Here's an exhibit on just how tightly controlled our food system is:
Source: Frugal dad
And, to make matters worse, we're running out out of key elements that make society work. Have a look (click to enlarge):
via Grist
What's a Hipcrime? You committed one when you opened this blog. Keep it up. It's our only hope.
Record numbers of young Japanese do not have boyfriends or girlfriends, and many do not want one, according to a survey by the country's government. Sixty-one percent of unmarried men aged 18 and 34 do not have a partner, nor do half of unmarried women the same age. The numbers have increased since the previous survey in 2005.Japan Singletons Hit Record High (BBC)
Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world - and its population is on course to shrink dramatically by the middle of the century. So every five years the government carries out a detailed survey of attitudes to sex and marriage. The latest found that 61% of unmarried men aged 18 to 34 have no girlfriend, and half of women the same age have no boyfriend - a record high. More than a quarter of the men and 23% of the women said they were not even looking.
Some cited a shortage of money, others a belief that it is impossible to find a good partner once they had passed the age of 25. Many of the women also said single life suited them better than how they imagined marriage would be. The survey also found that more than quarter of unmarried men and women between 35 and 39 years old said they had never had sex.
Like millions of others from her generation Megumi Sakaguchi cannot find a permanent job, just contracts. Temporary workers now make up a third of the workforce - up from fewer than a fifth in the mid-1980s - and a greater proportion of them are young. The certainty of the job-for-life tradition enjoyed by earlier generations has passed her by.Japan's youth turn to rural areas seeking a slower life (BBC)
"I never know if I'm going to lose my job," she says. "Financially my anxiety levels are very high. "In the morning during the rush hour when I'm getting off the train, the way people behave, they are almost inhuman," she adds. So she has decided it is time for a change.
One weekend in October Megumi Sakaguchi joined a bus tour through the Japanese countryside. Like her fellow passengers, who were also from the cities, she was getting a taste of what life would be like as a farmer - trying out working the land for a day.
Excursions like this around apple orchards and greenhouses full of strawberry plants, talking to farmers in their fields, take place pretty much every week somewhere in rural Japan. They are organised and paid for by local authorities which are desperate to repopulate the countryside. After years of young people heading for the cities the average farmer in Japan is now 65.8 years old and that figure is rising steadily.
But now some are considering making the journey back.
Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.And, in fact, teenagers are driving less:
The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.
Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey. This lack of demand all but guarantees continued price declines. Boomers selling their fringe housing will only add to the glut. Nothing the federal government can do will reverse this.
Many drivable-fringe house prices are now below replacement value, meaning the land under the house has no value and the sticks and bricks are worth less than they would cost to replace. This means there is no financial incentive to maintain the house; the next dollar invested will not be recouped upon resale. Many of these houses will be converted to rentals, which are rarely as well maintained as owner-occupied housing. Add the fact that the houses were built with cheap materials and methods to begin with, and you see why many fringe suburbs are turning into slums, with abandoned housing and rising crime.
But with money tight in many households, and the cost of gas and insurance soaring, some youngsters are having to choose between buying a car and owning the latest smartphone or tablet.
In a survey to be published later this year by Gartner, 46% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they would choose internet access over owning their own car. The figure is 15% among the baby boom generation, the people that grew up in the 1950s and 60s - seen as the golden age of American motoring.
Wally Neil, a 25-year-old wholefood salesman, from Raleigh North Carolina, was determined to stand out from the crowd by not getting a driving licence and a car as soon as he was old enough.
But it was a decision made easier by the fact that he could speak to his friends online and play games with them over the internet so did not feel he was missing out.
"We were all pretty closely connected, even before Facebook.
"So we were not driving to our friends' houses, there was the gaming network and all that. We were putting the car on the back burner.
"There is a lot to be said for the video game killing the need for a car for a lot of kids."
For Wally, whose father Dan is a motoring writer and sports car enthusiast, walking everywhere or taking the bus when he was a teenager, rather than learning to drive, was "an act of rebellion".
But he still had to put up with the taunts of his friends, he says, who could not wait to get behind the wheel and thought public transport was "for losers".
"I was ridiculed a little bit in my peer group but I was also saving a lot of money at the time."
There is no question that fewer teenagers are on the roads in the US.
In 1978, 50% of 16-year-olds had obtained their first driving licence. In 2008, according to the US Transportation Department, it was just 30%.
The number of those aged 19 and under with driving licences has also been in steady decline since its 1978 peak, when 11,989,000 had one. In 2010, it was 9,932,441, or 4.1% of American drivers.
AMERICA, like other modern countries, has always had some surplus workers — people ready to work but jobless for extended periods because the “job creators,” private and public, have been unable or unwilling to create sufficient jobs. When the number of surplus workers rose sharply, the country also had ways of reducing it.Robert Reich supplies some actual numbers:
However, the current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely never to work again.
