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Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Good News on Poverty - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...good-news-on-poverty.html

Poverty Climate AGW Policy

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Brookings Institution has a new report out by Lawrence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz (here in PDF) on trends in global poverty
  • The new estimates of global poverty presented in this brief serve as a reminder of just how powerful high growth can be in freeing people from poverty. In the span of a decade, the share of the world’s population living in poverty could be cut by two-thirds, the number of countries where more than 1 in 6 people live in poverty could drop from 60 to 35, and 19 countries are poised to eliminate poverty altogether.
  • Of course, it is far too early to declare success in the fight against poverty. To begin with, our estimates are just that; they are not hard numbers that can be calculated in real time, and the gains we imagine might not be realized if projections of future consumption growth turn out to be overly optimistic or if the poor do not share in this growth. Moreover, even if our figures are broadly accurate, in 2015 there will still be close to 600 million people—twice the population of the United States—living on less than the meager sum of $1.25 a day. Their fates are far from secure and represent a strategic and moral failure for the rest of the world, arguably all the more so as millions of others escape poverty.
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  • if a key factor in reducing poverty is economic growth, then it necessarily is the case that efforts to limit climate change by reducing growth (or as some even argue, putting growth into reverse) are in direct opposition to efforts to reduce poverty.  It is this tension that sets up what I call in The Climate Fix the "iron law" of climate policy.
  • Setting aside climate change, the trends in poverty reduction are of profound importance, as the report suggests: Over the past half century, the developing world, including many of the world’s poorest countries, have seen dramatic improvements in virtually all non-income measures of well-being: since 1960, global infant mortality has dropped by more than 50 percent, for example, and the share of the world’s children enrolled in primary school increased from less than half to nearly 90 percent between 1950 and today.5 Likewise there have been impressive gains in gender equality, access to justice and civil and political rights. Yet, through most of this period, the incomes of rich and poor countries diverged, and income poverty has proven a more persistent challenge than other measures of wellbeing.6 The rapid decline in global poverty now underway—and the early achievement of the MDG1a target—marks a break from these trends, and could come to be seen as a turning point in the history of global development.
Weiye Loh

More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World - By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duf... - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...people_are_hungry_in_the_world

