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I'm returning to the question of whether American values have changed:  specifically, whether there's been a move towards money and careers and away from personal relationships.  Following a suggestion from Claude Fischer, I looked at the World Values Survey.  Starting in 1990, it has a series of questions asking how important various things are in your life:  very important, rather important, not very important, or not at all important.  People are asked about family, friends, leisure time, politics, work and religion.  The average ratings in the United States:Religion and work have clearly declined, while the others don't show any clear trend.  In 1990, family ranked first, then friends and work almost tied, then leisure and religion almost tied, then politics far behind.  Now it's family, friends, leisure, work, religion, politics.   Whatever you think about the decline in ratings of religion and work, people aren't turning away from personal relationships.Part of the reason I am interested in this issue is that many people say that the problems in American politics today reflect problems in society.  There are many variants of this analysis, but the idea that people have become more focused on themselves is a popular one.   Nicholas Kristof offered another one  the other day--that they result from stagnation or decline in working-class standards of living--so while I'm at it I'll look at his evidence.  Kristof says:  "Average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a metric for blue-collar earnings, were actually higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they were this year."  He doesn't link to his source, just says it's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I tried to reconstruct it from the Federal Reserve Economic Data.  He's right--in fact, average weekly nonsupervisory earnings are lower then they were in 1965.  There's been an increase in part-time work since the `1960s, which is related to increased labor force participation by women, so I also show the figures for real hourly wages.  They give a more optimistic picture, but still say that there's been essentially no progress since 1973.  However, there are actually two offsetting periods of change:  a decline from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s and a pretty steady increase since that time.  So any reaction to economic distress should have occurred in the 1980s or 1990s, not in the last few years.  Of course, these figures aren't definitive, but they're what Kristof uses.So what is the problem?  I agree with another New York Times columnist, David French, that it's primarily one  of political leadership.  Of course, that raises the question of why the quality of political leadership has declined.  I've had several posts that touch on that issue, but haven't addressed it directly--I'll do that in the near future.

 In my last post, I said that I didn't think that contemporary political problems in the United States are a reflection of social problems (the loss of meaningful connections) or economic problems (lack of growth in working-class standards of living), but of failures of political leadership.  But that raises the question of why political leadership has become worse. One part of the answer is a combination of American political institutions and changes in the nature of parties.  The institutions worked reasonably well when parties were loosely organized and not very ideological, but when the parties are ideological, they create bad incentives for politicians.  One reason is the dominance of the two-party system means that negative partisanship can be at least as effective as trying to make a positive appeal.   Another is that the complexity of the system means that there are lots of ways to try to manipulate the rules to your benefit.  Complexity also means that there are opportunities to take a symbolic stand without worrying about the consequences--you can leave it to someone else (often the courts) to do the "responsible" thing.  An example of that is the Texas v. Pennsylvania suit, which was supported by most Republican attorneys general and members of the House of Representatives:  they knew that the Supreme Court would decline to hear it, so it wouldn't really make any difference but they would get credit with the "base."  But all of these have the effect of making the public more discontented with politics, and therefore more likely to support outsiders who promise to cut through the partisan wrangling but usually make it worse.  These considerations apply to both parties, but there is a difference between the way that they've responded.  Republicans were more vigorous in playing "constitutional hardball" even before the 2020 election.  Also, there's a difference in their treatment of extreme positions.  Few Democratic politicians expressed support for "defund the police," and those who did tried to say that they didn't mean it literally, they just wanted to move some resources from policing to social service.  But in every race for the Republican presidential nomination, some candidates will propose abolishing the IRS, or several cabinet agencies, cutting the federal workforce in half, etc..  Another way to look at it is that it's fairly common for Democratic politicians or pundits to say that the party needs to move to the center on certain issues, but Republicans almost never say that--even proposals for reform are presented as something uniquely conservative, not as moves to the center.  I think that the explanation for this difference is that American conservatism sees itself as being in opposition to the "elites."  William F. Buckley is generally agreed to be the founder of the modern conservative movement, and his first two books were not about New Deal policies, or labor union power, or policy towards the Soviet Union, but about Yale University and "McCarthy and his enemies"--that is, both were directed against what he called "our disintegrated ruling elite."  That sense of alienation has grown as "elites" have moved towards the left.  Consequently, conservative politicians don't feel much obligation to be "responsible"--they are just interested in expressing opposition.  

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Dr Matthew Agarwala, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, tells Channel 4 News that reversing the trend in biodiversity loss will be the defining economic challenge of our generation.
The post Biodiversity is in crisis appeared first on Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

China's economic reality, until recently, was nothing short of extraordinary. The nation's annual economic output soared from under US$500 billion to US$18 trillion between 1992 and 2022, with years of double-digit growth pushing annual GDP ...

This week we're looking at the current health crisis in the UK. What is going wrong with the NHS? Should the state intervene more or less in public health?