The currently jobless and the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for work, total about 15 percent of the work force, not including the invisible discouraged workers the government cannot even find to count.
In the old days — before Social Security, welfare and Medicaid — poverty-caused illnesses killed off or incapacitated some of the people who could not find jobs. Even earlier, some nations sold their surplus workers as slaves, while the European countries could send them to the colonies.
In addition, wars were once labor-intensive enterprises that absorbed the surplus temporarily, and sufficient numbers of those serving in the infantry and on warships were killed or seriously enough injured so that they could not add to the peacetime labor surplus.
The old ways of reducing surplus labor are, however, disappearing. Decades of medical and public health advances, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, have reduced the number of poverty-related deaths. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have left many more service members injured than killed.
Over the past quarter-century, one very costly way of decreasing the surplus has been the imprisonment of people, mostly dark-skinned men, for actual and invented offenses. Felons are not often hired when they leave prison. Many, at least those who do not become recidivists, become surplus and then superfluous labor. As incarceration becomes less affordable for financially strapped states, inmates will reach surplus or superfluous status at a younger age.
Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing and of services not requiring hands-on human contact. Continuing increases in worker productivity add yet more to the surplus. So does the unwillingness of employers to even consider hiring people who have been unemployed for a long time.
When the jobless recovery ends and the economy is restored to good health, today’s surplus will be reduced. New technology and the products and services that accompany it will create new jobs. But unless the economy itself changes, eventually many of these innovations may be turned over to machines or the jobs may be sent to lower-wage economies.
In fact, if modern capitalism continues to eliminate as many jobs as it creates — or more jobs than it creates — future recoveries will not only add to the amount of surplus labor but will turn a growing proportion of workers into superfluous ones.
Not to depress you, but our economic troubles are likely to continue for many years — a decade or more. At the current rate of job growth (averaging 90,000 new jobs per month over the last six months), 14 million Americans will remain permanently unemployed. The consensus estimate is that at least 90,000 new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the labor force. Even if we get back to a normal rate of 200,000 new jobs per month, unemployment will stay high for at least ten years. Years of high unemployment will likely result in a vicious cycle, as relatively lower spending by the middle-class further slows job growth.I'm glad to see this is getting more attention. Why should we expect the private sector to "create jobs", when all the incentives are to eliminate them? It never ceases to amaze me that these alleged Conservative hypercapitalists don't seem to know how capitalism works. The incentive is always to produce more with less workers. Thus, the private sector has every incentive to eliminate jobs, not create them. Employers only create jobs if there is a need for them, and who is to say that they need everyone? Why doesn't anybody get this? Here is a perceptive comment left on the Global Guerrillas Web site:
The third and fourth centuries at London are characterized by the widespread presence of dark humic soil, sometimes more than a yard thick and with cultural debris (pottery, bones of butchered animals, glass fragments) mixed into it, covering occupational remains of earlier centuries. This material, known as dark earth, is not unique to London but has been identified at many urban sites all over Northern Europe during late Roman times. There has been a great deal of discussion and debate about this dark earth--what it represents and how it originated. It was once widely regarded as evidence of decline and abandonment of Roman urban centers. It was considered a natural soil that developed on top of areas that had once been active parts of the urban center, such as we might observe forming in a vacant lot in a city today.Peter S. Wells, Barbarians To Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered. pp. 111-113
For a variety of reasons, this interpretation has changed. the dark earth is not thought to represent not abandonment but rather thriving activity--but activity of a very different character from that of the Roman urban centers. The dark earth has been found to contain remains of timber-framed, wattle-and-daub huts, along with sherds of pottery and metal ornaments datable to the late Roman period. These observations demonstrate that people who were living on the site were building their houses in the traditional British style rather than in the stone and cement fashion of elite and public Roman architecture. Such structures are much more difficult to identify in the archaeological material than Roman buildings, because all that is typically left of them are postholes in the ground and crumbly fragments of the daub that had been packed around the branchwork of the walls.
What are we to make of these two major changes reflected in the archaeology? After rapid growth in the latter part of the first century, London emerged as a stunning center of the Roman Empire on its northern edge, with the monumental architecture, a thriving commericial center, and a military base characteristic of the greatest of Roman cities. The third and fourth centuries at London are marked by a stoppage in major public architecture and a reverse of that process, the dismantling of major stone monuments, at the same time that much of the formerly urban area seems to have reverted to a non-urban character.
To call these changes "decline," "collapse," or "abandonment"--as has been done in the past--is to adopt a conservative Roman attitude toward change. Because we live in societies that use monumental stone architecture in ways similar to how Rome used it, we tend to think of dismantling such structures--our monuments to military and civic glory--as distasteful. But the question we need to ask is, how can we understand these changes in terms of the lives and actions of the inhabitants of this specific place?