Poverty

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"
  • For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. COMMENTS (7) SHARE: Twitter   Reddit   Buzz   More... But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night?
  • unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.
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  • Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. In books and countless speeches and television appearances, he has argued that poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; these factors, however, make it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with such endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor -- they are in what economists call a "poverty trap." Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them.
  • But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs's answers are wrong. William Easterly, who battles Sachs from New York University at the other end of Manhattan, has become one of the most influential aid critics in his books, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden. Dambisa Moyo, an economist who worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, has joined her voice to Easterly's with her recent book, Dead Aid. Both argue that aid does more bad than good. It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies.
  • The best bet for poor countries, they argue, is to rely on one simple idea: When markets are free and the incentives are right, people can find ways to solve their problems. They do not need handouts from foreigners or their own governments.
  • According to Easterly, there is no such thing as a poverty trap.
  • To find out whether there are in fact poverty traps, and, if so, where they are and how to help the poor get out of them, we need to better understand the concrete problems they face. Some aid programs help more than others, but which ones? Finding out required us to step out of the office and look more carefully at the world. In 2003, we founded what became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL. A key part of our mission is to research by using randomized control trials -- similar to experiments used in medicine to test the effectiveness of a drug -- to understand what works and what doesn't in the real-world fight against poverty. In practical terms, that meant we'd have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives.
  • Take, for example, Pak Solhin, who lives in a small village in West Java, Indonesia. He once explained to us exactly how a poverty trap worked. His parents used to have a bit of land, but they also had 13 children and had to build so many houses for each of them and their families that there was no land left for cultivation. Pak Solhin had been working as a casual agricultural worker, which paid up to 10,000 rupiah per day (about $2) for work in the fields. A recent hike in fertilizer and fuel prices, however, had forced farmers to economize. The local farmers decided not to cut wages, Pak Solhin told us, but to stop hiring workers instead. As a result, in the two months before we met him in 2008, he had not found a single day of agricultural labor. He was too weak for the most physical work, too inexperienced for more skilled labor, and, at 40, too old to be an apprentice. No one would hire him.
  • Pak Solhin, his wife, and their three children took drastic steps to survive. His wife left for Jakarta, some 80 miles away, where she found a job as a maid. But she did not earn enough to feed the children. The oldest son, a good student, dropped out of school at 12 and started as an apprentice on a construction site. The two younger children were sent to live with their grandparents. Pak Solhin himself survived on the roughly 9 pounds of subsidized rice he got every week from the government and on fish he caught at a nearby lake. His brother fed him once in a while. In the week before we last spoke with him, he had eaten two meals a day for four days, and just one for the other three.
  • Pak Solhin appeared to be out of options, and he clearly attributed his problem to a lack of food. As he saw it, farmers weren't interested in hiring him because they feared they couldn't pay him enough to avoid starvation; and if he was starving, he would be useless in the field. What he described was the classic nutrition-based poverty trap, as it is known in the academic world. The idea is simple: The human body needs a certain number of calories just to survive. So when someone is very poor, all the food he or she can afford is barely enough to allow for going through the motions of living and earning the meager income used to buy that food. But as people get richer, they can buy more food and that extra food goes into building strength, allowing people to produce much more than they need to eat merely to stay alive. This creates a link between income today and income tomorrow: The very poor earn less than they need to be able to do significant work, but those who have enough to eat can work even more. There's the poverty trap: The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer and eat even better, and get stronger and even richer, and the gap keeps increasing.
  • But though Pak Solhin's explanation of how someone might get trapped in starvation was perfectly logical, there was something vaguely troubling about his narrative. We met him not in war-infested Sudan or in a flooded area of Bangladesh, but in a village in prosperous Java, where, even after the increase in food prices in 2007 and 2008, there was clearly plenty of food available and a basic meal did not cost much. He was still eating enough to survive; why wouldn't someone be willing to offer him the extra bit of nutrition that would make him productive in return for a full day's work? More generally, although a hunger-based poverty trap is certainly a logical possibility, is it really relevant for most poor people today? What's the best way, if any, for the world to help?
Weiye Loh

A Culture of Poverty - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Personal - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...64854

Culture Poverty Violence

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • When we talk "culture," as it relates to African-Americans, we assume a kind of exclusivity and suspension of logic. Stats are whipped out (70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock) and then claims are tossed around cavalierly, (black culture doesn't value marriage.) The problem isn't that "culture" doesn't exist, nor is it that elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility.
  • It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. Of course, most white people only pay attention when Bill Cosby or Barack Obama are making that criticism. The problem is that rarely do such critiques ask  why anyone would embrace such values. Moreover, they tend to assume that there's something uniquely "black" about those values, and their the embrace.
  • If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield.
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  • once I was acculturated to the notion that often the quickest way to forestall more fighting, is to fight, I was a believer. And maybe it's wrong to say this, but it made my the rest of my time in Baltimore a lot easier, because the willingness to fight isn't just about yourself, it's a signal to your peer group. 
  • To the young people in my neighborhood, friendship was defined by having each other's back. And in that way, the personal shields, the personal willingness to meet violence with violence, combined and became a collective, neighborhood shield--a neighborhood rep.
  • I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment.
  • I suspect that a large part of the problem, when we talk about culture, is an inability to code-switch, to understand that the language of Rohan is not the language of Mordor
  • how difficult it is to get people to discard practices which were essential to them in one world, but hinder their advancement into another. And then there's the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world, that you may not master. 
  • The streets are like any other world--we all assume an armor, a garment to suit that world. And indeed, in every world, some people wear the armor better than others, and thus reap considerable social reward.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10
     
