FW: Myths about Poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand
> The New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services and the Joint > Methodist Presbyterian Public Questions Committee have just completed a > major piece of work called: > > Myths about Poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand > > The publication examines eight myths about poverty that currently form > obstacles to its eradication, either by not recognising its existence or > by giving inaccurate explanations of why it occurs. The eight myths are: > > * "There is no poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand" > * "People can always get help if they really need it" > * "Poor people don't know how to manage their money" > * "If only they didn't keep having babies" > * "Why don't they just get a job" > * "Welfare dependency is the real problem, not poverty" > * "No need to worry about poverty - as long as we get the economy > right" > * "The poor will always be with us" > > > The following website has the whole package: > http://www.pq.godzone.net.nz/povmyths.htm > > To view the myths you will require Adobe's Acrobat Reader. You can get > this free software from: > http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html > > If you use the Myths about Poverty material please print off, fill in and > return the feedback sheet. > > Warm wishes, > > Richard Davis > Research/Executive Officer > Joint Methodist Presbyterian Public Questions Committee > > PO Box 9049, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand > Phone: +64-4-801 6000 > Fax: +64-4-801 6001 > > http://www.pq.godzone.net.nz/ > >
Re: Child Poverty and Despair - Up Close and Personal
"The first drumbeat of revolution starts as a growl in a child's empty stomach" Doubtless someone out there knows the author . . . I can't remember. By my calculations, you've got about 8 years before those two kids are capable of doing real social damage. If you can't fix 'em by the time they're 12 yrs old, then your best bet is to teach them a good solid drug addiction (heroine makes good money these days and is really a fine insturment of social control. Alcohol is second choice, less profitable, more debilitating.) Please, I don't mean to be a smart-ass, just a realist. Harv Tom Walker wrote: > >X-From_: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Oct 22 11:07:12 1998 > >X-MSMail-Priority: Normal > >Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 09:50:00 - > >Reply-To: Health Promotion on the Internet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >Sender: Health Promotion on the Internet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >From: Colleen Nisbet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >Subject: Child Poverty and Despair - Up Close and Personal > >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > >This contribution to the list is out of the ordinary but still I feel > >compelled to share a personal experience that brings the issue of child > >poverty to a painful reality. > > > >While walking my 10 year old son to school this morning with our dog I > >happened to encounter two small boys. Both appeared to be about 4 or 5 > >years old - they looked as though they could be twins. Their clothing was > >thin and dirty and the shoes on their feet were almost in pieces from wear > >and they were shivering in the 0'c temperatures this morning. The both had > >little backpacks that were hanging open apparently empty of all the usual > >things we expect to find in our kids bags like lunches, snacks and books. > > > >Obviously, from their bewildered expression - the boys were lost. When I > >asked where they were going one of the boys related this story to me. They > >were attending a new school ( the same one as my son) because they were > >living for a month with a 'friend'. Yesterday they got lost and were late > >for school. Their Mom stays in bed because she can't get a job. One boy > >said " The only job my mom has is to get us off to school and today the > >alarm clock didn't go off." The second boy added bits and pieces to this > >dialogue but was difficult to understand as he had a very definite speech > >problem. > > > >Half way to school the quieter boy tripped over his broken shoes and began > >crying, right away the other boy assisted him to his feet and they > >continued to walk on. > > > >This is hardly my first experience with poverty first hand! However, > >something about this experience has really given me a jolt today and I wish > >that I could articulate the way it has made me feel. As a human being this > >is devastating and I doubt that I will think of much else today. As a > >Health Promoter it should stir me up but today it just makes me feel > >hopeless, especially in view of the headlines in the Toronto Star today * > >RICH GET RICHER AS WAGE GAP WIDENS* *TOP TEN PERCENT MAKE 314 TIMES MORE > >THAN THE POOREST* As a MSc. in HP grad I am too familiar with the effects > >of the health/wealth divide. > > > >I am usually a more optimistic person. Maybe someone can offer some > >insightful thoughts that will help all of this to make sense. > >Maybe you will all want me off the list for making such a dismal > >contribution! > > > >Colleen Nisbet > > > >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > > > > Regards, > > Tom Walker > ^^^ > #408 1035 Pacific St. > Vancouver, B.C. > V6E 4G7 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (604) 669-3286 > ^^^ > The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: DANGEROUS CURRENTS
Victor Milne: >Royal Bank blamed weak stock markets and narrowing interest rate margins for>third-quarter profits of $464 million that were unchanged from the prior>three months. However, those earnings were 8 per cent higher than the 1997>third quarter. [my emphasis] Analyst Nick Majendie said, "It will be tougher>to increase earnings overall 10 per cent for the group, the growth rate set>by analysts for the banks.">Do you see the incredible assumption? Unlimited growth. At the ten per cent>growth rate that banks want their profits would have to double every 7.2>years. Even at a "mere" 8 per cent it would only take nine years.>>Any high school student who has been introduced to the concept of geometric>progression should be able to understand that this is impossible in the real>world. When I learned about geometric progression many years ago, it was>introduced by a fable from ancient India.> snip >>The bank presidents and stockbrokers and currency speculators who demand an>unending geometric progression of profits are all multi-millionaires. Their>real physical wants were long ago satisfied. The latest status symbol among>many of them is a $230,000 wrist watch that keeps time no better than a $30>Timex.>>What drives them on? I would not presume to deny some of the points you make. Indeed people are greedy, perhaps bankers and speculators more so than ordinary folk. And it certain that most people prefer bull markets to the kind of economic uncertainty that we are now faced with. However, I do think that we have to be a little careful with numbers. I've prepared a little table to illustrate. I hope I can post it without it looking too confusing. Profits are the difference between all revenues and all costs. In the table, I've assumed that revenues are initially $10,000 (a very small and poor bank) and costs are $9,700 throughout the period depicted. The bank starts out with a profit of $300 during the initial period. Being a very well run bank, it is able to achieve its objective of increasing profits by 10% annually, so that, in agreement with what you have said, profits more than double. However, while profits rise rapidly, revenues rise only very slowly, about 0.3% per year. Costs, which best reflect the value of the earth's resources being used by the bank, do not rise at all. This should not be considered unusual for a bank because it shouldn't cost that much more to negotiate a loan for a higher than a lower value, and simply making an entry for $2 million should not cost much more than an entry for $1.5 million. In the case I've developed, therefore, the impact of the bank on the earth's dwindling resource base is zero, though I do recognize that costs could increase as revenues do. Increase in Revenue Revenues Costs Profits % 0 10,000 9,700 300 1 10,030 9,700 330 0.30 2 10,063 9,700 363 0.33 3 10,099 9,700 399 0.36 4 10,139 9,700 439 0.40 5 10,183 9,700 483 0.43 6 10,231 9,700 531 0.47 7 10,285 9,700 585 0.52 8 10,343 9,700 643 0.57 9 10,407 9,700 707 0.62 10 10,478 9,700 778 0.68 My example is entirely hypothetical. However, it does make that point that one needs to be careful about drawing conclusions without giving some careful thought to numbers. The example does raise a few additional issues, however. One concerns how the bank might increase
was: petfood
Should cheer up Jay... Just imagine if all the money/land/ resources spent now on tobacco would be spent on better things... However, short term profit and one easily collectable state revenue is part of the system that cannot be concerned about human needs. I think it is more than the pet-food money, though this data is overlooked. Eva - Forwarded message from Mark Graffis -
Smoking set to become world's leading killer, study predicts
Copyright 1998 AFP GENEVA (October 21, 1998 02:56 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Smoking is set to become the biggest single cause of death and disability on Earth, with tobacco use worldwide reaching epidemic proportions, according to a World Health Organization report published Tuesday. Thinking of lighting up? Read on -- the following statistics and statements are drawn from the WHO report: Based on current patterns of consumption, more than 500 million people currently alive are likely to be killed by tobacco. Tobacco causes around 3.5 million deaths annually, the figure set to rise to around 10 million deaths annually during the 2020s or 2030s. Of the latter figure, 7 million deaths will occur in developing countries. By 2020, it is predicted that 12 percent of deaths globally will be caused by tobacco, more than HIV, tuberculosis, maternal mortality, road accidents, suicide and homicide combined. On average, smokers who begin smoking in adolescence and continue to smoke regularly have a 50 percent chance of dying from tobacco. Half of these will die in middle age, before age 70, losing around 22 years of normal life expectancy. Based on current trends, around 250 million children currently alive will eventually be killed by tobacco. Tobacco is a known or probable cause of numerous diseases: Cancer -- of the lip, oral cavity and pharynx; the esophagus; the pancreas; the larynx; the lung, trachea and bronchus; the urinary bladder; the kidney and other urinary organs; Respiratory diseases -- tuberculosis, pneumonia and