All of these changes--the dismantling of stone buildings, the reuse of stone, and the buildup of the dark earth--can be understood in terms of new uses of the formerly urban landscape for different purposes. As evidence accumulates in London, it is becoming clear that the site was not abandoned, as earlier researchers had thought. Life went on in place throughout the third, fourth, and fifth centuries; it was just different. For reasons that are explored below, the inhabitants of London after the glory years of the second century did not have uses for the monumental stone structures that played such important roles between A.D. 70 and 200. Their needs were different, and they behaved in ways dictated by their traditions and their uses of the resources available to them.
During the Cold War, the Cuban economy relied heavily on support from the Soviet Union. In exchange for sugar, Cuba received subsidized oil, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other farm products. Approximately 50 percent of Cuba's food was imported. Cuba's food production was organized around Soviet-style, large-scale, industrial agricultural collectives. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba used more than 1 million tons of synthetic fertilizers a year and up to 35,000 tons of herbicides and pesticides a year.
With the USSR collapsed, Cuba lost its main trading partner and the favorable trade subsidies it received, as well as access to oil, chemical fertilizers, pesticides etc. From 1989 to 1993, the Cuban economy contracted by 35 percent; foreign trade dropped 75 percent. Without Soviet aid, domestic agriculture production fell by half. This time, called in Cuba the Special Period, food scarcities became acute. The average per capita calorie intake fell from 2,900 a day in 1989 to 1,800 calories in 1995. Protein consumption plummeted 40 percent.
Without food, Cubans had to learn to start growing their own food rather than importing it. This was done through small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, food became de facto organic. Thousands of new urban individual farmers called parceleros (for their parcelos, or plots) emerged. They formed and developed farmer cooperatives and farmers markets. These urban farmers found the support of the Cuban Ministry of Agriculture (MINAGRI), who provided university experts to train volunteers with organic pesticides and beneficial insects. These efforts were furthered by Australian agriculturalists that came to the island in 1993 to teach permaculture, a sustainable agricultural system, and to "train the trainers". The Cuban government then sent these teams throughout the country to train others.
Due to a poor economy, there were many crumbling buildings that could not be repaired. These were torn down and the empty lots lay idle for years until the food shortages forced Cuban citizens to make use of every piece of land. Initially, this was an ad-hoc process where ordinary Cubans took the initiative to grow their own food in whatever piece of land was available. The government encouraged this practice and later assisted in promoting it. Urban gardens sprung up throughout the capital of Havana and other urban centers on roof-tops, patios, and unused parking lots in raised beds as well as "squatting" on empty lots. In Havana, organopónicos (organic farms and gardens) were created in vacant lots, old parking lots, abandoned building sites and even spaces between roads.
Cuba's history of colonization included deforestation and overuse of its agricultural land. Before the crisis, Cuba used more pesticides than the U.S.. Much of their land was so damaged (de-mineralized and almost sand-like) that it took three to five years of intensely "healing" the soil with amendments, compost, "green manure", and practices such as crop rotation and inter-planting (mixed crops grown in same plot) to return it to a healthy state. Bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides have replaced most chemicals. Today, 80% of Cuba's produce is organically grown. Without the fertilizers, hydroponic units from the Soviet Union were no longer usable. The systems were then converted for the use of organic gardening. The original hydroponic units, long cement planting troughs and raised metal containers, were filled with composted sugar waste and hydroponicos became organopónicos.
Another reason Cuba survived this crisis is the shift in their thinking from machine to manual labour. Abandoning their previous industrialized agricultural methods, tractors and other machinery were replaced with human and animal labor. Older farmers familiar with raising and training oxen trained others to increase those involved in food production. Chemical fertilizers were replaced with organic farming techniques which require more labor but less fossil fuels.
Cuba has more than 7,000 organopónicos. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90% of their fruit and vegetables. Yields have more than quintupled from 4 to 24 kilograms per meter squared between 1994 and 1999, and currently around a million tons of food per year is produced in the organopónicos. More than 35,000 hectares (over 87,000 acres) of land are being used in urban agriculture in Havana alone. The city of Havana produces enough food for each resident to receive a daily serving of 280 grams (9.88 ounces) of fruits and vegetables. The urban agricultural workforce in Havana has grown from 9,000 in 1999 to 23,000 in 2001 to more than 44,000 in 2006. "Kiosks" (farmers' markets) were set up in all communities to provide easy access to locally grown produce; less travel time required less energy use. These local markets provide 80-100% of the produce needed for that local community.
