricultural surplus, no economic growth. And agriculture is hardly a low-energy sector.
Now, I think it’s possible to have a vision of truly clean energy, which could one day allow us to grow energy use without increasing our environmental footprint. But to get there, we have to turn the corner where the reduction in impact per unit increase in energy use is greater than the overall increase in energy use. And we are nowhere near turning that corner yet.
From PLOS, Urbanization is correlated with economic growth, but it is not necessarily the cause of it.
The authors of the study argue that GDP growth may create conditions that organically drive migration from rural to urban areas, but the assumption that urbanization will necessarily drive strong economic growth may be false. Pointing to the numerous examples of accelerated urbanization without strong economic growth (again, the green graph above), they caution that “urbanization is not an automatic panacea” for economic difficulties. Citing other work, the authors suggest that instead of trying to move people into cities, governments and development agencies should focus on creating a mobile workforce, ensuring broad access to goods and markets, implementing government policies that support commerce, and investing in infrastructure. These efforts could make a bigger difference for short- and medium-term economic growth than arbitrary urbanization targets.
While economic growth is an incredibly complex process and much work remains, this study serves as a good reminder not to confuse causation and correlation: just because two variables are closely related doesn’t necessarily mean that one directly causes the other.
According to BBC, the Swedish military is back out searching for “foreign underwater activity”, meaning Soviet…er, Russian submarines. So I went to Wikipedia and refreshed myself on the “whiskey on the rocks” incident from 1981:
Soviet submarine S-363 was a Soviet NavyWhiskey-classsubmarine of the Baltic Fleet, which became famous under the designation U 137 when it ran aground on October 27, 1981 on the south coast of Sweden, approximately 10 km from Karlskrona, one of the larger Swedish naval bases. U137 was the unofficial Swedish name for the vessel, as the Soviets considered names of most of their submarines to be classified at the time and did not disclose them. The ensuing international incident is often referred to as the Whiskey on the rocks incident…
his produced the most dangerous period of the crisis and is the time where the Swedish Prime MinisterThorbjörn Fälldin gave his order to “Hold the border” to the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces. The coastal battery, now fully manned as well as the mobile coastal artillery guns and mine stations, went to “Action Stations“. The Swedish Air Force scrambled strike aircraft armed with modern anti-ship missiles and reconnaissance aircraft knowing that the weather did not allow rescue helicopters to fly in the event of an engagement. After a tense 30 minutes, Swedish Fast Attack Craft met the ships and identified them as West German grain carriers.
The boat was stuck on the rock for nearly 10 days. On November 5 it was hauled off the rocks by Swedish tugs and escorted to international waters where it was handed over to the Soviet fleet.
How many times were the two sides locked and loaded during the Cold War, and are we just lucky that cooler heads almost always prevailed?
This article from Planetizen puts the break-even price for hydraulic fracturing at something like $80-85 a barrel, higher than I had previously reported. The point is that they are getting down to the point where it would no longer be as profitable as it has been, and at some point it wouldn’t be profitable at all. It’s fun to try to piece together the reasons for this shift – slowing economies in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and as a result a rising U.S. dollar which means oil that might be holding steady in currencies around the world is still getting cheaper in U.S. dollars at the moment. I still think this is a short-term fluctuation masking a decades-long trend toward higher energy and food prices.
Climate Central has this graphic predicting increases in average annual coastal flooding events in U.S. cities. It’s a little hard to read accurately, but what caught my eye is the increase from something like 20 now in my native Philadelphia to something like 75 in 2035. That is pretty big and pretty soon. I think we will manage to protect ourselves, either physically or through insurance, from changes of this magnitude that happen gradually. But it will cost money and resources that will then not be available to spend on other critical needs. So unless our income and wealth are growing faster than these impacts, we are going to be getting gradually poorer and poorer as we deal with these changes.
Source: Climate Central http://www.climatecentral.org/news/coastal-flooding-us-cities-18148
I thought that high unemployment and downward pressure on wages was leading to more startup companies and entrepreneurs. Not so, according to Janet Yellen from the Federal Reserve:
With a good deal of justification, the United States has always viewed itself as an entrepreneurial country. Although most new businesses fail, founding a new company is still a key way for people to move up the income distribution, Yellen said. “However, it appears that it has become harder to start and build businesses,” she added. “The pace of new business creation has gradually declined over the past couple of decades.” This decline could serve to depress the growth of productivity, wages, and employment, Yellen went on, and it “may well threaten what I believe likely has been a significant source of economic opportunity for many families below the very top in income and wealth.”
