The Evolution of the Global GDP

Source: Lloyd Sakazaki, "Investing in China: Rapid GDP Growth Rates Indicate Prosperous Future," Seeking Alpha, November 30, 2006.

1950 A.D.-present: Western Europe and its "offshoot" [Maddison's terminology] U.S. economy represented about 54% of the world's GDP in 1950, but this combined percentage has fallen over the past few decades to about 40%, where it sits today. Following on the coattails of Japan's economic growth spurt in the post-World War II years between 1950 and 1990, China [and India, though at a more moderate pace] has begun to rise again. Through accelerated growth, China's economy has gone from representing just 4% to 5% of the world's GDP in the decades [1949-1976] of Chairman Mao's rule, to more than 15% today.

The gap in the data between the start of World War I and the end of World War II indicates that these trends are not always stabile. Still, the trends suggest that the domination of the world economy by the United States and Western Europe may soon be more widely shared.

Oceans: Much more than “fish and ships”

The oceans are suffering. The main source of food for two billion people, a key element in climate control and a largely untapped reserve of vital resources, they deserve to be managed better. This is why the United Nations has decided to celebrate the first ever World Ocean Day on the 8th of June.

Sorry for the late posting.

Read more!

June 17th -- World Day to Combat Desertification

The World Day to Combat Desertification is observed every year on 17 June. This year, the Day's theme is

"Conserving land and water = Securing our common future"

"Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online"

A young man climbs "Freedom Tower"
in Azadi Square in Tehran.
Uncredited photo via The Huffington Post

Source: BRAD STONE and NOAM COHEN, The New York Times, June 15, 2009.

"As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

"Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential election on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications."

Too bad Twitter chose last night to go down for maintenance. The Huffington Post has provided a Tweet aggregator for Iran, which I hope will come back online.

"Wall Street’s Toxic Message"

Vanity Fair illustration by Edward Sorel.

Joseph Stiglitz has an article in Vanity Fair with the following summary:

When the current crisis is over, the reputation of American-style capitalism will have taken a beating—not least because of the gap between what Washington practices and what it preaches. Disillusioned developing nations may well turn their backs on the free market, warns Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, posing new threats to global stability and U.S. security.

In the article he writes:

In many parts of the world, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism (“neoliberalism,” it was often called), a notion idealized by Americans as “free and unfettered markets.” They pressed for financial-sector deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization.

Not surprisingly, people in developing countries became less and less convinced that Western help was motivated by altruism. They suspected that the free-market rhetoric—“the Washington consensus,” as it is known in shorthand—was just a cover for the old commercial interests.

I continue to be surprised by Prof. Stiglitz' condemnation of the World Bank policies, since he was once the Chief Economist of that institution.

The article suggests, as I understand it, that the best economy is a properly regulated free market economy, with the private sector and the government in balance, each playing its appropriate role. Stiglitz hopes that the disillusionment with American economic problems will not cause other countries to reject market economies.

It seems silly for me to take on a great economist, but I do wonder about this position. The United States and other countries greatly revised their economic institutions to deal with the great depression and its causes, and are likely to revise those institutions again as a result of the current crisis. Moreover, there are many differences in the economic institutions of different developed nations, such as the the degree to which government centralizes health and education services and the extent of the social safety net. It seems to me that countries are continually evolving and adjusting their economic institutions. While all dresses are dresses, there is a huge variety among them; while all free market economies are free market economies, so too there can be variety among them.

I wonder, incidentally, how good a job we are doing in identifying the problems that led to the current crisis. Ex post facto explanations in so complex a system as the global economy seem prone to many errors.

Thanks Emily for pointing out the article to me!

UNESCO SHS Editorial

Here is the abstract of an editorial by Sami Mahroum and Paul de Guchteneire:

It is increasingly recognised that diasporas, and diaspora knowledge networks in particular, may contribute to the benefits of the migration process: in receiving countries by providing valuable international linkages that bring new ideas and skills, in migrant source countries by strengthening ties with their emigrants abroad, and last but not least, to the migrants themselves, by giving them a platform for exchange of experiences and valuable contacts for their professional and private lives.

