I did enjoy Ted; but I ponder the scale for births per woman which includes units of 0.5 - as far as I know, biology does not allow us to give birth to half a child.
interesting, although I found the images very engaging whilst at the same time completely confusing. They looked pretty but I couldn't work out what exactly they represented. That bloke seems to understand it all, which is good, since he seems very nice.
The general gist of what he was saying seemed to be summed up with:
1. sort health before you sort wealth (although he ignores whether wealth at modern levels is sustainable or desirable.)
2. in a global world geography and culture are less important, all countries have in them both rich and poor and within cultures/countries/landmases their is a far greater diversity of conditions and ecconomics than their used to be, but at the same time everywhere is more similar in general terms.
Have I got that right? Like I said the pictures were confusing me and I was of course doing other things at the same time as watching it.
I dunno how hopeful it is, in terms of there are still big income gaps whatever he says about most people being in the middle. That the rich are now super-rich and the poor a little more healthy than they used to be is not really very hopeful to me. Probably is to a lot of people I guess, ones less concerned with the destruction of all the world through our overuse of it. People who think civilisation is the answer rather than the problem and all that.
I worry its a bit dangerous as well to stop simplifying stuff, by which I mean that often you just simplify in a different way: i.e. the 3rd world is a different thing now, geographically and culturally etc... arguably its areas or subsections of many different places etc... but those areas and places are still exploited by the wealthy world. The global poor and the global working classes suffer for the good or the glbal middleclass and everyone suffers a bit due to the global rich. These are the areas I worry people will forget when they hear all this "we are all in the middle" stuff. But the truth is best, we just need to make sure it remains true and is not spun.
But of course it will be spun. It will always be spun. Thats what statistics are for!!
as long as we continue to define poverty in relative terms, it will remain - although even on the one dollar a day definition, it's quite resilient.
funny how people notice different things - i was taken by the software, and paid very little attention to what he was saying about health and development, that being for me an excuse to present a) the software and b) his other point, which you didn't mention, about free use of data. that for me was the really exciting bit, what he was pushing at the end about making data available to all those who want to use it. especially UN data, being paid for through global taxes (although much UN data also agglomerates national sources). his scepticism about the attitude of different data collection projects, that our methodology is unique and the data non-comparable with that other data, is well made, too. i'm hoping against hope that unece will let me use their generations and gender data for my masters...
while i'm partly sympathetic to your point about civilisation, it's non-starting when it comes to policy, and a bit self-flagellating for my liking. but then i reckon you're more into individual cases (you good liberal citizen), so screw policy, right? i remember a chap in my politics a-level class who was convinced that AIDS is population control - maybe the ecologist prize-winning stance is just that it's happening in the wrong part of the world?!
5 comments:
Chris, this stuff is very exciting. I thought my Flash reports were neat, but these moving pictures are something else.
I did enjoy Ted; but I ponder the scale for births per woman which includes units of 0.5 - as far as I know, biology does not allow us to give birth to half a child.
I don't know, I can think of a few people who fit into that category...
interesting, although I found the images very engaging whilst at the same time completely confusing. They looked pretty but I couldn't work out what exactly they represented. That bloke seems to understand it all, which is good, since he seems very nice.
The general gist of what he was saying seemed to be summed up with:
1. sort health before you sort wealth (although he ignores whether wealth at modern levels is sustainable or desirable.)
2. in a global world geography and culture are less important, all countries have in them both rich and poor and within cultures/countries/landmases their is a far greater diversity of conditions and ecconomics than their used to be, but at the same time everywhere is more similar in general terms.
Have I got that right? Like I said the pictures were confusing me and I was of course doing other things at the same time as watching it.
I dunno how hopeful it is, in terms of there are still big income gaps whatever he says about most people being in the middle. That the rich are now super-rich and the poor a little more healthy than they used to be is not really very hopeful to me. Probably is to a lot of people I guess, ones less concerned with the destruction of all the world through our overuse of it. People who think civilisation is the answer rather than the problem and all that.
I worry its a bit dangerous as well to stop simplifying stuff, by which I mean that often you just simplify in a different way: i.e. the 3rd world is a different thing now, geographically and culturally etc... arguably its areas or subsections of many different places etc... but those areas and places are still exploited by the wealthy world. The global poor and the global working classes suffer for the good or the glbal middleclass and everyone suffers a bit due to the global rich. These are the areas I worry people will forget when they hear all this "we are all in the middle" stuff. But the truth is best, we just need to make sure it remains true and is not spun.
But of course it will be spun. It will always be spun. Thats what statistics are for!!
as long as we continue to define poverty in relative terms, it will remain - although even on the one dollar a day definition, it's quite resilient.
funny how people notice different things - i was taken by the software, and paid very little attention to what he was saying about health and development, that being for me an excuse to present a) the software and b) his other point, which you didn't mention, about free use of data. that for me was the really exciting bit, what he was pushing at the end about making data available to all those who want to use it. especially UN data, being paid for through global taxes (although much UN data also agglomerates national sources). his scepticism about the attitude of different data collection projects, that our methodology is unique and the data non-comparable with that other data, is well made, too. i'm hoping against hope that unece will let me use their generations and gender data for my masters...
while i'm partly sympathetic to your point about civilisation, it's non-starting when it comes to policy, and a bit self-flagellating for my liking. but then i reckon you're more into individual cases (you good liberal citizen), so screw policy, right? i remember a chap in my politics a-level class who was convinced that AIDS is population control - maybe the ecologist prize-winning stance is just that it's happening in the wrong part of the world?!
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