In 1997, The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC) took a turkey census. For about half a century, nearly every turkey farm in the U.S. had been raising a breed known as the Broad Breasted White. (This cost-efficient, big-breasted bird has a lifespan of only 18 weeks and can neither fly, nor reproduce without artificial insemination). So when the ALBC went looking for other, older breeds of turkey, what they found was startling: They counted only 1,300 turkeys not bred for industrial purposes. In the whole country.Turkeys are snapshot of what's wrong with Industrial Agriculture in this country:
Fast forward to today, when “they have literally bred all of the turkey out of the turkey,” says Will Harris, owner of White Oak Pastures, the largest USDA-certified organic farm in the state of Georgia. Harris raises American Standard Bronze turkeys, one of eight varieties identified by the ALBC as heritage breed turkeys—or birds descended from a continuous gene pool dating back to before the rise of the Broad Breasted White. Heritage birds can still mate naturally, and have a long outdoor lifespan and slow growth rate. Industrial turkeys, on the other hand, said Harris, “are satisfied to sit in one place and eat and defecate.”
At the time of 1997 census, the farmers who still raised heritage turkeys did so because they “had a true passion for them,” said Jennifer Kendall of the ALBC, not because they were profitable; until around 2000, the concept of heritage turkeys was unfamiliar even to more conscious eaters.
When it comes to turkeys, or any kind of food, the existence of multiple, diverse varieties (i.e. biodiversity) is crucial to food security. “The analogy we like to use is a stock portfolio,” says Alison Martin, also of the ALBC. You wouldn’t want to put all your savings behind one stock, but “essentially that’s what commercial agriculture has done. In a time of global climate change and economic stress, doesn’t it make sense to have options for other production methods?”It's the same old story: mass production at the cost of quality and the environment. And if that weren't enough to scare you, antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria are starting to show in factory farmed birds:
That’s the theory behind Slow Food’s Ark of Taste project, “a catalog of over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction.” The Ark of Taste strives to preserve these endangered edibles (everything from American Rye Whiskey to Amish Pie Squash) both for their unique tastes and for the sake of the biodiversity of our food system. If we don’t, said Vaughn, “we’re going to do ourselves a disservice in terms of what we have access to in the future.”
Heritage turkeys were added to the ark in 2001. And farmers like Harris are crucial to their preservation efforts. His family farmed conventionally until the 1990s, when he “grew tired and disgusted with the excesses of modern industrial farming.” Harris stopped giving his cattle corn, hormones, and antibiotics, and stopped using pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Then he added sheep and poultry to his flock of livestock, realizing it would benefit every aspect of his farm.
“Nature wants a whole smorgasbord of different things out there grazing,” he says.
For eaters, a big draw of heritage turkeys—beyond the knowledge that they’re part of a diverse food system—is their “more rich, succulent” taste, says Kendall. Because they’re bred on pasture, as opposed to in cages, heritage birds also have stronger legs, with more thigh meat.
“Industrial agriculture favors the bland,” Vaughn explains. “Because [Broad Breasted Whites] mature so fast, [they] don’t develop the rich flavor that heritage birds do.
Think, for a minute, about what happened on the original Thanksgiving. (Yes, I know that there are doubts about what really happened, but never mind.)Finally, I can't help but note this anecdote from John Robb (via Nassem Taleb), the parable of the happy turkey:
Here’s how it went down: a bunch of people got together, with each group bringing what it could — the Wampanoag brought deer, the Pilgrims apparently shot some birds, etc.. Then everyone shared equally in the feast — regardless of how much they brought to the table. Socialism!
Worse yet, many of the lucky duckies benefiting from the largesse of this 17th-century welfare state were illegal immigrants. (That would be the Pilgrims).
We need to stop celebrating this deeply un-American event, and start celebrating something more in tune with the things that make America great, such as the Ludlow Massacre.
I offered my complaint about Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee Race Against The Machine yesterday, but I also want to praise one extremely important insight in the book that really changed my way of thinking about something. This is what they call “the back half of the chessboard” and they derive it from an old story about a Persian king who makes a deal in which he promises to pay someone as follows. On the first day, one grain of rice is placed on one square of a chessboard. On the second day, two grains go in the second square. On the third day, four grains go in the third square. On the forth day, it’s eight grains in the forth square. The king agrees, and of course it turns out that 2^64 grains of rice bankrupts the kingdom. But the point about the back of the chessboard is that even though the mathematical pattern is evident throughout the process, the actual impact is amazingly backloaded.I've never heard the term "back half of the chessboard" before, but it's a great term, and a good framework for understanding so I'll use it from now on. As I've noted earlier, I'm a skeptic when this is extrapolated to something like progress, which is nonquantifiable, even though I do believe we are in for a lot more automation in the future. But I should note that the "back half of the chessboard" concept has to do with not just automation, but ANY sort of exponential growth, including economic growth.