    A Culture of Poverty
Weiye Loh

Small answers to the big questions - Chris Blattman - 0 views

chrisblattman.com/...l-answers-to-the-big-questions

Poverty Inequality AGW

shared by Weiye Loh on 03 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • A reporter emailed me this morning to see if I could answer a few questions about poverty. Sure I said. The emailed questions that followed?It is realistic to think that poverty can one day end?What, in your view, are the best global solutions?How urgent is it to act (in the context of climate change)?
  • My first reaction: thanks for asking the easy questions, lady. Was this serious? How can one possibly answer the grand questions of development in a few sentences?
  • It is realistic to think that poverty can one day end?In America, you can be poor but own a car, a television, and have food on the table every day. In northern Uganda, that would make you a very wealthy man.Do I see a world where nearly every household has their basic needs covered, plus some of the comforts of life? Absolutely. I imagine most places on the planet will get to what we now think of as middle-income status—perhaps $8,000 to $14,000 per head in 2011 dollars and purchasing ability. The poorest nations will probably be in those places least advantageous to trade (the landlocked, for instance) and where cultures or political systems restrict innovation and freedoms.But poverty is a relative measure, and short of a Star Trek world where you can summon food and items out of a wall unit, there will always be people who struggle to keep up.
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  • What, in your view, are the best global solutions?
  • There are plenty aid programs that seem to work, from de-worming to small business grants to incentives to send children to school. But none of these programs are likely to have transformative effects.
  • The difference between a country with $1,500 and $15,000 of income a head a head is simple: industry. All the microfinance and microenterprise programs in the world are not going to build large firms and import technology and provide most people with what they really want: a stable job, regular wages, and a decent work environment.
  • How you get these firms is the tricky question. Only a few firms will be home grown; most will be firms that spread across borders, because they have the markets and know-how. Probably we’ll need to see wages rise in China and India before manufacturing ever spreads to the poorest places on the planet, like Central Asia and Africa.The countries that will get them first are the ones that are close to trade routes, have stable political climates, make it easy to get finance, are open to trade, have large domestic markets, have able and educated workforces (i.e. secondary education), and have leaders in charge who don’t see the industrial sector as either a threat to their power or a garden from which they get to select the sweetest fruits for themselves.
  • How urgent is it to act (in the context of climate change)?The short answer: I wouldn’t know. For the US and China and Europe and India, they must change because if they don’t nothing will.For the Ugandas or Uzbekistans or Bolivias of the world, I can’t see it making a difference. Let them develop as green as possible, but let’s not impede their growth because of it, and rob them of the opportunity we took ourselves.
Weiye Loh

Op-Ed Columnist - Poverty in Africa and the Pill - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20kristof.html

Birth Control Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • “I didn’t want to get pregnant,” Emilie told us here in the Congolese capital. “I was afraid of getting pregnant.” But she had never heard of birth control.
  • In rural parts of Congo Republic, the other Congo to the north, we found that even when people had heard of contraception, they often regarded it as unaffordable.
  • all the clinics and hospitals we visited in Congo Republic said that they would sell contraceptives only to women who brought their husbands in with them to prove that the husband accepted birth control.
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  • Condoms are somewhat easier to obtain, but many men resist them. More broadly, many men seem to feel that more children are a proud sign of more virility.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 May 10
     
    Poverty and the Pill By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: May 19, 2010
Weiye Loh

The Medium Is Not The Message: 3 Handwritten Newspapers | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...handwritten-newspapers

Medium Message Newspaper Poverty Information

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 May 11 - No Cached
  • Handwritten newspapers.

  • Since 1927, The Musalman has been quietly churning out its evening edition of four pages, all of which hand-written by Indian calligraphers in the shadow of the Wallajah Mosque in the city of Chennai. According to Wired, it might just be the last remaining hand-written newspaper in the world. It’s also India’s oldest daily newspaper in Urdu, the Hindustani language typically spoken by Muslims in South Asia. The Musalman: Preservation of a Dream is wonderful short film by Ishani K. Dutta, telling the story of the unusual publication and its writers’ dedication to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy.