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The events in Niger over the past few months have been alarming to watch. What began as a military coup now risks spiraling into a wider war in West Africa, with a group of juntas lining up to fight against a regional force threatening to invade and restore democratic rule in Niamey.The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the "continuous deterioration of the security situation" plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel "have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO's hazardous adventure in Libya." Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same. The episode thus reminds us of an iron rule of foreign interference: Even military interventions considered successful at the time have unintended effects that cascade long after the missions formally end.The 2011 Libyan adventure saw the U.S., French and British governments launch an initially limited humanitarian intervention to protect civilians that quickly morphed into a regime change operation, unleashing a torrent of violence and extremism across the region.There was little dissent at the time. As Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's forces battled anti-government rebels, politicians, the press and anti-Gaddafi Libyans painted an overly simplistic picture of unarmed protesters and other civilians facing imminent if not already unfolding genocide. Only years later would a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report publicly determine, echoing the conclusions of other post-mortems, that charges of an impending civilian massacre were "not supported by the available evidence" and that "the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element" that carried out numerous atrocities of its own.Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. "I love the military ... but they always seem to find reasons why you can't do something rather than why you can," complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka said it would be "an important humanitarian step." The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who's who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that "inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later."Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, "limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion" could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that "the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion." (Despite Gaddafi's ouster, the Syrian civil war continues to this day, and its leader Bashar al-Assad is still in power).Likewise, columnist Anne-Marie Slaughter urged Clinton to think of Kosovo and Rwanda, where "even a small deployment could have stopped the killing," and insisted U.S. intervention would "change the image of the United States overnight." In one email, she dismissed counter-arguments:"People will say that we will then get enmeshed in a civil war, that we cannot go into another Muslim country, that Gaddafi is well armed, there will be a million reasons NOT to act. But all our talk about global responsibility and leadership, not to mention respect for universal values, is completely empty if we stand by and watch this happen with no response but sanctions."Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter ("bravo!"; "No-fly! Brava! You did it!"), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin ("your efforts ... will be long remembered"). Pro-war voices like Pletka and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz immediately began moving the goalposts by discussing Gaddafi's ouster, suggesting escalation to prevent a U.S. "defeat," and criticizing those saying Libya wasn't a vital U.S. interest.NATO's undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn't regime change, while others said Gaddafi "needs to go." It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons' letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a "limited intervention" that wouldn't involve regime change, to professing "I don't see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going."After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. "There is no mission creep," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.The episode was considered a triumph. "We came, we saw, he died," Clinton joked to a reporter upon hearing the news. Analysts talked about the credit owed to Obama for the "success." "As Operation Unified Protector comes to a close, the alliance and its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done," wrote then-U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Ivo Daalder and then-Supreme Allied Commander in Europe James Stavridis in October 2011. "Most of all, they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change." That same month, Clinton traveled to Tripoli and declared "Libya's victory" as she flashed a peace sign."It was the right thing to do," Obama told the UN, presenting the operation as a model that the United States was "proud to play a decisive role" in. Soon discussion moved to exporting this model elsewhere, like Syria. Hailing the UN for having "at last lived up to its duty to prevent mass atrocities," then-Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth called to "extend the human rights principles embraced for Libya to other people in need," citing other parts of the Middle East, the Ivory Coast, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.Others disagreed. "Libya has given [the mandate of 'responsibility to protect'] a bad name," complained Indian UN Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, echoing the sentiments of other diplomats angry that a UN mandate for protecting civilians had been stretched to regime change.It soon became clear why. Gaddafi's toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the "Tesco" of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi's ouster "opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem" across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.Things are scarcely better in "liberated" Libya today. The resulting power vacuum produced exactly what Iraq War critics predicted: a protracted (and forever close-to-reigniting) civil war involving rival governments, neighboring states using them as proxies, hundreds of militias and violent jihadists. Those included the Islamic State, one of several extremist groups that made real Clinton's pre-intervention fear of Libya "becoming a giant Somalia." By the 2020 ceasefire, hundreds of civilians had been killed in Libya, nearly 900,000 needed humanitarian assistance, half of them women and children, and the country had become a lucrative hotspot for slave trading.Today, Libyans are unambiguously worse off than before NATO intervention. Ranked 53rd in the world and first in Africa by the 2010 UN Human Development Index, the country had dropped fifty places by 2019. Everything from GDP per capita and the number of fully functioning health care facilities to access to clean water and electricity sharply declined. Far from improving U.S. standing in the Middle East, most of the Arab world opposed the NATO operation by early 2012.Only five years later, Clinton, once eager to claim credit, distanced herself from the decision to intervene. "It didn't work," Obama admitted bluntly as he prepared to leave office, publicly deeming the country "a mess" and, privately, "a shit show." The New York Times collected the damning verdicts of those involved: "We made it worse"; "Gaddafi is laughing at all of us from his grave"; "by God, if we can't succeed here, it should really make one think about embarking on these kind of efforts."Libya offers numerous cautionary tales about well-meaning U.S. military interventions, from the way they rapidly escalate beyond their initial goals and limited nature, to their penchant for unforeseen knock-on effects that are hard to control and snowball disastrously. As Obama's "success" in the country now threatens to spark a regional war in Niger that could even drag the United States into the fighting, it should remind us that the consequences of military action and rejection of negotiated solutions last much longer than, and look very different years after, the initial period of triumphalism.