The point of this, in terms of technological progress, is that we’ve gotten so accustomed to Moore’s Law that we sometimes overlook the implication that the deeper we get into the chessboard, the bigger the changes. We all know that computers advanced a lot between 1991 and 2011, but we should expect the scale of change over the next 20 years to dwarf those changes. This is a straightforward application of a well-known principle and some pretty basic math, but it’s usually not discussed in quite the right way. We think we’re used to the idea of rapid improvements in information technology, but we’re actually standing on the precipice of changes that are much larger in scale than what we’ve seen thus far.
I briefly referred to our lack of numeracy as a species, and I would like to look at one aspect of this in greater detail: our inability to understand and internalize the effects of compound growth. This incapacity has played a large role in our willingness to ignore the effects of our compounding growth in demand on limited resources. Four years ago I was talking to a group of super quants, mostly PhDs in mathematics, about finance and the environment. I used the growth rate of the global economy back then – 4.5% for two years, back to back – and I argued that it was the growth rate to which we now aspired.That's the problem with exponential growth - by the time the problem reveals itself, it is too big to tackle. Population, economics, resource depletion, all are problems with an exponential component. It amazes me that economists, who are supposedly so wise in the ways of mathematics, cannot see that we're on the back half of the chessboard, and eternal economic growth is not possible, or even desirable. It just seems like common sense.
To point to the ludicrous unsustainability of this compound growth I suggested that we imagine the Ancient Egyptians (an example I had offered in my July 2008 Letter) whose gods, pharaohs, language, and general culture lasted for well over 3,000 years. Starting with only a cubic meter of physical possessions (to make calculations easy), I asked how much physical wealth they would have had 3,000 years later at 4.5% compounded growth. Now, these were trained mathematicians, so I teased them: “Come on, make a guess. Internalize the general idea. You know it’s a very big number.” And the answers came back: “Miles deep around the planet,” “No, it’s much bigger than that, from here to the moon.”
Big quantities to be sure, but no one came close. In fact, not one of these potential experts came within one billionth of 1% of the actual number, which is approximately 10^57, a number so vast that it could not be squeezed into a billion of our Solar Systems. Go on, check it. If trained mathematicians get it so wrong, how can an ordinary specimen of Homo Sapiens have a clue? Well, he doesn’t. So, I then went on. “Let’s try 1% compound growth in either their wealth or their population,” (for comparison, 1% since Malthus’ time is less than the population growth in England). In 3,000 years the original population of Egypt – let’s say 3 million – would have been multiplied 9 trillion times!
When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need.The article has interviews with actual people, unlike what you normally here out of the ivory-tower statisticians who normally pontificate on economic affairs. The stories have a common thread - working full-time jobs, two incomes, and yet costs for food, housing, transportation and health care make them struggle to get from paycheck to paycheck, with one unexpected expense having the potential to cause utter destitution. They are stressed, tired and demoralized; economic cannon-fodder whose labor fruits flow almost exclusively to the 1 percent.
The new method, called the Supplemental Poverty Measure, was designed to add in many of the things the old measure ignored, like the hundreds of billions the needy receive in food stamps and tax credits. At the same time, it subtracted the similarly large sums lost to taxes, medical care and work expenses.
One surprising difference with the new measure, outlined in an article today, was the 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That category, sometimes called “near poor,” was 76 percent higher than the official account, which was published in September. (The portion of people under the poverty line, meanwhile, increased by just 5 percent in the new measure.)
About a fifth of the people who appear near poor in the new measure are lifted out of poverty by benefits the old measure ignores, like food stamps and tax credits. But more than half were pulled down into near poverty from higher income levels by taxes, medical costs and work expenses like child care and gas. Taken together with people under the poverty line, a full third of Americans – or about 100 million people – live in poverty or in the economically vulnerable area just above it.
In Washington and its suburbs, the near poor are people with incomes between $31,693 and $47,539 for a family of four with a mortgage.
Reporters talked to people in the Washington area this week with incomes in this category. They spoke of the knife-edge quality of their lives, in which one unexpected bill could knock them off balance. Many owned the usual trappings of middle-class life – cars, houses, cellphones and air-conditioners. But payments on those possessions were juggled, often unsuccessfully, depending on the unpredictable tides of their incomes. None saw themselves as poor. Most saw themselves as part of the middle class. But they focused on how hard they had to struggle to remain there.
A new report from Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group that previously produced an index of what it takes to do more than survive while working, shows that 45 percent of United States residents live without economic security. That means they are not earning enough income to cover basic expenses, plan for important life events like college or save for emergencies like unexpected health bills.And government does make a difference: Millions Caught by Social Safety Net:
“What does it take for households in this country to get by and be able to plan for their own futures based on the work that they do?” said Donna Addkison, president and chief executive of Wider Opportunities for Women. “We’re really looking at not just the lowest of the lowest income households but that slice of households that live somewhere above the poverty line but are constantly in danger of being thrown into financial catastrophe, and that’s a much larger slice of the American public than we are currently talking about.”