  • I mentioned a fascinating reversal of the-medium-is-the-message as one Japanese newspaper reverted to hand-written editions once the earthquake-and-tsunami disaster destroyed all power in the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture. For the next six days, the editors of the Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun “printed” the daily newspaper’s disaster coverage the only way possible: By hand, in pen and paper. Using flashlights and marker pens, the reporters wrote the stories on poster-size paper and pinned the dailies to the entrance doors of relief centers around the city. Six staffers collected stories, which another three digested, spending an hour and a half per day composing the newspapers by hand.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 May 11
     
    Minuscule literacy rates and prevailing poverty may not be conditions particularly conducive to publishing entrepreneurship, but they were no hindrance for Monrovia's The Daily Talk, a clever concept by Alfred Sirleaf that reaches thousands of Liberians every day by printing just once copy. That copy just happens to reside on a large blackboard on the side of one of the capital's busiest roads. Sirleaf started the project in 2000, at the peak of Liberia's civil war, but its cultural resonance and open access sustained it long after the war was over. To this day, he runs this remarkable one-man show as the editor, reporter, production manager, designer, fact-checker and publicist of The Daily Talk. For an added layer of thoughtfulness and sophistication, Sirleaf uses symbols to indicate specific topics for those who struggle to read. The common man in society can't afford a newspaper, can't afford to buy a generator to get on the internet - you know, power shortage - and people are caught up in a city where they have no access to information. And all of these things motivated me to come up with a kind of free media system for people to get informed." ~ Alfred Sirleaf
Weiye Loh

Breakthrough Europe: Emerging Economies Reassert Commitment to Nuclear Power - 0 views

breakthrougheurope.org/...hina_india_japan_nuclear.shtml

Greenhoues Gases Green Energy Nuclear Risk

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Nearly half a billion of India's 1.2 billion citizens continue to live in energy poverty. According to the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, Srikumar Banerjee, "ours is a very power-hungry country. It is essential for us to have further electricity generation." The Chinese have cited similar concerns in sticking to their major expansion plans of its nuclear energy sector. At its current GDP growth, China's electricity demands rise an average of 12 percent per year.
  • the Japanese nuclear crisis demonstrates the vast chasm in political priorities between the developing world and the post-material West.
  • Other regions that have reiterated their plans to stick to nuclear energy are Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Prime Minister of Poland, the fastest growing country in the EU, has said that "fears of a nuclear disaster in Japan following last Friday's earthquake and tsunami would not disturb Poland's own plans to develop two nuclear plants." Russia and the Czech Republic have also restated their commitment to further nuclear development, while the Times reports that "across the Middle East, countries have been racing to build up nuclear power, as a growth and population boom has created unprecedented demand for energy." The United Arab Emirates is building four plants that will generate roughly a quarter of its power by 2020.
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  • Some European leaders, including Angela Merkel, may be backtracking fast on their commitment to nuclear power, but despite yesterday's escalation of the ongoing crisis in Fukushima, Japan, there appear to be no signs that India, China and other emerging economies will succumb to a similar backlash. For the emerging economies, overcoming poverty and insecurity of supply remain the overriding priorities of energy policy.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11
     
    As the New York Times reports: The Japanese disaster has led some energy officials in the United States and in industrialized European nations to think twice about nuclear expansion. And if a huge release of radiation worsens the crisis, even big developing nations might reconsider their ambitious plans. But for now, while acknowledging the need for safety, they say their unmet energy needs give them little choice but to continue investing in nuclear power.
Weiye Loh

Unique Perspective on Pornography - 13 views

"These women will have forever have to live with the social stigma of being a "porn star" and whatever negativity that is associated with that concept. " The patriarchal ideology is the underlying...

pornography debate abcnews face-off

started by Jianwei Tan on 01 Sep 09 2 follow-ups, last by Weiye Loh on 03 Sep 09
Weiye Loh

Is Consensus Possible on Birth Control? - Nicholas D. Kristof Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/...nsus-possible-on-birth-control