Into mid-2011, the world's worst food crisis is being felt in East Africa, in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.

Despite successive failed rains, the crisis has been criticized as avoidable and man-made. This is because the situation had been predicted many months before by an international early warning system. Both the international community and governments in the region have been accused of doing very little in the lead up to this crisis. In addition, high food prices have forced food out of the reach of many people, while local conflicts exacerbate the situation.

As the international organization Oxfam describes: 12 million people are in dire need of food, clean water, and basic sanitation. Loss of life on a massive scale is a very real risk, and the crisis is set to worsen over the coming months, particularly for pastoralist communities.

This page also presents news coverage from Inter Press Service on this crisis.

Read full article: East Africa Food Crisis 2011

[…] published here for […]

By KIM BELLARD These are not happy times in America. Now, I'm not thinking about the increasing cultural wars, the endless political bickering, the troubles in the Med-East or Ukraine, the loomingContinue reading...

Winter droughts and delayed snowfall are impeding grass regrowth in high-altitude grazing sites in Nepal's Eastern Rukum district, endangering the local sheep population and forcing shepherds to leave profession.

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Blocked streets, occupied airports, and a Brandenburg Gate sprayed with paint: Civil disobedience is making a spectacular comeback.

 The government's decision to award about 100 new licences for offshore oil and gas drilling is a welcome move towards addressing the UK's energy shortfall, and the announcement of a major carbon capture initiative is a significant step on the road to developing technological solutions to address environmental concerns.The UK's energy problem is that it needs abundant and affordable energy, while simultaneously meeting environmental concerns. The government wishes to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, while building up renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, and building up non-polluting nuclear power.  There is a problem, in that while renewables are reducing in cost, they are still much more expensive than their fossil fuel alternatives, especially due to Britain's lack of storage capacity.Although people publicly express support for policies designed to reduce the energy environmental impact, their revealed preferences differ from their expressed preferences. It seems that they still want affordable transport, and the ability to heat their homes in winter and cool them in summer. This suggests that promotion of, and reliance on, behavioural change will not be sufficient to address the problem, and that more attention should be paid to increasing supply, rather than to reducing demand.The energy supply can be a diversified mix of different sources. This diversification can include a combination of renewable energy, nuclear power, and cleaner fossil fuel technologies such as natural gas with carbon capture and storage. By diversifying its energy sources, the country can enhance energy security while reducing environmental impacts.It makes environmental sense to phase out the most polluting sources first. Coal pollutes more than oil, which pollutes more than gas. This suggests that gas could be the bridge to maintain the supply until lower cost renewables can be developed and rolled out alongside nuclear power.Increasing the nuclear proportion of the energy mix is important, since it is clean, reliable, and not dependent on foreign suppliers. The UK nuclear proportion is 15%, compared to France's 75%. Since nuclear power plants, even SMRs, take time and great expense to plan, build and go on-line, gas is the obvious bridge until the UK reaches that point.There is a treasure trove of natural gas beneath us, and the technology in the shape of hydraulic fracturing to access it. The government caved in before environmental lobbyists and set the tremor limit far too low to make it viable. Any tremor over 0.5ML [local magnitude] on the Richter scale requires fracking to stop and testing and monitoring to commence. Some commentators have pointed out that this corresponds to a lorry passing by in the street, or a cat jumping off a wardrobe in the next room.Dr Brian Baptie, of the British Geological Survey (BGS), and Dr Ben Edwards, of Liverpool University, have argued that the limit could be raised safely to 1.5ML, which, they said, was unlikely to be felt. Politically, this could be implemented if compensation were given to households in the area any time it might be exceeded. It could be a cash sum, or a reduction in fuel bills.Development of extraction technology should run in parallel to carbon sequestration technology, with awards available for those developing practical techniques for achieving this. In addition, research should be instigated to explore the suggestion that some geologists have made that it might be possible to access parts of the gas field offshore, or from the Isle of Mann, which would probably welcome the extra jobs and opportunities it would bring.Energy storage has a role to play in handling the intermittent nature of some renewable sources, and a programme to encourage firms to develop the appropriate technologies is yet another item in a co-ordinated, multi-source strategy for ensuring a continued supply of affordable and reliable energy into the future. The use of an interconnector, such as that proposed by Aquind, to link Britain and France, offers the UK 5% of its demand in clean nuclear energy, and the possibility of selling to the European electrical market. It could help achieve our energy needs - if it is permitted to be built.