Category: Economic Growth

“I’m Sick of It, I’m Leaving” Are First Words of Children in Primitive Village Routinely Eating Grubs and Starch Tasting Like “Gummy Mucous”

(p. C9) As she tended soldiers during the Crimean War, a British nurse found herself appalled by the wretched, vermin-infested conditions at the army’s hospital in Istanbul. She began collecting figures showing the devastating effects of the filth and the dramatic benefits of the sanitary improvements she implemented. Her presentation on the need for cleaner care facilities, published in 1858, led to reforms that ultimately saved millions of lives and increased life expectancy in the U.K. Florence Nightingale, it turns out, was a pioneering data scientist.

Data, when used to reveal the value of hospital hygiene or the harm of tobacco smoke, can be a vital force for good, as Tim Harford reminds us in “The Data Detective.”

. . .

Imprecise and inconsistent definitions are one source of confusion.  . . .  . . . “infant mortality,” a key data point for public health, varies depending on the specific time in fetal development when the line is drawn between a miscarriage and a tragically premature birth.

. . .

To learn from data, it’s essential to present it well. For her analysis after the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale created one of the first infographics, using shrewdly designed diagrams to tell a memorable story. From the outset, she regarded visually compelling data displays as indispensable to making her arguments.

. . .

An authentically open mind can make a difference, Mr. Harford says, noting that the top forecasters tend to be not experts but earnest learners who constantly take in new data while challenging and refining their hypotheses. Data, Mr. Harford concludes, can illuminate and inform as well as distract and deceive. It’s often maddeningly hard to know the difference, but it would be unforgivable not to try.

For the full review see:

Wade Davis. “To Hear a Dying Tongue.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019 [sic]): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 9, 2019 [sic], and has the title “‘A Death in the Rainforest’ Review: To Hear a Dying Tongue.”)

The book under review is:

Kulick, Don. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2019.

In Walt Disney’s Disneyland Youth Could “Savor the Challenge and Promise of the Future”

(p. 12) President Dwight D. Eisenhower once praised Walt Disney for his “genius as a creator of folklore.” When Disney died in 1966, the line made it into his obituary, evidence of its accuracy. Folklore, defined broadly, is an oral tradition that stretches across generations. It tells people who they are, how they got here and how they should live in the future. The company Disney created appointed itself keeper of these traditions for Americans, spinning up fresh tales and (more often) deftly repackaging old ones to appeal to a new century.

It started with Mickey Mouse, but as his company turns 100, Disney’s legacy — advanced in hundreds of films and shorts and shows, mass-produced tie-in merchandise, marvelous technical advancements, gargantuan theme parks around the world — was the production of a modern shared language, a set of reference points instantly recognizable to almost everyone, and an encouragement to dream out loud about a utopian future. Walt Disney was a man who gazed backward and forward: speaking at the opening of Disneyland in 1955, he proclaimed: “Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”  . . .

Disney told stories of folk heroes (Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan), princes and princesses, and even, occasionally, a mouse, all while leading the pack on ever-shifting technologies. (He was, among other things, the first major movie producer to make a TV show.) A sense of optimism ruled Disney’s ethos, built on homemade mythologies. The lessons of his stories were simple, uplifting and distinctly American: believe in yourself, believe in your dreams, don’t let anyone make you feel bad for being you, be your own hero and, most of all, don’t be afraid to wish upon a star. Fairy tales and legends are often disquieting, but once cast in a Disney light they became soft and sweet, their darker and less comforting lessons re-engineered to fit the Disney ideal. It was a distinctly postwar vision of the world.

And we ate it up, and we exported it, and we wanted to be part of it, too.

For the full commentary see:

Alissa Wilkinson. “The Wonderful World of Disney?” The New York Times, Arts&Leisure Section (Sunday, December 17, 2023): 12 & 14.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Dec. 18, 2023, and has the title “Disney Is a Language. Do We Still Speak It?”)

Growth-Impeding Red Tape Especially Hurts Small and Midsize Firms

(p. B1) When Markus Wingens created the position of “energy manager” for the metal heat-treatment company he runs in southwestern Germany, his idea was to increase energy efficiency and attract customers interested in sustainability.

But the job has become as much a task of filling out paperwork and studying seemingly ever-changing laws as it is ensuring that the firm, Technotherm Heat Treatment Group, is meeting energy requirements.

