Thoughts About K4D

The U.S. Debt Buildup Before 2008

2012-01-25T11:18:00.001-05:00

Source of the graph I recently posted showing that the United States was doing rather well, as compared with other developed nations, in pulling down the debt as percentage of GDP since 2008. This graph shows were that debt accumulated. There was a sharp change early in the Great Depression (decrease in GDP) followed by a long recovery lasting until the early 1950s. There was a long slow

The top one percent

2012-01-25T10:53:00.001-05:00

Source: The Economist The average household income of the 1% was $1.2m in 2008, according to federal tax data. The ultra-rich skew that average upwards: admission to the 1% began at $380,000 in 2008. The Congressional Budget Office puts the cut-off lower, at $347,000 in 2007, or $252,000 after subtracting federal taxes and adding back transfers. Measured by net worth, rather than income,

Did you know this after all the discussion of the debt crisis

2012-01-24T23:14:00.000-05:00

The figure above is from The Economist. It shows the total debt in six countries, that is government debt plus other forms of debt. Note that among these six developed economies, the United States has the lowest total debt as a portion of GDP and also the fastest rate of pull down of that debt. This is true because government stimulus programs have provided for an economic recovery that

Where value is added in the Apple iPad value chain

2012-01-24T22:58:00.000-05:00

The Economist has an article pointing out that U.S. trade statistics focus on the final value of products imported into the United States, not the overseas value added in those products. The figure above apportions the costs of an Apple iPad, noting that the labor accounts for less than the profits to Apple, and that South Korea and Taiwan gain as much or more employment in its production as

Good News On Polio

2012-01-24T18:03:00.001-05:00

The Economist has an article noting that India has not had a case of polio for a year and appears well on the way to the three year period required to declare the disease eradicated. The disease is still being found in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. Credit is given to Rotary International which has put $800 million into the polio eradication program over the last quarter century. Of

Thinking about knowledge intensive economic goods and services

2012-01-24T13:00:00.001-05:00

From Science and Engineering Indicators Digest 2012: D. HIGH-TECHNOLOGY MANUFACTURINGThe United States, the EU, and China generate most of the value in the world’s high-technology manufacturing output. The worldwide recession changed trends in high-technology output growth around the world. U.S. growth nearly halted, and the EU, Japan, and Asia-8 experienced contraction in 2008 and 2009.

We need new words to describe what the brain does!

2012-01-23T22:51:00.001-05:00

Words reflect our mental models, or at least the mental models when they came into use. The sun "rises" and "sets" because the concepts of sunrise and sunset come from a time when people thought that the sun orbits the earth rather than the earth revolving around its axis. We describe Europe and Asia as separate continents from a time in which geographical models were limited to a small part of

Another image from NASA

2012-01-22T15:19:00.006-05:00

This great photo from NASA via The Washington Post shows a giant blob of plasma ejected from the sun which is to hit the earth today. Not to worry as it is not supposed to be dangerous. Check the Post article for a great streaming video of the ejection!

What if he had Perry's Brains and Paul's looks?

2012-01-22T14:43:00.000-05:00

There is an old story of a very smart man (variously George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx, and Albert Einstein) sitting next to a beautiful women. She remarked that they two could have wonderful children with his brains and her beauty. He replied, but madam, what if she had your brains and my beauty. In the South Carolina primary buildup, a number of voters remarked that it was

Lest make conspicuous consumption by the rich more expensive for them!

2012-01-22T13:22:00.002-05:00

Robert Frank, in his book The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, suggests that we should have a strongly progressive consumption tax. I confess that I don't understand how that would work. For example, think of a family that buys a second house at the beach planning to rent it out when they could, but to live in it when a renter could not be found; what portion of the

Mozilla on the Strike against SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T13:10:00.001-05:00

Here is the content of an email I received: Today, Mozilla is joining in a virtual strike with other leading public interest organizations and tech companies, from Wikipedia to Reddit to Google, to protest the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and its companion legislation in the US House, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) -- and we need your voice. The fact is that it's been a great couple of weeks in

Oppose SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T09:25:00.000-05:00

(T)he important task of protecting intellectual property online must not threaten an open and innovative internet.Obama administration This is easy. Do I want to support Google (motto: "don't be evil"} and the Obama administration or Rupert Murdoch (remember the phone hacking scandal)? Google, Wikipedia and other websites are campaigning today to protect their services. Two bills before

How do my last two posts tie into the theme of this blog

2012-01-17T17:21:00.002-05:00

The theme of this blog is "thoughts about knowledge for development". International development has two key themes: Development strategies that further enrich the rich in the hope that the wealth will trickle down don't work for the poor. Economic Development programs work for all when accomplished in a framework of pro poor policies. The trend towards enriching the rich in the United

Inequality in the United States is a Civil Rights Problem

2012-01-17T16:33:00.003-05:00

The increasing difference in income in the United States is linked inextricably to inequities in the opportunities for youth, poor health and especially lack of access to education that I find unacceptable. As my last post indicated, there is good evidence that these changes are not simply "the way things are", but are significantly the result of government policies that in turn came from the

Winner Take All or Justice for All?