Traditionally, the relationship between geography, science, technology and innovation(used here broadly to describe all activities relating to scientific and techno-economic change) has been dominated by the concept of “national innovation systems” (NIS) developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Freeman 1988; Lundvall 1992; Nelson 1993). The NIS concept was then extended by Michael Porter (1995) to apply on a regional scale (cluster theory). The NIS approach does not give enough consideration to the role that transnational forces play in shaping and transforming local innovation environments, particularly through the factor of human mobility. In a world that is increasingly witnessing the emergence of transnational communities with extended international networks, a growing body of research on international knowledge networks (IKN)or diaspora knowledge networks (DKN) is providing more insight into the structures and processes of the agents of change that are increasingly shaping many regions around the world. IKN is defined as “a system of coordinated research, study, results dissemination and publication, intellectual exchange, and financing across national boundaries” (Parmar 2002: 13). The actors in such networks may incorporate professional bodies, academic research groups and scientific communities that organise around a special subject matter or issue. The primary motivation of such networks is to create and advance knowledge as well as to share, spread and, in some cases, use that knowledge to inform policy and apply to practice (Stone 2003).

From the Overview of the World Development Report 2009 -- Without Comment

"Place is the most important correlate of a person’s welfare. In the next few decades, a person born in the United States will earn a hundred times more than a Zambian, and live three decades longer. Behind these national averages are numbers even more unsettling. Unless things change radically, a child born in a village far from Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, will live less than half as long as a child born in New York City—and during that short life, will earn just $0.01 for every $2 the New Yorker earns. The New Yorker will enjoy a lifetime income of about $4.5 million, the rural Zambian less than $10,000.

"A Bolivian man with nine years of schooling earns an average of about $460 per month, in dollars that refl ect purchasing power at U.S. prices. But the same person would earn about three times as much in the United States. A Nigerian with nine years of education would earn eight times as much in the United States than in Nigeria. This “place premium” is large throughout the developing world.1 The best predictor of income in the world today is not what or whom you know, but where you work."

"Attitudes towards redistribution have a strong cultural component"

Source: The Economist, June 4th 2009.

I quote from an Economics Focus column based on the work of Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal of Harvard University:

Immigrants have typically had their formative experiences in a country with different institutions, benefit systems and attitudes from those of their adopted home. If culture matters, then their attitudes should be different from those of native citizens in similar economic circumstances and closer to those that prevail in their country of origin. Mr Luttmer and Ms Singhal analyse data from the European Social Survey, a biennial multi-country exercise, on the attitudes of over 6,000 immigrants who have moved from one of 32 countries in the survey to another and they find precisely this result.

Even after controlling for income, education and other relevant economic and social factors such as work history and age, views about redistribution in an immigrant’s home country are a strong predictor of his own opinions. Indeed, this measure of “cultural background” explains as much as income levels, and three-fifths as much as income and education combined. These results hold even for immigrants who moved 20 years before they were surveyed; they cannot be attributed to people not having had time to adjust their views.

This is an interesting study, confirming what we would all assume from the history of ethnic politics in the United States.

"How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research?"

"A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data"
Daniele Fanelli, PLoS One, May 29, 2009.

From the Abstract:

A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Meta-regression showed that self reports surveys, surveys using the words “falsification” or “fabrication”, and mailed surveys yielded lower percentages of misconduct. When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others.

Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.

Comment: I would agree with Fanelli that the self reported occasions of misconduct probably under estimate the true value.

Lets think a moment about the estimate of 14% of scientists who report knowledge of falsification by at least one colleague and 72% who report knowledge of other questionable practices by at least one colleague. How do people define "colleague" in answering such a question? I would think that all scientists have read about some of the widely publicized cases of falsification by scientists, so presumably they are not defining "colleague" broadly enough to include any scientist or even any scientist working in their own field of science.

How many "colleagues" would a scientist have on the average with whom he/she was working sufficiently closely to directly observe misconduct? I would guess perhaps four or five at a given time, with some scientists who do a great deal of collaborative research at an extreme tail of the distribution. On the average, perhaps surprisingly, scientists don't spend as much as a decade doing research, so the total number of other scientists observed would be relatively modest. And of course, one does not closely observe the conduct of friends and colleagues.

I recall one fairly strong argument during my days as a researcher in which my coauthors and I debated (hotly) how to report our study, a debate that resulted in doing what I felt to be the right thing. How would one report the attitude of the colleagues seeking to present the results "in the most favorable light"?

And of course, I would be reluctant to answer such a question positively in any case. It would involve a charge against a colleague, which even in the case of anonymity is distasteful.

The level of questionable conduct may be quite high. JAD

"The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers"

Frank Rich wrote this Opinion Piece in todays New York Times. He focuses on a new trend among right wing pundits towards hyperbole that borders on outright fabrication and lies. Certainly there are historical precedents, and in our early history the press was villainous. With two recent right wing assassinations, there is reason to worry that words will encourage and lead to violence. I also think that democracy is advanced by a responsible journalism that seeks to present information rather than misinformation, that promotes reasoned judgment rather than emotional reaction.

By the way, so much for the success of Homeland Security in preventing deaths on American soil due to terrorism.

Thaddeus Holt and "The Deceivers"

I am listening to Thaddeus Holt discuss his book, The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War. He is describing what I guess is the opposite to the topic of this blog. I am focusing on knowledge for development. He focuses on the efforts of the military to impart false knowledge to the enemy, focusing especially on World War II.

There is a "science" of that effort -- knowing what you want the decision maker to believe, knowing what you want his intelligence sources to convey to the decision maker to achieve that belief, knowing what they already believe and are disposed to believe, and having a plan to plant false leads. Moreover, one does not want to expose the real plans of your side in the process or if your process fails, and ideally one would like to leave the enemy in a state that it can be deceived again when the current deception is complete.

The military actually developed a bureaucracy to deceive, with experts in deception working at very high levels in the chain of command.

I wonder how much we can learn from the deceivers as to how to make decisions, and especially how to avoid self deception.

Final Comments on Tamerlane

My history book club met this week to discuss Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World by Justin Marozzi.

Timur inherited the approach used by Ghengis Khan of building a military by splitting the tribes, and incorporated elements from his constantly enlarging empire. He kept his military busy; successful wars of conquest resulted in a flow of loot that enriched the survivors of his campaigns. He executed bureaucrats of his empire that he found wanting.

He seems to have been pragmatic, adopting religious positions to meet the political needs of the moment, while enjoying wine and a large number of wives denied the religious Muslim. He invited cities to submit, offering them the choice of ruinous donations to his treasury if they did so and retaliation of massive executions, rape, enslavement, and property destruction if they resisted and lost; those who resisted inevitably lost.

One question that came up was why Timur's empire did not last as had the Roman empire. Clearly the answer would be complicated. I would note that the question seemed to imply that a lasting empire is better than a transient one. It made me wonder whether the Tartars would have agreed, since their culture not too long previously had been nomadic disdaining urban centers. Would Timur have chosen to establish a smaller empire that lasted, had he preceived the choice, or would he have chosen to go down in history as a conqueror comparable to Alexander and Ghengis Khan in the extent of his conquests?

A second question was whether Timur was evil. It was noted, for example, that the perception that enslaving people as evil is clearly modern, an ethical judgment that become common only in the 19th century. In Timur's time, mass executions, rape and even the murder of little children might have been regarded differently by the average man, inured to killing animals and early death of his friends and family, than they do today. Still, if a "pragmatic" policy of deliberately inflicting such destruction on city after city is not "evil", then what good is the word?

Sotomayor will add diversity to the Supreme Court

It has long been intuitively obvious that group decisions are usually better than individual decisions, and now psychologists are documenting the phenomenon in controlled experiments. The Supreme Court has nine members in part because it can be expected to make better decisions as a group than any Chief Justice would be expected to make alone.

I suggest that the count is likely to make better decisions if it is made up not only of legal experts, but of jurists who bring different views and experience to the court. Adding another woman to the current court (seven men and one woman) would seem likely to help. Adding a jurist who has experience as a prosecutor to a court without such experience would seem likely to help. Adding a Latina to a court that has never had a Latino member would seem likely to help. Adding a Justice who has experienced poverty to a court drawn largely from middle and upper economic classes may help. So Sonia Sotomayor may well have been right in suggesting that she would bring a diverse background to the court that would help it make better decisions more often.