Last year, four new laws and 14 amendments to existing ones governing energy use took effect, each bringing fresh demands for data to be reported and forms to be submitted — in many cases to prove the same standards that the company has already been certified as reaching since 2012, Mr. Wingens said.

“We have the Renewable Energy Act, we have the Energy Efficiency Act, we have the Energy Financing Act, and each comes with an administrative burden,” he said. “It’s madness.”

Freedom from red tape has been a rallying cry for farmers from Poland to Portugal at recent protests against European Union laws and policies. Indeed, the burden of bureaucracy is a general complaint of corporate executives across the globe.

But nowhere is the issue more pressing than in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, which is facing anemic growth of no more than 0.2 percent this year. In a report last month, the International Monetary Fund called “too much red tape” one of the major impediments to reviving the German economy.

For example, it takes 120 days to obtain a business license in Germany — more than double the average in other Western economies. Germany also lags behind the rest of the European Union in the digitization of government services, still requiring written forms for certain tax refunds and building permits.

. . .

(p. B2) German companies spend 64 million hours every year filling out forms to feed the country’s 375 official databases, according to industry estimates. When the Stuttgart chamber of commerce asked its 175,000 members to name their biggest challenges, red tape topped the list.

. . .

The red tape drain on time and resources is felt especially by small and midsize firms — those with fewer than 500 employees and annual revenue below €50 million (about $54 million) — that are the backbone of the German economy.

These businesses often lack in-house legal departments dedicated to filing audits, recording statistics and deciphering which information is wanted by which authorities — the European, federal, state and local governments.

. . .

“In Germany, we have regulations about handing over business cards at business meetings and whether it’s still allowed,” [Andreas Kiontke, a lawyer who works with the Stuttgart chamber of commerce] said.

For the full story see:

Melissa Eddy. “German Business Is Tangled in Red Tape.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 15, 2024): B1-B2.

(Note: ellipses added. The bracketed information on Andreas Kiontke is from a couple of paragraphs earlier.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 9, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Ending the “License Raj” in India Allowed Economic Growth and the Creation of Earned Entrepreneurial Wealth

(p. A8) The younger son of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, is set to wed his fiancée in Mumbai on Friday, the finale of a monthslong extravaganza that signaled the arrival of the unapologetic Indian billionaire on the global stage — and introduced the world to the country’s Gilded Age.

. . .

Kavil Ramachandran, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Indian School of Business, said there were more billionaires with fatter wallets because India has sustained a high growth rate for more than two decades. That’s created a deep domestic market for goods and services, and pushed Indian companies to pursue new businesses, pairing opportunity with ambition.

“It’s a consequence of rapid growth and entrepreneurialism,” Mr. Ramachandran said.

. . .

India has come a long way from its socialist origins. Until 1990, the country operated under strict government supervision and protectionist policies. Companies could only run after procuring multiple permits and licenses from the government, leading to the name “License Raj” — a play on the term British Raj, which referred to colonial rule.

Once India opened up its economy after a series of reforms, some domestic companies embraced the logic of free markets while remaining family-run and tightly controlled, diversifying into new businesses.

. . .

Many Indians see in Mr. Ambani’s staggering rise in stature and wealth a version of the India they want: a country that doesn’t make a play for attention but demands it. Some even feel pride that his son’s wedding has attracted such global attention. To them, India’s poverty is a predictable fact, such opulence is not.

“Based on the level of the Ambanis’ wealth, the wedding is perfect,” said Mani Mohan Parmar, a 64-year-old resident from Mumbai.

“Even the common man here in India spends more than his capacity on a wedding,” Ms. Parmar said. “So it’s nothing too much if we talk about Ambani. He has so much money due to God’s grace, so why shouldn’t he spend it by his choice?”

For the full story see:

Anupreeta Das. “India’s New Gilded Age on Display at a Wedding.” The New York Times (Monday, June 15, 2024): A8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 12, 2023, and has the title “A Wedding Puts India’s Gilded Age on Lavish Display.”)

Human Ancestor 1.45-Million Years Ago Was a Victim of Cannibalism

Modern capitalism is sometimes criticized as inferior to a long-ago golden age. A past golden age is a myth. Human ancestors suffered from cannibalism and other violence.