2012-01-16T16:15:00.000-05:00

In Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob S. Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of Berkeley argue that America's money-addicted and change-resistant political system is at the heart of the enormous and rapidly growing income inequality that they say is undermining America's economic and political stability. Nearly 40

Living through the Cold War

2012-01-14T18:28:00.002-05:00

Source of the Cold War map I tend to forget that I am much older than most Americans and that they don't share my memories of living through the Cold War. I did not suffer in that war in any serious way, but it was an influence for a very long time. In school in the 1940's I went through "drop drills" where we ducked under our desks to practice self defense in case there was an atomic

Magical thinking, myths and ignorance are not good for national policy!

2012-01-14T13:42:00.001-05:00

Map source I lived in Chile for a couple of years in the last days of the Christian Democratic administration there. The general opinion of people to whom I talked at the time was that Salvador Allende would win the next election and become president of Chile. At the time, there was a lot of poverty in Chile, high inflation and the economy wasn't working very well for the people. A lot of

Mitt, Newt, Rick, Rick and Ron

2012-01-13T09:58:00.000-05:00

The last six Republican presidents were named Dwight, Richard, Gerald, Ronald, George and George. Why is it that the five most likely Republican candidates this year don't have a grownup name among them?

An important choice for me and my neighbors in April

2012-01-12T18:03:00.000-05:00

Donna Edwards I have been redistricted, and am now in the sixth Congressional District of Maryland. Instead of Donna Edwards who represented me when my house was still in the fourth Congressional District, I am now represented by Roscoe Bartlett. Donna Edwards is a young, active, liberal Congresswoman who has done a great job of representing me. Roscoe Bartlett, at 85, is the second oldest

Gaddis' book, The Cold War

2012-01-12T13:02:00.001-05:00

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis is enormously encouraging in recounting three great triumphs that took place between 1945 and 1991. In 1945 the world was divided between capitalist, free market economies of the West and socialist, command economies of the East, and beginning to be armed with nuclear weapons. In the previous three decades there had been two world wars that had

Wondering about the aftermath of the fall of Communism

2012-01-11T22:47:00.000-05:00

The fall of Communism two decades ago resulted in a sudden destruction of the economic institutions of the former USSR and the former Warsaw Pact nations. It occurs to me that a comparable destruction of economic institutions occurred in the former Confederate states when the Confederacy lost the American Civil War and slavery was abolished. In the case of the fall of Communism, the command

Good news on the flu front!

2012-01-09T15:13:00.002-05:00

I quote from the IAVI Report: The impetus for this surge in vaccine development is two-fold: to reduce the global impact of seasonal influenza, which results in an estimated three to five million severe illnesses and 25,000-50,000 deaths annually, and to dramatically improve emergency preparedness for the unpredictable nature and sometimes tsunami-like strength of pandemic influenza strains..

A thought about presidential decision making.

2012-01-09T12:39:00.002-05:00

Often we focus on political decision making at moments of great crisis, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the creation of the Berlin Wall, the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, or the recognition of a new, potentially pandemic disease. Decisions at such times are indeed important, but many more decisions are made in the White House or the Kremlin that are considered as routine. The

Lets raise taxes on the rich!

2012-01-08T13:58:00.001-05:00

From a fact checker with The New York Times: Mr. Romney stated that government consumes 37 percent of the economy’s output, but that figure should be put in perspective considering that he is running to head the federal government. That 37 percent reflects the combined size of the federal, state and local governments. The Congressional Budget Office has reported that federal government

Benefits of Size versus Benefits of Local Rule

2012-01-08T09:36:00.000-05:00

Anthony questioned my idea, expressed in a recent post, that the changing balance between imperialism and nationalism was one of the trends that led to the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. I think he is right that my argument was flawed. Clearly the great political empires were broken up in the 20th century. Think of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire