Some preliminary observations
Browsing around in the UNICEF annual report:
Replacement birth rate is normally 2.1 children/mother: you need a higher birthrate, naturally, if a lot of people are dying. The world as a whole has a birth rate of 2.6. East Asia/Pacific has 1.9: CEE/CIS (I think that means North America and Europe, because I don't see anything else either of those could fit into) has 1.7: Sub-Saharan Africa has 5.4. The rest of the world is in the 3 range.
Income equity is irregularly sprinkled over the face of the earth. Most of the countries with the greatest income equity appear to be the ones you'd expect -- places like Denmark and the Czech Republic -- but there are places like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Rwanda where the difference in income between the lowest 40% and the highest 20% is not that great. I don't know if this measure correlates well with anything else yet. The United States falls into the "not very equal category" with the lowest 40% getting 16% of the household income and the highest 20% getting 46% of the household income. Notice the careful limiting of the measure to household income -- Unicef left out all that other stuff that rich people own and earn, in order, I guess, to avoid exaggerating the effect. Which makes the measure, appropriately, "how much money can you spend on stuff?" instead of "how much money do you control?"
Venezuela comes out looking good. So does Ecuador. Ecuador! This is first glance, so I might be missing some things. It's too bad that so many countries don't have some of the statistics. The US and UK are missing a bunch, too. it's all sort of spotty all around, so you have to be careful drawing conclusions.
Hey, did you know you can get Stephen Hawking to read your pdf files to you? I was trying to get a better view of the Unicef report and discovered this menu item: Read out loud! I figured it wouldn't work --like I would need some kind of software I don't have or something -- but there it is! It works! Stephen Hawking telling me all about the methodology for the report. How cool is that?
I also found out that my cable company carries Democracy Now! on some station or other, but I don't know which. For some reason, three of the stations were mute this morning. The sound for one of them was coming out on the Food Network -- it was hilarious, because the sound was a little old lady sex therapist and the visual was a cute male Indian cook who was putting lurid raspberry-pink lilies on a plate with some really sexy food. I don't watch tv at home much, but I was mining telephone numbers and addresses for tutoring outfits to apply to, and then I was mending the nice fellow's pants. And when I do junk like that, I watch tv. Sometimes.
On another front, if you watched the History Channel's "Digging for Truth" installment about the Maya, you saw my friend Tom Schreiner's partner Richard Hansen and some of Tom's work -- he does the research into lime and cement production. It was a good show. I'm going to look for the others inthe series (I can do without the Aztec one, though).
Finally: it took me maybe ten minutes to reconstruct the paragraphs that went missing this morning. I think I may be back in business.
Replacement birth rate is normally 2.1 children/mother: you need a higher birthrate, naturally, if a lot of people are dying. The world as a whole has a birth rate of 2.6. East Asia/Pacific has 1.9: CEE/CIS (I think that means North America and Europe, because I don't see anything else either of those could fit into) has 1.7: Sub-Saharan Africa has 5.4. The rest of the world is in the 3 range.
Income equity is irregularly sprinkled over the face of the earth. Most of the countries with the greatest income equity appear to be the ones you'd expect -- places like Denmark and the Czech Republic -- but there are places like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Rwanda where the difference in income between the lowest 40% and the highest 20% is not that great. I don't know if this measure correlates well with anything else yet. The United States falls into the "not very equal category" with the lowest 40% getting 16% of the household income and the highest 20% getting 46% of the household income. Notice the careful limiting of the measure to household income -- Unicef left out all that other stuff that rich people own and earn, in order, I guess, to avoid exaggerating the effect. Which makes the measure, appropriately, "how much money can you spend on stuff?" instead of "how much money do you control?"
Venezuela comes out looking good. So does Ecuador. Ecuador! This is first glance, so I might be missing some things. It's too bad that so many countries don't have some of the statistics. The US and UK are missing a bunch, too. it's all sort of spotty all around, so you have to be careful drawing conclusions.
Hey, did you know you can get Stephen Hawking to read your pdf files to you? I was trying to get a better view of the Unicef report and discovered this menu item: Read out loud! I figured it wouldn't work --like I would need some kind of software I don't have or something -- but there it is! It works! Stephen Hawking telling me all about the methodology for the report. How cool is that?
I also found out that my cable company carries Democracy Now! on some station or other, but I don't know which. For some reason, three of the stations were mute this morning. The sound for one of them was coming out on the Food Network -- it was hilarious, because the sound was a little old lady sex therapist and the visual was a cute male Indian cook who was putting lurid raspberry-pink lilies on a plate with some really sexy food. I don't watch tv at home much, but I was mining telephone numbers and addresses for tutoring outfits to apply to, and then I was mending the nice fellow's pants. And when I do junk like that, I watch tv. Sometimes.
On another front, if you watched the History Channel's "Digging for Truth" installment about the Maya, you saw my friend Tom Schreiner's partner Richard Hansen and some of Tom's work -- he does the research into lime and cement production. It was a good show. I'm going to look for the others inthe series (I can do without the Aztec one, though).
Finally: it took me maybe ten minutes to reconstruct the paragraphs that went missing this morning. I think I may be back in business.