influenza, bronchitis and emphysema, asthma and chronic airway obstruction; Cardiovascular diseases -- rheumatic heart disease; hypertension; pulmonary heart disease; cerebrovascular diseases; atherosclerosis; aortic aneurysm; Pediatric diseases -- low birth weight; respiratory distress syndrome; newborn respiratory conditions; sudden infant death syndrome. WHO estimates that there are around 1.1 billion smokers in the world, around one third of the population aged 15 and over. Of these, 800 million are in developing countries. Data indicate that globally, 47 percent of men and 12 percent of women smoke. By the mid-2020s the transfer of smoking from rich to poor countries will be well advanced, with only 15 percent of the world's smokers living in rich countries. The biggest increases in the smoking-related disease burden are expected in India and China. In China alone, where there are 300 million smokers, new data show that there are already around 750,000 deaths a year caused by smoking. Stopping smoking benefits health in all cases. One year after giving up smoking, the risk of coronary heart disease decreases by 50 percent, and within 15 years the risk of coronary heart disease is similar to that of a lifelong non-smoker. The relative risk of developing lung cancer and strokes also decreases, though more slowly. Within 10 to 14 years of stopping smoking, the risk of death from cancer becomes comparable to that of a lifelong non-smoker. _ - End of forwarded message from Mark Graffis -
Re: DANGEROUS CURRENTS
While I agree with Victor's analysis and imagery, I do think that governments can respond, before the Lamborghini crashes into the wall. Governments only respond to threat -- either of the loss of from business pullout/ flight of capital, or from the fear of revolution from below. To make good this threat would require massive and persistent organization built around this understanding. Governments will respond when their home base is threatened. I support Linda McQuaig in this that governments can stop the juggernaught, but for them to do that they need to be pushed very hard against the tide. David Burman At 06:11 PM 22/10/98 -0400, Victor Milne wrote: > >While I have to agree with Ed Weick's earlier comment that people will >inevitably "do economics"-- I do after a fashion, and I'm no professional >economist -- nevertheless Jay Hanson may be right that it's time to start >screaming and being abusive because the business community and their tame >economists are just not hearing anything about LIMITS TO GROWTH. > >Jay Hanson writes: > >>Our present economic-political system is rushing full speed into the brick >>wall known as LIMITS TO GROWTH (LTG). LTG assumes many forms: depletion of >>nonrenewable resources, pollution and perturbation of natural systems, and >>simply reaching a level of complexity that is too great for our energy base >>to sustain. > >I used precisely the same metaphor in a short essay I wrote for my own >website, and I think if we look at the assumptions of the business >community, the situation is even scarier than Jay presents it to be. Here is >part of what I wrote: > >Royal Bank blamed weak stock markets and narrowing interest rate margins for >third-quarter profits of $464 million that were unchanged from the prior >three months. However, those earnings were 8 per cent higher than the 1997 >third quarter. [my emphasis] Analyst Nick Majendie said, "It will be tougher >to increase earnings overall 10 per cent for the group, the growth rate set >by analysts for the banks." >Do you see the incredible assumption? Unlimited growth. At the ten per cent >growth rate that banks want their profits would have to double every 7.2 >years. Even at a "mere" 8 per cent it would only take nine years. > >Any high school student who has been introduced to the concept of geometric >progression should be able to understand that this is impossible in the real >world. When I learned about geometric progression many years ago, it was >introduced by a fable from ancient India. > >The story goes that a young hero had performed a great service for the king. >In gratitude the king offered to give him a large sum of gold. No, said the >young man modestly, all he wanted was this: Take a chess board of 64 >squares, and on the first square put 1 grain of rice, on the second square 2 >grains, on the third square 4 grains, on the fourth square 8 grains, and so >on. The king agreed with a smile at the simplicity of the young man, but his >accountants soon informed him that he had promised more than the entire rice >harvest of the kingdom. > >The profits of banks and businesses of all kinds can only come from >providing products or services to people, and those people can only get the >money to pay a bank or business from two sources, either from being >wage-earning employees or dividend-earning stockholders of those same banks >and businesses. To ask that their profits should double in infinite >geometric progression is to demand more than the entire harvest of the >kingdom. > >The bank presidents and stockbrokers and currency speculators who demand an >unending geometric progression of profits are all multi-millionaires. Their >real physical wants were long ago satisfied. The latest status symbol among >many of them is a $230,000 wrist watch that keeps time no better than a $30 >Timex. > >What drives them on? > >No more eloquent and haunting words can be found than