Although the study uses median incomes on a national basis, Wider Opportunities and its research partners are working on tables that define what economic security would mean on a state-by-state basis. Obviously, the income needed to cover basic expenses would be higher in New York City than in Omaha.
The report showed that 55 percent of children live in households where families do not earn enough to achieve economic security. Even among those households with two full-time workers, 22 percent of those families with children earn less than is necessary to guarantee economic security.
The most vulnerable households are those led by single mothers, as well as African-American and Hispanic households. Only 18 percent of households headed by single mothers are living with economic security, while two-thirds of Hispanic households and 62 percent of African-American households are not earning enough to cover basic needs and saving requirements.
Part of the problem, Ms. Addkison said, is that so many jobs pay low wages. According to the report, less than 13 percent of the jobs that the Labor Department projects will be created by 2018 will pay wages that will be sufficient to allow families to keep their heads above water.
According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the percentage of the United States population living in poverty increased by 0.6, to 15.5 in 2010 from 14.9 in 2007.Once the social safety net is abolished due to "austerity", expect millions more to fall into utter destitution. It's only a matter of time. Poverty, crime, suicide, child-abuse, drug use, etc. will all increase, pulling us down even further as we have to spend more GDP dealing with all the social fallout.
The poverty measure refers to resources available to families, accounting for the taxes they pay and subsidies they receive. Considering all that happened in the economy over those three years, 0.6 percentage points is quite a small change. Measures of the poverty rate typically change more than that over any three-year interval.
The study found that many people were technically above the poverty line in 2010, although their incomes were low, because they received government assistance like unemployment insurance, food stamps and refundable tax credits. The government assistance permitted them to have living standards above poverty, even while their market incomes were below the poverty line.
Were it not for government assistance, the study found, the recession would have pushed 4.2 percent of the population into poverty, rather than 0.6 percent.
People in the Democratic Republic of Congo expect very little from the state, government or civil servants.I could insert a comment here about how similar the first three points are to another country with which we're familiar [ahem], but I'll refrain. I'll just point here and wonder how much we can expect from our own government. Anyway, it seems a total lack of government does not lead to the expected libertarian paradise:
In fact, ordinary Congolese often repeat expressions like "the state is dying but not yet dead" or "the state is ever present but completely useless".
It seems they also expect little from the upcoming elections and there can be little argument that DR Congo is indeed a failed state.
Ordinary citizens are poor, hungry and under-informed.
The government is unable to provide decent education or health services.
The country - two-thirds of the size of western Europe - is a battleground.
I asked a university colleague if he thought things could get worse.Obviously this an extreme example, but it seems to be indicative of the way things are going around the world in the age of austerity. This is what we have to look forward to, while the wealthy will be insulated in the cocoons of extravagance we talked about yesterday. I've heard several interviews with Lester Brown, and he believes that environmental and resource problems are causing states to fail one by one around the world. Every passing year brings more failed states. Brown asks the pointed question: how many failed states to we need to have before we have a failing global system? He writes:
"When you are rock bottom, you can still dig deeper," was his response.
Public administration is in shambles. Civil servants have mutated into predators.
Ferdinand Munguna is a retired railway worker in Lubumbashi, the mineral capital of DR Congo in the south of the country.
He has to bribe the man working in the pension office who requires "motivation" before processing the old man's file. Mr Munguna complains that his pension is "hardly enough to buy soap".
Starting a business in DR Congo takes 65 days compared to the sub-Saharan African average of 40 days. In neighbouring Rwanda it takes three days.
And guess which country has one of the worst air safety records worldwide?
The prestigious Foreign Policy magazine's Failed States Index puts DR Congo in the critically failed category. Only Somalia, Chad and Sudan (when it included South Sudan) have worse rankings.
The recently released UNDP report on human development indicators put the former Belgian colony at the bottom of the 187 countries it surveyed.
The Failed States Index, undertaken by the Fund for Peace and published in each July/August issue of Foreign Policy, ranks 177 countries according to “their vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration,” based on 12 social, economic, and political indicators. In 2005, just 7 countries had scores of 100 or more out of 120. (A score of 120 would mean that a society is failing totally by every measure.) By 2010, it was 15. Higher scores for countries at the top and the doubling of countries with scores of 100 or higher suggest that state failure is both spreading and deepening.Here's Wikipedia on failed states. What's amazing is that according to their map, almost all of the world's surface area is either failed of in danger of failing (I would include the U.S. in orange). And notice how much worse it has gotten in the last five years! It seems Lester Brown's worries are justified - the world system is failing. See also John Robb on Failed States versus Hollow States.