Tamerlane

I have been reading Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World by Justin Marozzi. I think there has been a failure of imagination, either by the author of by me, possibly both.

War is terrible, but the wars of Tamerlane were even worse than most. The book did not convey the pain of those wars to me.

Think about the Tartar hordes. They traveled thousands of miles, away from home for years at a time, living in camps and on horseback, often hungry, always exhausted, and frequently hungry. Not only did they fight terrible battles with large numbers of casualties, they must have suffered from many diseases in a time before understanding of communicable disease, traveling in large numbers and living in unsanitary conditions. The policy of the Tartar military was, as I understand it, to separate the rank and file from their traditional tribal leaders and to organize ethnically mixed units so that these presumably simple, unlettered soldiers were denied their tribal support. The survivors would return with relative riches, but the likelihood of failure to survive to the end of a campaign must have been relatively high. How could the Tartars have been forced to serve, or how desperate must have been their homelife to make military service a desired alternative.

For the people conquered by Tamerlane's troops the situation must have been even worse. Before the arrival of the Tartar hordes their lives would have been pretty bad; medieval life was not great for most people. If they promptly surrendered to the Tartars they had to pay huge ransom plus continuing tributes, and were likely to suffer from the attentions of the conquering soldiers. If they fought, they were invariably defeated and then were killed in large numbers, the rest being robbed, raped and vandalized.

I know people descended from the Tartars and the Ottomans, and as far as I can see they are pretty much the same as people here and in the other countries in which I have lived and/or worked. They don't seem likely to be more immune from pain and suffering. I try but can not imagine myself as a Tartar soldier or a resident of one of the conquered cities -- the hardship beggers my imagination.

Unfortunately, reading Marozzi did not immediately convey that hardship, it took some independent thinking to recognize how hard were the lives of even the winners of Tamerlane's battles, and how desperate were the lives of those who lost.

Bradford's law

Bradford's law examines the frequency of relevant journal articles in groups of journals. It assumes that journals are ranked by relevance and that the frequency of relevant articles is given by a negative power law.

Suppose that in a month there are 12 articles of interest in those journals. Suppose further that in order to find another dozen articles of interest, the researcher would have to go to an additional 10 journals. Then that researcher's Bradford multiplier bm is 2 (ie 10/5). For each new dozen articles, that researcher will need to look in bm times as many journals. After looking in 5, 10, 20, 40, ... journals, most researchers quickly realize that there is little point in looking further.

The parameters of the distribution will differ for different researchers and/or fields, and presumably vary over time.

It would be interesting to explore the implications of this observed relationship for knowledge systems in developing nations. One wonders, for example, how good page rank algorithms and their like are in ordering sources for relevance.

The Death of Rajeev Motwani

US computer science professor Motwani, 47, was found dead in his swimming pool. A 1998 paper written by Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Motwani discussed the development of Google. "We have developed a global ranking of web pages called PageRank based on the link structure of the web that has properties that are useful for search and navigation … We have used PageRank to develop a novel search engine called Google, which also makes heavy use of anchor text," Prof. Motwani "was also an influential investor who backed the initial development of what turned out to be a number of successful hi-tech companies and initiatives, including the internent payment giant PayPal."

Where does U.S. support for Israel's governments stop?

I am not an expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I have consequently refrained from commenting on it until now. An article in the New York Times has broken that resolve. It reveals that there were discussions between the governments of Israel and the United States about Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as part of the process leading to "the roadmap" -- discussions which have not been made public. Apparently (unnamed) officials of the Netanyahu administration in Israel are holding that the Bush administration agreed to continuation of settlements in the West Bank as part of the deal for removal of the settlements in Gaza; (unnamed) former members of the Bush administration are holding that while the discussions took place in the context of natural growth of the West Bank settlements, they never reached a clear agreement as to what was acceptable.

The Israeli policies in the occupied territories seem to be the result of compromises made by factions of the Israeli political process. Surely there is a significant portion of the Israeli population which wishes to take and hold all the West Bank, while other factions are more than willing to give up land for peace.