Here’s a Journal of the American Medical Association editorial on the level of preparedness in the United States for something like Ebola:
The Dallas case raises significant concerns about national preparedness for public health emergencies. Health emergencies (eg, anthrax, SARS, novel influenzas, and hurricanes Katrina and Sandy) spurred federal preparedness planning and funding, including the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (reauthorized in 2013),2 to ensure that federal, state, and more than 3500 local health departments coordinate their efforts effectively in disasters. Significant investments have been made in staff training, interagency coordination, legal reform, and planning.
Preparedness efforts like these are essential, but inadequate. Overall, investment in key health system functions has been in decline. The CDC’s 2013 budget declined 10%, or nearly $1 billion, from 2012.3 Since 2008, state and local public health agencies have lost more than 50 000 staff (almost 20% of their workforce),4 requiring cuts to preparedness programs. Many EMS agencies and hospitals are also strained, leading the Institute of Medicine to warn in 2012 of an “enormous potential for confusion, chaos, and flawed decision-making”5 in a public health emergency. Insufficient funding in a research and data infrastructure limits the ability to identify weaknesses and learn from mistakes. Rare, novel infections such as Ebola expose the difficulty of diagnosis and adherence to arduous infection control protocols. Following the nurses’ EVD diagnosis in Dallas, future Ebola patients may be directed to centers with advanced training, PPE, and well-equipped isolation rooms. Vinson was transferred to Emory Hospital in Atlanta on October 15.
Now, the American Medical Association is a special interest group. The United States has the world’s largest economy and spends more than any other country on health care, even as a fraction of that economy. So I don’t like to hear that the answer is throwing more money at the problem. I think we have a patchwork of doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies each looking out for their own interests, and what it adds up to shouldn’t really be called a “health care system”. But we’ve been warned – we need to get a lot smarter before we have to deal with something like SARS or a novel influenza.
Here’s a laundry list of world economic problems from CBS News:
The focused has been on Germany over the past week, the weakly beating heart of the still-troubled eurozone, where industrial production, factory orders and export activity all posted the worst results since early 2009 amid chatter that the country is on the verge of falling back into a technical recession.
Separately, France is having budget woes. And the eurozone debt crisis threatens a comeback as credit rating agencies issue new warnings and the market starts to realize that the European Central Bank can no longer bluff its way out of trouble. It now must step up with a bona fide sovereign bond-buying stimulus program (which could be illegal according to its charter and is unpopular idea with the Germans) after playing at one for more than two years.
Japan is also at risk of falling back into technical recession (GDP growth already contracted last quarter) as a recent sales tax hike and the negative impact of a very weak yen (higher food, fuel and import costs) pinches consumers.
Japan has been held together by the idea that the Bank of Japan would issue more cheap money stimulus and further slam the yen if the economy faltered. But economists are realizing that a weak yen is hurting more than it’s helping at this point. And given Japan’s massive 227% national debt-to-GDP ratio (vs. around 100% for the U.S.) time is running out.
And in China, the People’s Bank of China is watching as electricity production contracts outright for the first time since early 2009, an anecdotal sign that China’s economy has hit a wall.
The second reason is that the U.S. Federal Reserve is watching as its efforts to merely return monetary policy to a more neutral footing — by bringing to an end the QE3 bond-buying program and looking ahead to the first interest rate hike since 2006 — has resulted in a volatile corporate bond market and a massive rally in the U.S. dollar.
This has crushed commodity prices, tightened credit to foreign economies (many of which have grown dependent on borrowing at low rates in cheap dollars) and threatens to slow U.S. GDP growth by pinching American exports.
It goes on after that…
No mention of root causes here. I keep repeating myself all the time redundantly but some potential root causes, which are not mutually exclusive are (1) the world is still feeling effects of the 2007-8 financial crisis, in a classic depression and loss of demand and confidence scenario, (2) rich people and corporations are driving government policy in their favor to the point that inequality has gotten so bad it has broken our economic system, with the middle class and working class not having enough incentive (i.e. income) to be productive, (3) technology and automation are putting strong downward pressure on middle class and working class wages, (4) climate change and natural capital depletion are starting to be felt in energy and food prices, putting a head wind on economic growth, with “green” technological progress not enough to lessen or reverse environmental impacts, or (5) innovation and technological progress in general have slowed down and are not driving economic growth like they have over the past century or so.
It’s becoming more common to freeze human eggs. The implications are interesting. A woman can freeze eggs when she is young for later use, obviously. What if a young woman learns that she is not able to have children? Could she choose to be implanted with eggs her sister has frozen? Sure, that seems okay. What about eggs her mother chose to freeze decades earlier? The baby could be someone’s daughter and granddaughter at the same time. But still just a baby. I imagine these things will all happen within families, if they haven’t already. What about buying and selling eggs though? What about a couple paying a stranger to have their genetic child because they are just too busy or don’t want to be bothered with a pregnancy. That’s slightly more troubling, but I’m sure that too will happen if it hasn’t already.