those penned by Samuel >Johnson, poet, essayist, lexicographer and sage, to explain the building of >the Great Pyramid: "It seems to have been erected only in compliance with >that hunger of the imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must >always be appeased by some employment." > >The Great Pyramid must have been a terrible drain on the GNP of ancient >Egypt for perhaps 20 years, leaving little enough for the welfare of the >common people. However, the project of our modern pharoahs of the business >world is far more frightening. The Great Pyramid was finite. Once the >surveyors had staked out the sides, it was determined that a certain >enormous amount of stone would finish the project. However, the scheme of >doubling profits every 10 years or 20 years is without limits. > >Our business leaders are best compared to an idiot driving a turbocharged >Lamborghini, whose only goal is to go faster than he is driving at the >moment. Doubling profits every 7.2 years requires that they reach 64 times >their current level in half a century
'Free Enterprise' and the Bagel Effect
Dear Friends, This morning I listened to Rafe Mair's talk show for the first time in a long time. Mr. Mair is an ex-provincial cabinet minister who now hosts a very 'free enterprise' oriented talk show in Vancouver. His first guest was the provincial finance minister, Joy McPhail. After the obligatory but wildly inaccurate lecture about her government being socialist and anti-free enterprise (all the mainstream media keep repeating this no matter how pathetically her government fawns at the feet of the 'business community'), he expressed his dismay that the government had turned its back on 'free enterprise' which had brought prosperity to all- not perhaps in the 19th century, but certainly recently. A few miniute later, a caller asked the minister how the government could balance the interests of business people demanding spending and tax cuts, citizens concerned about the decaying health (i.e. sickness) care system, and a dwindling middle class, caught between a tiny minority of the increasingly fithy rich and the growing ranks of the poor, but which still expected the government to provide accustomed services. Mr. Mair then conceded that the rich were getting richer and the rest getting poorer- certainly the middle class, and- yes- the poor too. No one pointed out that the "all" to whom 'free'enterprise' had brought so much prosperity was the tiny minority of the very rich. The next guest was a rock star and university professor who has just written a book called "The Bagel Effect." He has a somewhat Theobald-Tofflerian analysis, harping on the three great changes in social development- i.e. the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. He was big on lifelong learning. But his main point was that responsibility was slipping from the central government to provincial governments and thence to municipalities, but since none of them had the money to carry out their reponsibilities, those responsibilities were devolving onto individuals and families. He did not note that this was occuring ata time when most of those individuals and families also had dwindling resources. He called this process' the empowerment of the individual.' To me, it looks more like P.R. Sarkar's third stage, in which power devolves from the political core not to ordinary individuals but rather to concentrations of wealth: 3. (As summarized by me) The Era of Acquisition (feudalism: 900-1450, capitalism: 1860 to the present), which emerges as warriors and intellectuals who fail to acquire political power turn their attention to accumulating wealth. It is marked by decentralized political authority, commercialization of the arts and all areas of life, abandonment of all values except for wealth, at first at the top but spreading throughout society, growth of prostitution and lewdness, increasing crime, lack of social discipline, growing concentration of wealth, no concern for the well-being of others. This age is followed not by a paradise of happily communicating on the internet, as the learned professor seemed to suggest, but rather by 4, 1, and 2.* I tell these stories not just to fill your long empty hours, but also to show how much nonsense and deception and self-deception there is about us. If I had not been thinking deeply about these issues for a long time, I probably would have ignored or accepted the nonsensical and self-contradictory things I was hearing. As it was, I thought my reactions might have some value to others. It all reminds me of the Stanford physics professor who told me (30 years ago) that physicists had been sweeping so much data under the rug that they were in danger of banging their knees on the rug... * *4. Laborer Age- revolt against the insensitivity of concentrated wealth, engineered not by laborers themsemlves but by warriors and intellectuals reduced to the laborer's level of poverty. These periods are usually brief and lead end when the rebellious warriors take control and recommence the cycle. 1. The warrior era (in the west, the stone age, pre-christian Roman empire: c. 0-450, despotic monarchies,1470-1689), governments dominated by warriors and surprisingly characterized (at least in its earlier stages) by centralized control, generally good morals, low crime, considerable status for women and reasonable treatment of laborers; 2. The Era of Intellectuals (late [christian] Roman era and dark ages: c. 450-900, 1689-1860), created when priests or other pen pushers create theoretical (religious or otherwise) justifications for the ruler's absolute authority and then propound a set of rituals and dogmas which they control and through which they dominate the rulers who become figureheads behind which the intellectuals wield the true power. This era is characterized by some decentralization, low regard for women (who threaten authority based on abstractions), incedption of prostitution, and little concern with the well-
