Facts To Ponder

If inequality in Asia had remained stable instead of increasing over the past two decades, the region’s economic growth would have lifted about 240 million more people out of poverty, the ADB estimates. 

In Pictures: Asia's Widening Wealth Gap

Though recent media reports suggest that elite students are growing disillusioned by Wall Street, the numbers are unconvincing. Among the class of 2011, the financial industry was the top employer of graduates of Harvard, Duke, Columbia and even the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school. 

Here is more:

My generation has come of age in a society that tells its youth that we can do or be anything, but never mentions the suffocating price tag attached to our dreams. Like many of my peers, I entered college with unbridled ambition, only to confront a harsh economic reality: undergraduate loans, costly post-graduate degrees and high unemployment. In 2010, the average college student graduated with $25,000 in loans, the highest tally on record. Student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. No wonder our priorities are skewed.

The financial pressures manifest themselves in different ways on different campuses, but at the country’s most-esteemed schools, the economy has precipitated Wall Street’s recruiting supremacy. When a six-figure income, including bonus, is dangled in front of a 22-year-old’s nose, it’s tough to stomach the thought of taking on the average $158,000 debt-load of today’s medical student, or shelling out $50,000 a year for a master’s degree. 

How Elite Colleges Still Feed Wall St.’s Recruiting Machine (NYT Dealbook)

What kind of society prospers by turning it's brightest young people into extractive predators?

And many people have made predictions that high oil costs will kill the airline industry. Is this coming true? When airlines start buying their own oil refineries, you gotta believe the Long Emergency is kicking into high gear:

Delta buying oil refinery to help reduce costs (Marketplace)

And some facts are so dispiriting you just want the world to end:

...in the past 48 hours five farmers in just one district of the state of Maharashtra have killed themselves, all over high debts. For the year, just five months and two days old, 332 farmers have chosen to end their lives because of debt.

In other words, in one state in India (albeit a big state) nearly 3 farmers each day are killing themselves because the debts they have incurred. About this time last year, looking back at 2010 and for the whole of India, the number of farmer suicides divided out to one every 30 minutes (!!!).

Alarming Trend of Farmer Suicides in India (Treehugger)