States fail when national governments lose control of part or all of their territory and can no longer ensure people’s security. Failing states often degenerate into civil war as opposing groups vie for power. In Afghanistan, for example, the local warlords or the Taliban, not the central government, control the country outside of Kabul.
Among the top 20 countries on the 2010 Failed States list, all but a few are losing the race between food production and population growth. The populations in 15 of the top 20 failing states are growing between 2 and 4 percent a year. Many governments are suffering from demographic fatigue, unable to cope with the steady shrinkage in cropland and freshwater supply per person or to build schools fast enough for the swelling ranks of children.
In 14 of the top 20 failing states, at least 40 percent of the population is under 15, a demographic indicator that raises the likelihood of future political instability. Many are caught in the demographic trap: they have developed enough economically and socially to reduce mortality but not enough to lower fertility. As a result, large families beget poverty and poverty begets large families.
Virtually all of the top 20 countries are depleting their natural assets—forests, grasslands, soils, and aquifers—to sustain their rapidly growing populations. The 3 countries at the top of the list—Somalia, Chad, and Sudan—are losing their topsoil to wind erosion, undermining the land’s productivity. Several countries in the top 20 are water-stressed and are overpumping their aquifers.
After a point, as rapid population growth, deteriorating environmental support systems, and poverty reinforce each other, the resulting instability makes it difficult to attract investment from abroad. Even public assistance programs from donor countries are sometimes phased out as the security breakdown threatens the lives of aid workers.
While DR Congo is clearly a failed state, Congolese society has not failed.Incidentally, basically the whole African continent is failed or failing. To give you some idea of how much land that is, see this: The True Size of Africa.
On the contrary it is strong, vibrant, dynamic, tolerant and generous. People have a sense of taking charge of their own destinies.
Women form rotating credit systems to compensate for the absence of an accessible banking system.
Farmers band together to hire a lorry to get their cassava or charcoal from the central city of Kikwit to market in Kinshasa.
Bebe, who lives in the Paris suburb of Griney, sends money home to Kasai via Western Union. Some months it contributes to school fees, others it pays for medicines for her ailing mother-in-law.
Her father will spend some of it on Primus, the beer of choice in Kinshasa.
"Elikia" means hope in Lingala and there is much of it throughout the country.
Hopes for positive change will come from the people, not from the Congolese political establishment, and certainly not from outside interventions.
The findings show a changed map of prosperity in the United States over the past four decades, with larger patches of affluence and poverty and a shrinking middle.
In 2007, the last year captured by the data, 44 percent of families lived in neighborhoods the study defined as middle-income, down from 65 percent of families in 1970. At the same time, a third of American families lived in areas of either affluence or poverty, up from just 15 percent of families in 1970.
The study comes at a time of growing concern about inequality and an ever-louder partisan debate over whether it matters. It raises, but does not answer, the question of whether increased economic inequality, and the resulting income segregation, impedes social mobility.
Much of the shift is the result of changing income structure in the United States. Part of the country’s middle class has slipped to the lower rungs of the income ladder as manufacturing and other middle-class jobs have dwindled, while the wealthy receive a bigger portion of the income pie. Put simply, there are fewer people in the middle.
But the shift is more than just changes in income. The study also found that there is more residential sorting by income, with the rich flocking together in new exurbs and gentrifying pockets where lower- and middle-income families cannot afford to live.
ean F. Reardon, an author of the study and a sociologist at Stanford, argued that the shifts had far-reaching implications for the next generation. Children in mostly poor neighborhoods tend to have less access to high-quality schools, child care and preschool, as well as to support networks or educated and economically stable neighbors who might serve as role models.
The isolation of the prosperous, he said, means less interaction with people from other income groups and a greater risk to their support for policies and investments that benefit the broader public — like schools, parks and public transportation systems. About 14 percent of families lived in affluent neighborhoods in 2007, up from 7 percent in 1970, the study found.
The map of that change for Philadelphia is a red stripe of wealthy suburbs curving around a poor, blue urban center, broken by a few red dots of gentrification. It is the picture of the economic change that slammed into Philadelphia decades ago as its industrial base declined and left a shrunken middle class and a poorer urban core.
The Germantown neighborhood, once solidly middle class, is now mostly low income. Chelten Avenue, one of its main thoroughfares, is a hard-luck strip of check-cashing stores and takeout restaurants.
They call when they make the Forbes 400 list. They call when annual hedge fund rankings appear, when their names are mentioned on CNBC and when their children travel abroad. And, these days, they call when protesters camped in Lower Manhattan grow uncomfortable with the idea of their existence.That’s right, they’ll spend millions of dollars for security and private protection, but not a penny more in taxes for schools, libraries, etc. The rich are sociopaths, pure and simple. In other news, limos aren’t good enough for the 1 percent anymore; they’ve taken to driving around cities in armored mobile offices called "sprinters":
The ultra-rich bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity executives of New York City have long enlisted private security firms to help safeguard them and their wealth. But as the mood on Main Street turns increasingly hostile, New York’s financial titans are cranking their security measures up to 11. For the high-end security firms that provide the moneyed elite with specialty services like around-the-clock bodyguards and elaborate home security systems, Occupy Wall Street has been a stimulus package all its own.
