GDP and child mortality

In this 2007 TED talk, Hans Rosling compares GDP and child mortality rates between countries over long periods of time. He makes some interesting comparisons – today’s “developing” or “emerging” countries have GDP similar to the U.S. about a hundred years ago (all adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, I assume), but they are much more advanced in terms of health and living standards than the U.S. was then. By animating over time, you can see how the catching up process occurred particularly after World War II. These plots are interesting because they show child mortality and GDP in two dimensions, but then use colors and bubbles to add various third variables like education level or carbon emissions.

I have to critique a little bit, I can’t help it. He mentions that GDP growth statistically explains 80% of the gains in child mortality. I accept the statistics, but I don’t think GDP growth is logically the cause of these gains. I suspect there are a couple key technologies, vaccination and water disinfection, that can probably explain a lot of the trend, and the discovery of these technologies happened to occur at a certain time in history. 100 years ago, when the U.S. was passing a threshold to join the club of truly wealth countries, we were in the early stages of discovering and implementing these trends. Today, when countries in Asia and South America are joining the club, these technologies are well established. So it’s not just about wealth, it’s about where we are at a particular moment of history. Logically, there can be periods where the world makes large gains in quality of life without equally large increases in financial wealth, and also the opposite.

“management flight simulators”

MIT has posted some free “management flight simulators” (aka games) online. It didn’t sound that interesting to me until I noticed that one of them is the “fish banks” game originally developed by Dennis Meadows who, I now recall, was from MIT. Other games simulate a clean energy startup and climate change negotiations.

LED lightbulbs

There is officially no reason not to be buying LED lightbulbs now. The purchase price is no longer higher than other types of bulbs, and the operating cost is much lower. NPR has nice charts that make all this pretty clear.

Now, normally I don’t link to products other than books on this site, but I’ve been buying these and replacing older bulbs as they burn out, and so far I am happy with them:

the sharing economy

In an IGM Forum poll of whether economists agree or strongly agree that services like Uber and Lyft are good for the economy, only 56% strongly agreed. The other 37% only agreed. (Some didn’t respond.) Meanwhile, the Guardian has printed an op-ed by one grumpy old man who hates the sharing economy:

Given vast youth unemployment, stagnating incomes, and skyrocketing property prices, today’s sharing economy functions as something of a magic wand. Those who already own something can survive by monetising their discomfort: for example, they can earn cash by occasionally renting out their apartments and staying with relatives instead. Those who own nothing, on the other hand, also get to occasionally enjoy a glimpse of the good life – built entirely on goods they do not own.

You don’t get it, grumpy old man. If the knowledge that you own an object sitting in your basement or garage gives you some feeling of pleasure or status, then more power to you and nobody should take that away from you. But for most people, I don’t think it does. The point is to get the same utility out of less stuff taking up less space. Cars are a particularly important example, because they take up such enormous amounts of space when most of them are just sitting there most of the time.

solar roads

I clicked on this article from Woodhouse about new paving technologies expecting to hear about porous pavement. But it turned out to be all about paving with solar panels:

The company’s aim is to reduce carbon emissions by paving currently tarmacked surfaces with solar panels, turning a previously unproductive landmass into a renewable energy powerhouse.

The solar energy collected by the smart surface could be used to feed the grid during the day time, or even power things such as heating elements under the surface to clear ice and snow from the roads in the winter. Eventually, it might be possible to power electric cars as they drive along.

Pavement covers enormous areas in our cities, so this could be huge. On the other hand, the lack of any mention of stormwater worries me slightly. There is a lot more time and effort going into developing better materials to capture energy than to manage water, when both are important. In fact, when it gets to the point (now in some places, very soon in others) where people can make serious money installing solar panels on their rooftops and paved surfaces, that could even come into conflict with stormwater management opportunities (green roofs and porous pavement being two examples). On the other hand, my water bill has been creeping up to the point where it is not that much less than my electric and natural gas bills. So where the economic drivers have been overwhelmingly on the side of energy until recently, water may be catching up. Of course, we want to find materials and approaches that do both, so let’s get to work on that.

new vs. old economy in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania – we’re not always known as the most progressive of states, at the forefront of the major trends – but even here, the old business as usual economy is fighting against the new, more sustainable one. At the moment, traditional electric utilities seem to be winning their battle to limit the amount of solar energy homeowners can sell back to the grid. But at the same time, Uber and Lyft seem to be making progress in their battle against the filthy sleazy old taxi companies. One thing Uber has now that taxis never have even considered – car seats! I would support it for that reason alone.

slavery

What happens when an economic system is designed to support the profit-seeking of a small class of immoral people? Well, that sort of thing might have happened somewhere in the world in the past, but certainly not in the United States. Oh wait…

The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph…

The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation “families,” but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders — the middlemen — they excelled at maximizing profits…

Planters called their method of labor control the “pushing system.” Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it “the ‘whipping-machine’ system.” In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is “torture.” To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time — sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”

These are quotes from a New York Times review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist.

Ryan Avent on Automation

In this Economist podcast, Ryan Avent talks about how automation is leading to a “hollowing out” of the workforce. Basically, the concept is that as computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example given), 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.

trees!

Here’s a long document from the “Trees and Design Action Group” in the UK about everything to do with planting trees in the city. Of particular use to me are some good references on dealing with underground utilities, species selection, and just lots and lots of great pictures. Even some nice stats on the odds of being killed by a tree compared to car accidents and cancer (the odds are very low, but not zero).  Trees really can be done a lot better than most American cities do them.

automation

Longreads has an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

The historian Thomas Hughes, in reviewing the arrival of the electric grid in his book Networks of Power, described how first the engineering culture, then the business culture, and finally the general culture shaped themselves to the new system. “Men and institutions developed characteristics that suited them to the characteristics of the technology,” he wrote. “And the systematic interaction of men, ideas, and institutions, both technical and nontechnical, led to the development of a supersystem—a sociotechnical one—with mass movement and direction.” It was at this point that what Hughes termed “technological momentum” took hold, both for the power industry and for the modes of production and living it supported. “The universal system gathered a conservative momentum. Its growth generally was steady, and change became a diversification of function.” Progress had found its groove.

We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. The assumptions underlying industrial operations have already changed. “Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically,” explains W. Brian Arthur, an economist and technology theorist at the Santa Fe Institute. “They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital.” As an example, he points to freight shipping. Not long ago, coordinating a shipment of cargo across national borders required legions of clipboard-wielding functionaries. Now, it’s handled by computers. Commerce of all sorts is increasingly managed through, as Arthur puts it, “a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines.” To be in business is to have networked computers capable of taking part in that conversation. Any sizable company has little choice but to automate and then automate some more. It has to redesign its work flows and its products to allow for ever-greater computer monitoring and control, and it has to restrict the involvement of people in its supply and production processes. People, after all, can’t keep up with computer chatter; they just slow down the conversation.