Apparently every U.S. administration since the Nixon administration has opposed further settlements, and the Israeli government has allowed further settlements in each of those administrations. Now there is a large Israeli population in East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as a complex infrastructure to keep them out of harms way. The Israeli settlements and their security apparatus not only makes life difficult to Palestinians, but helps convince many of them that Israel will only be satisfied when they are driven out of their lands or deprived of any hope of political autonomy.

The Unites States greatly values its alliance with Israel, and has provided Israel with huge amounts of military and economic assistance. It has continued to do so over decades in which the Israeli government was ignoring our concerns that the settlements stop growing and more progress be made towards peace.

At what point do we separate our support for Israel from support for whichever party is in power in Israel at the moment. At what point does this country begin to flex the power that Israeli dependency on U.S. aid and trade provides to encourage Israeli government policies that we believe will lead to peace and to discourage Israeli government policies that appear to worsen the prospects for peace?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I suspect and hope it is being seriously debated within the Obama administration.

A New ALA Report

A new publication by the American Library Association reports:

The importance of libraries in American life continued to grow in 2008—and accelerated dramatically as the
national economy sank and people looked for sources of free, effective help in a time of crisis.

A Harris Poll released in September revealed that 68 percent of Americans have a library card, an increase of 5 percent since 2006. In-person visits increased 10 percent in the same period, and 76 percent of Americans had visited their local public library in the year preceding the survey, compared with 66 percent two years ago.
Online-visit data were even more remarkable: 41 percent of library card holders visited their library websites in the year before the poll, compared with 24 percent in 2006.

Unfortunately, in hard economic times, local governments will face budget constraints likely to be transferred to their libraries. As people need the libraries more, the libraries will have fewer resources.

"What Are the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years?"

Knowledge@Warton provides this list, in order of importance:

1. Internet, broadband, WWW (browser and html)
2. PC/laptop computers
3. Mobile phones
4. E-mail
5. DNA testing and sequencing/Human genome mapping
6. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
7. Microprocessors
8. Fiber optics
9. Office software (spreadsheets, word processors)
10. Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery (laparoscopy)
11. Open source software and services (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia)
12. Light emitting diodes
13. Liquid crystal display (LCD)
14. GPS systems
15. Online shopping/ecommerce/auctions (e.g., eBay)
16. Media file compression (jpeg, mpeg, mp3)
17. Microfinance
18. Photovoltaic Solar Energy
19. Large scale wind turbines
20. Social networking via the Internet
21. Graphic user interface (GUI)
22. Digital photography/videography
23. RFID and applications (e.g., EZ Pass)
24. Genetically modified plants
25. Bio fuels
26. Bar codes and scanners
27. ATMs
28. Stents
29. SRAM flash memory
30. Anti retroviral treatment for AIDS

Comment: Without microprocessors there would not be personal computers, and without personal computers and fiber optics, there would not be much value in the Internet. That is true also for ATMs I suppose.

The software commodity business, including Microsoft, is more important than the development of free and open source software, at least so far.

Generally, I guess I would put the evolution of the global information infrastructure as the most important technological development of the past 30 years.

I wonder whether there are not more important medical advances than anti-retrovirals. Perhaps some of the social innovations that are leading to more progress against the diseases of poverty are saving more lives than the anti-retrivurals. JAD

A world awash in money is going to be overwhelmed by debt

I am not an economist, but can the following be right:

The 1990's saw the creation of new financial mechanisms (derivatives) used in the absence of regulation to greatly expand the amount of money available to be lent out as compared with the capital available to cover bad debts. One assumes that increasing returns to ever more highly leveraged capital led to more capital invested in financial enterprises. The oil price spike in the late 1990's also resulted in a glut of money in the oil exporting states, which they must have lent and invested. So there should have been a glut of money, encouraging the developing nations to borrow. Lots of money to lend leads to low interest rates, leads to borrowing for relatively lower valued investments.

Now the nations of the world are borrowing like crazy to have the money to stimulate their economies. Trillions of dollars in borrowing should drive up interest rates. Developing countries which have borrowed to invest in low return projects will not have the ability to borrow even to invest in high return projects!

It seems we have gone through something like this after the oil shocks of the 1970s.