Birth Control Contraception

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • My column today is about the need for birth control as a key to fighting poverty. In short: let’s make contraception as available as sex.
  • all the numbers on a subject like this are dubious. The U.N. or research groups put out nice reports with figures for all kinds of things, and I sometimes worry that they imply a false precision. The truth is we have very little idea of some of these numbers.
  • in my column today, I refer to the 215 million women around the world who have “an unmet need for contraception.” That means they want to delay pregnancy for two years or more,  are married or sexually active, and are not using modern contraception. I use that figure because it’s the best there is, but in the real world many women are much more ambivalent. They kind of don’t want another pregnancy, unless maybe it’s a boy. Or you ask them if they want to get pregnant, and they reply: “Not really, but I leave it to God.” Or they say that in an ideal world, they’d prefer to wait, but their husband doesn’t want to wait so they want another pregnancy now. So many people answer in those ways, rather than in the neat, crisp “yes” or “no” that the statistics suggest.
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  • all these figures need to be taken with a good deal of salt. We need these kinds of estimates — don’t get me wrong — but we shouldn’t pretend that they are more precise than they are.
  • why did family planning lose steam in the last couple of decades? I think one factor was the coercion that discredited programs in India and China alike. Another was probably that enthusiasts oversold how easy it is to spread family planning. It’s not just a matter of handing out the Pill: it’s a question of comprehensive counselling, multiple choices, aftercare, girls’ education, and a million other things. Contraceptive usage rates can increase even in conservative societies (Iran has actually demonstrated that quite well), but it’s not just a matter of airlifting in pills, condoms and IUD’s.
  • amily planning got caught up in the culture wars. Originally, many Republicans were big backers of family planning programs, and both Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush supported such efforts. Bush was nicknamed “Rubbers” because of his enthusiasm. But then in the 1980’s, UNFPA, the UN Population agency, was targeted by conservatives because of China’s abortion policies. This was deeply unfair, for UNFPA was trying to get China to stop the coercion. In addition, UNFPA had nudged China to replace the standard Chinese steel ring IUD with a copper T that was far more effective. The result is 500,000 fewer abortions in China every year. Show me any anti-abortion group with that good a record in reducing abortions! But the upshot is that one Republican president after another defunded UNFPA. Indeed, in the last Bush administration, officials didn’t even want to use the term “reproductive health.”
  • we can rebuild a consensus behind voluntary family planning, including condoms as one element of a package to fight AIDS. The Vatican clearly won’t join, but many conservatives do recognize that the best way to reduce abortion numbers is to reduce unplanned pregnancies.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 May 10
     
    May 20, 2010, 10:25 AM Is Consensus Possible on Birth Control? By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
Satveer

Why I hate stem-cell technologies & Regenerative Therapies - 5 views

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8314442.stm This article is another one of those regenerative therapies article that use of stem-cell technology to reverse aging because first world countries ar...

stem cell regenerative first world third

started by Satveer on 21 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
Jody Poh

Powering our way out of poverty - 3 views

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8046112.stm Only the first part of the article before "Cheap and Continuous" is relevant. Although the whole article is about saving the environment, it h...

social progress technology ethics justice

started by Jody Poh on 03 Nov 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

China accuses US of human rights double standards | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-human-rights-double-standards

Rights Censorship China United States Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Beijing has a doctrine of non-interference in other countries' internal affairs, but the State Council Information Office releases an annual report on the US human rights record as a riposte to Washington's criticisms. The document says it underlines the hypocrisy of the US and "its malicious design to pursue hegemony under the pretext of human rights".
  • Last week the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, criticised China's "worsening" record – citing the detention of artist Ai Weiwei and others – as she released the annual state department survey of the human rights situation around the world. An introduction to the Chinese document, by the state news agency Xinhua, said the report was "full of distortions" and the US "turned a blind eye to its own terrible human rights situation".
  • Much of the document focuses on social and economic issues such as poverty, crime and racism. It attacks the US for the large number of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prisoner abuse scandals that have dogged counterterrorism initiatives. It adds: "The violation of [US] citizens' civil and political rights by the government is severe … the United States applies double standards … by requesting unrestricted 'internet freedom' in other countries, which becomes an important diplomatic tool for the United States to impose pressure and seek hegemony, and imposing strict restriction within its territory.
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  • the US government wants to boost internet freedom to give voices to citizens living in societies regarded as 'closed' and questions those governments' control over information flow, although within its borders the US government tries to create a legal frame to fight the challenge posed by WikiLeaks
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