“We expect to more than double our revenue in New York this year,” said Paul M. Viollis, a co-founder of Risk Control Strategies, a firm that protects some of the top executives on Wall Street.
The executive protection industry has existed as long as there have been executives, but it got a boost in 2003, when Edward S. Lampert, a Greenwich hedge fund manager, was kidnapped by four men on his way to his car. The men stuffed the billionaire into a Ford Expedition at gunpoint, took him to a motel and tied him up in the bathroom for two days. (Mr. Lampert survived the incident, and his kidnappers were caught and convicted.)
These days, bankers and hedge fund managers are willing to spend millions of dollars to avoid enduring anything similar.
Steve Kantor admits that he likes to travel in style. He is an affable investment banker, concerned about flaunting his wealth, but he drives around Manhattan in what looks like a simple black delivery van.
Of course, most vans do not have chauffeurs, as Mr. Kantor’s has. Or a built-in office, custom installed.
“I have two big-screen televisions; I have a couch in the back that goes into a bed,” Mr. Kantor said. “I have four chairs that go back and massage you. It has a desk, a table and an intercom so you can have meetings in there if you want to.”
As the economy limps along and more attention is paid to the so-called 1 percent, some of the richest New Yorkers have taken to driving around in vehicles that ooze neither wealth nor privilege. But on the inside, the vans may be as lavishly decorated as the private railroad cars owned by turn-of-the-century industrialists.
Some owners use them as mobile offices, outfitted with fine leather chairs and Persian rugs; vans may also double as a child’s playroom on wheels, complete with a built-in vacuum to clean what the children dirty.
And while some owners say they are drawn to the vehicles’ vanilla exteriors, their outsize profiles cannot help but draw attention: at more than 22 feet long and nearly 9 feet tall, they look like cargo vans on steroids, their high roof lines dwarfing nearly all that surrounds them on the streets of New York. And that’s before the satellite dishes are raised.
The gap between first class and coach has never been so wide.Taking First-Class Coddling Above and Beyond (New York Times)
Carriers on international flights are offering private suites for first-class passengers, three-star meals and personal service once found only on corporate jets. They provide massages before takeoff, whisk passengers through special customs lanes and drive them in a private limousine right to the plane. Some have bars. One airline has installed showers onboard.
The amenities in the back of the cabin? Sparse.
So as domestic travelers take to the skies for the holiday season, most will be in cramped cabins, their food is likely to be bland and they will have paid for it, along with any fees for slightly more legroom or checked bags.
But even as they have cut back on domestic service, including first-class accommodations, the airlines have been engaged in a global battle for top executives and the superwealthy on their international routes. Though only a privileged few can afford to pay $15,000 to fly first class from New York to Singapore or Sydney, the airlines are betting that the image of luxury they project for the front helps attract passengers to the rest of the plane. That includes a growing business-class section with offerings once solely the preserve of first class.
The question this should raise: how do a very, very small group of neo-feudal plutocrats control a global population (of economic losers) in the modern context?Q: How Will Plutocrats Dominate a World? A: Bots (Global Guerrillas)
Right now? Lawfare and the bureaucracy of the nation-state. As things continue to degrade, that veneer of legality and constraint will fade and become less effective.
Long term? Bots. Software bots. Drones. My good friend Daniel Suarez did a great job of demonstrating how this works in his books Daemon and Freedom.
In short, bots will increasingly allow a VERY small group of people (in our case, a small group of plutocrats that act as the world's economic central planners) to amplify their power/dominance in a the physical world to a degree never seen before.
Software bots automate information dominance. They can do everything from checking purchasing habits to energy use (via smart meters) to social media use o look for "terrorist" signatures. They can dominate markets as we are seeing high frequency trading. These software bots can also automate interactions with human beings from the simple phone spam/customer service phone tree to interfaces like Siri.
Hardware bots include everything from flying drones to crawling rats to kill, maim, or incapacitate individuals and/or groups. Driven by the ability of computational hardware to mimic nature, these bots will be able to do what their counter-parts in nature can do and more (already, although the data isn't official yet, I anticipate the majority of "enemy combatants" killed by the US security system in 2011 were killed by drones). Expect to see them operating in swarms/clouds, conducting highly autonomous decision making (including the decision to kill), and serving in hunter killer roles.
The combination of the two bot systems, software and hardware, provides the means to automate control of vast populations. A perfect, privatized solution for an extremely small group of plutocrats.