FW: Re: DANGEROUS CURRENTS (149 lines)
This response to Mike Hollinshead is a little tardy but it took me awhile to reacquaint myself with what I have at hand. In the meantime, others have had more sensible things to say but I'll post this anyhow. > ...from what I can determine in Waldrop's book about Santa Fe, > they can't break free from the strait jacket of conventional > thinking and terminology and the "traditional" economic problems. I don't know the "Waldorp's book" or its date. Did I miss an earlier reference? > The person at Santa Fe who did the most interesting work in > economics was the biologist Stuart Kauffman who built network models > in which life (including economic life) bootstrapped itself into > existence. When Kauffman explained his model to [Brian] Arthur, all > the latter could do was to talk about the fact that it led to > increasing returns, which is interesting and important but no news to > biologists, and immediately smothered the results in conventional > economic terminology and thinking. Arthur went to Santa Fe in April of 1987 and he's (what I would call) a mathematical economist so it's not surprising that, at least initially, he would couch his thoughts in economists' terms. In his intro to _Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy_ (1994), Arthur recounts, In March of 1987 I went to my old University, Berkeley, to have lunch with two of it's most respected economists. What was I working on? Increasing returns. "Well, we know that increasing returns don't exist", said one. "Besides, if they do", said the other, "we couldn't allow them. Otherwise, evey two-bit industry in the country would be looking for a handout." I think it's to Arthur's credit that he has been thinging critically about increasing returns and has made the effort to beat up Kauffmann's rather difficult models. His articles intended for economists are regretably impenetrable (at least for me) because of their allusion to presumably well known statistical and economic paradigms. (E.g. priors, convexity, standard Poincare-index topological arguments, Verdoorn's "law", Walrasian dynamics or threshold capital-labor ratio.) But those not intended for such an exclusive audience reflect an attempt to model what it is that actually happens in the world rather than a defensive attempt to keep all the ex cathedra assumptions of neo-calssical economics together without soiling them. One of his chief points is that, given the possibility of multiple equilibria, sensitivity to intial condiditions, path dependence and increasing returns, there is a potential to become locked into an economic choice that is non-optimal (or even pessimal [1]) even when each individual choice by each player is "rational". One of his examples: Consider the case of the person who has the choice of practicing law or medicine each year. Each activity pays more, the more previous experience has been accumulated. Suppose that rewards to practicing law rise rapidly with experience but then flatten out; and those to practicing medicine are small initially but eventually surpass those of law. According to the theorem, whichever acivity the person chooses, he will continue to choose thereafter. If he has a high discount rate [2], he will choose law. And this choice will at all stages continue to be rational and superior to the alternative first-year payoff as a doctor. Yet there may be *regret*, in the sense that after N years in the law, an equivalent time served in mediceine would have paid more at each time into the future. Self reinforcement can lock a single rational economic agent in to one activity, but not neccessarily the one with the best long term potential. He observes elsewhere: If an economic system is locked in to an inferior local equilibrium, is "exit" or escape to a superior one possible? There is rarely in economics any mechanism corresponding to "annealing" (outside injections of energy that "shake" the system into new configurations so that it finds its way randomly to a lower cost one.) This is a concept that's familiar to chemists as an energy well and to various kinds of systems analysts as local optima in hill climbing models or gradient descent in optimization problems. I hypothesize that economics as a whole suffers from just this kind of lockin. Players adopted the constellation of basic ideas that we generally associate with Adam Smith, making approximately rational decisions all along the way. Two hundred years ago, the implicit assumptions were more or less correct: many small players of about the same size, power and access to information. The ideas of "free markets" and "self interest" were appealing because of consonance with notions of the natural rights of natural persons. The world has changed. Five thousand corporate players and a few hundred individuals have disproportinate power by six or eight orders