(p. D3) In today’s scholar-eat-scholar world of paleoanthropology, claims of cannibalism are held to exacting standards of evidence. Which is why more than a few eyebrows were raised earlier this week over a study in Scientific Reports asserting that a 1.45-million-year-old fragment of shin bone — found 53 years ago in northern Kenya, and sparsely documented — was an indication that our human ancestors not only butchered their own kind, but were probably, as an accompanying news release put it, “chowing down” on them, too.

The news release described the finding as the “oldest decisive evidence” of such behavior. “The information we have tells us that hominids were likely eating other hominids at least 1.45 million years ago,” Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and first author of the paper, said in the news release.

. . .

Dr. Pobiner, an authority on cut marks, had spied the half-tibia fossil six summers ago while examining hominid bones housed in a Nairobi museum vault. She was inspecting the fossil for bite marks when she noticed 11 thin slashes, all angled in the same direction and clustered around a spot where a calf muscle would have attached to the bone — the meatiest chunk of the lower leg, Dr. Pobiner said in an interview.

She sent molds of the scars to Michael Pante, a paleoanthropologist at Colorado State University and an author on the study, who made 3-D scans and compared the shape of the incisions with a database of 898 tooth, trample and butchery marks. The analysis indicated that nine of the markings were consistent with the kind of damage made by stone tools. Dr. Pobiner said that the placement and orientation of the cuts implied that flesh had been stripped from the bone. From those observations she extrapolated her cannibalism thesis.

“From what we can tell, this hominin leg bone is being treated like other animals, which we presume are being eaten based on lots of butchery marks on them,” Dr. Pobiner said. “It makes the most sense to presume that this butchery was also done for the purpose of eating.”

. . .

. . ., clear proof of systematic cannibalism among hominids has emerged in the fossil record. The earliest confirmation was uncovered in 1994 in the Gran Dolina cave site of Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains. The remains of 11 individuals who lived some 800,000 years ago displayed distinctive signs of having been eaten, with bones displaying cuts, fractures where they had been cracked open to expose the marrow and human tooth marks.

Among our other evolutionary cousins now confirmed to have practiced cannibalism are Neanderthals, with whom humans overlapped, and mated, for thousands of years. A study published in 2016 reported that Neanderthal bones found in a cave in Goyet, Belgium, and dated to roughly 40,000 B.C. show signs of being butchered, split and used to sharpen the edges of stone tools. Patterns of bone-breakage in Homo antecessor, considered the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, suggest that cannibalism goes back a half-million years or more.

For the full story see:

Franz Lidz. “For Paleoanthropology, Cannibalism Can Be Clickbait.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 11, 2024): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 3, 2023, and has the title “Cannibalism, or ‘Clickbait’ for Paleoanthropology?”)

The study in Scientific Reports mentioned above is:

Pobiner, Briana, Michael Pante, and Trevor Keevil. “Early Pleistocene Cut Marked Hominin Fossil from Koobi Fora, Kenya.” Scientific Reports 13, no. 1 (2023): 9896.

Starlink Gives Remote Tribes Voice, Information, and Fast Help in Emergencies

(p. 12) . . . Starlink, . . . has quickly dominated the satellite-internet market worldwide by providing service once unthinkable in . . . remote areas. SpaceX has done so by launching 6,000 low-orbiting Starlink satellites — roughly 60 percent of all active spacecraft — to deliver speeds faster than many home internet connections to just about anywhere on Earth, including the Sahara, the Mongolian grasslands and tiny Pacific islands.

Business is soaring. Mr. Musk recently announced that Starlink had surpassed three million customers across 99 countries. Analysts estimate that annual sales are up roughly 80 percent from last year, to about $6.6 billion.

. . .

. . . perhaps Starlink’s most transformative effect is in areas once largely out of the internet’s reach, like the Amazon. There are now 66,000 active contracts in the Brazilian Amazon, touching 93 percent of the region’s legal municipalities. That has opened new job and education opportunities for those who live in the forest. It has also given illegal loggers and miners in the Amazon a new tool to communicate and evade authorities.

One Marubo leader, Enoque Marubo (all Marubo use the same surname), 40, said he immediately saw Starlink’s potential. After spending years outside the forest, he said he believed the internet could give his people new autonomy. With it, they could communicate better, inform themselves and tell their own stories.

Last year, he and a Brazilian activist recorded a 50-second video seeking help getting Starlink from potential benefactors. He wore his traditional Marubo headdress and sat in the maloca. A toddler wearing a necklace of animal teeth sat nearby.

They sent it off. Days later, they heard back from a woman in Oklahoma.

. . .

Allyson Reneau’s LinkedIn page describes her as a space consultant, keynote speaker, author, pilot, equestrian, humanitarian, chief executive, board director and mother of 11 biological children. In person, she says she makes most of her money coaching gymnastics and renting houses near Norman, Okla.

. . .

Enoque was asking for 20 Starlink antennas, which would cost roughly $15,000, to transform life for his tribe.

. . .

[Allyson Reneau said] “One tool would change everything in their life. Health care, education, communication, protection of the forest.”

Ms. Reneau said she bought the antennas with her own money and donations from her children.

. . .

The internet was an immediate sensation.

. . .

They spend lots of time on WhatsApp. There, leaders coordinate between villages and alert the authorities to health issues and environmental destruction. Marubo teachers share lessons with students in different villages. And everyone is in much closer contact with faraway family and friends.

To Enoque, the biggest benefit has been in emergencies. A venomous snake bite can require swift rescue by helicopter. Before the internet, the Marubo used amateur radio, relaying a message between several villages to reach the authorities. The internet made such calls instantaneous. “It’s already saved lives,” he said.

For the full story see:

Jack Nicas and Victor Moriyama. “The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes of Brazil.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, June 2, 2024): 1 & 12-13.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed words, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 21 [sic], 2024, and has the title “The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes.”)

California Politicians Ban Test of Sprayed Seawater That Might Reverse Global Warming

Some environmentalists are only willing to cool the planet by the pain of less consumption.

(p. A14) Elected leaders in Alameda, Calif., voted early on Wednesday [June 5, 2024] to stop scientists from testing a device that might one day be used to artificially cool the planet, overruling city staff members who had found the experiment posed no danger.

. . .

The test involved spraying tiny sea-salt particles across the flight deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Hornet, docked in Alameda in San Francisco Bay. Versions of that device could eventually be used to spray the material skyward, making clouds brighter so that they reflect more sunlight away from Earth. Scientists say that could help to cool the planet and to fight the effects of global warming.

. . .

“The chemical components of the saltwater solution (which is similar to seawater) being sprayed are naturally occurring in the environment,” the report said. Staff recommended that the City Council allow the experiment to continue, . . .

. . .

Some environmentalists oppose research aimed at so-called climate intervention, also known as solar geoengineering. They argue that such technology carries the risk of unintended consequences, and also takes money and attention away from efforts to reduce the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which is the underlying cause of climate change.

For the full story see:

Soumya Karlamangla and Christopher Flavelle. “Leaders in California City Halt Cloud-Brightening Test.” The New York Times (Thursday, June 6, 2024): A14.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 5, 2024, and has the title “California City Leaders End Cloud-Brightening Test, Overruling Staff.”)

Europe’s Regulations Reduce Economic Dynamism

(p. A23) Growth and dynamism: In 1960 the E.U. 28 — the 27 countries currently in the European Union, plus Britain — accounted for 36.3 percent of global gross domestic product. By 2020 it had fallen to 22.4 percent. By the end of the century it is projected to fall to just under 10 percent. By contrast, the United States has maintained a roughly consistent share — around a quarter — of global G.D.P. since the Kennedy administration.

Think of any leading-edge industry — artificial intelligence, microchips, software, robotics, genomics — and ask yourself (with a few honorable exceptions), where’s the European Microsoft, Nvidia or OpenAI?

. . .

How much state protection, in social welfare and economic regulation, are Europe’s aging voters willing to forgo for the sake of creating a more dynamic economy for a dwindling number of young people?

For the full commentary, see:

Bret Stephens. “This D-Day, Europe Needs to Resolve to Get Its Act Together.” The New York Times (Wednesday, June 5, 2024): A23.

(Note: ellipsis added; bold font in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 4, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Species Shifting Their Range Due to Climate Change May Have Enabled the “Playing Around With Resources” That Invented Farming

(p. D6) In the 1990s, archaeologists largely concluded that farming in the Fertile Crescent began in Jordan and Israel, a region known as the southern Levant. “The model was that everything started there, and then everything spread out from there, including maybe the people,” said Melinda A. Zeder, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

But in recent years, Dr. Zeder and other archaeologists have overturned that consensus. Their research suggests that people were inventing farming at several sites in the Fertile Crescent at roughly the same time. In the Zagros Mountains of Iran, for example, Dr. Zeder and her colleagues have found evidence of the gradual domestication of wild goats over many centuries around 10,000 years ago.

People may have been cultivating plants earlier than believed, too.

In the 1980s, Dani Nadel, then at Hebrew University, and his colleagues excavated a 23,000-year-old site on the shores of the Sea of Galilee known as Ohalo II. It consisted of half a dozen brush huts. Last year, Dr. Nadel co-authored a study showing that one of the huts contained 150,000 charred seeds and fruits, including many types, such as almonds, grapes and olives, that would later become crops. A stone blade found at Ohalo II seemed to have been used as a sickle to harvest cereals. A stone slab was used to grind the seeds. It seems clear the inhabitants were cultivating wild plants long before farming was thought to have begun.

“We got fixated on the very few things we just happened to see preserved in the archaeological record, and we got this false impression that this was an abrupt change,” Dr. Zeder said. “Now we really understand there was this long period where they’re playing around with resources.”

Many scientists have suggested that humans turned to agriculture under duress. Perhaps the climate of the Near East grew harsh, or perhaps the hunter-gatherer population outstripped the supply of wild foods.

But “playing around with resources” is not the sort of thing people do in times of desperation. Instead, Dr. Zeder argues, agriculture came about as climatic changes shifted the ranges of some wild species of plants and animals into the Near East.

Many different groups began experimenting with ways of producing extra food, which eventually enabled them to start a new way of life: settling down in more stable social groups.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “The First Farmers.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 18, 2016 [sic]): D1 & D6.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 17, 2016 [sic], and has the title “How the First Farmers Changed History.”)

The 2015 study co-authored by Dani Nadel and mentioned above is:

Snir, Ainit, Dani Nadel, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski, Yoel Melamed, Marcelo Sternberg, Ofer Bar-Yosef, and Ehud Weiss. “The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long before Neolithic Farming.” PLOS ONE 10, no. 7 (July 22, 2015): e0131422.

As Freedom Left Hong Kong, So Did Hundreds of Billions of Dollars and 100,000 Citizens

(p. B1) This summer, when Hong Kong’s stock market rout seemed to have no end in sight, the city’s financial chief, Paul Chan, jumped into action, creating a task force to inject confidence into a market that was being pummeled by global investors wary of China.

Hong Kong cut taxes on trading, and Mr. Chan went on a roadshow to Europe and the United States, promising measures to “let investors feel optimistic about the outlook.” Investors were anything but sanguine, however, and the city’s stock exchange is among the world’s worst-performing stock markets this year.

. . .

Hundreds of billions of dollars flowed out this year as money managers and pension funds reduced their holdings in Hong Kong, which has long been a gateway for foreign investors wanting to put money into mainland China. The outflows were largely driven by an economic downturn in China and mounting pressure on American investors to sell their (p. B3) exposure to Chinese companies.

. . .

A former British colony, Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 with a pledge that it would maintain a high degree of self-governance under a policy called “one country, two systems.” For two decades, this allowed Hong Kong to define itself as unique and distinct from the rest of China, while offering financial access to the world’s second largest economy.

But after citywide protests in 2019, Beijing imposed the national security law, which has silenced political debate and stifled civic activity.

More than 100,000 residents have left Hong Kong over the last few years, in part because of the security law and tough pandemic restrictions. Many young Hong Kong professionals who are still there have expressed a desire to leave, making it a challenge to recruit the talent that has helped the city function as a financial center.

Once a major hub for Wall Street banks, Hong Kong had a drought of initial public offerings this year. Companies raised the lowest amount of money since 2001, resulting in layoffs at financial institutions citywide.

Many international companies have stopped hiring for new positions in Hong Kong. With less money coming into the exchange and fewer transactions, dozens of brokerages have also closed.

For the full story, see:

Alexandra Stevenson. “Hong Kong Stock Market Ends in Loss For 4th Year.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 29, 2023, and has the title “Hong Kong Stocks Plunge to Losses for 4th Straight Year.”)

Communist China’s Restriction of Citizens’ Freedom Shows Its “Fragility”

(p. A8) HONG KONG—Prominent Pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow said she was exiling herself in Canada after getting her passport back from police in return for taking a patriotic trip to China, an exchange that sheds light on Hong Kong’s efforts to re-educate political opponents.

. . .

When Chow returned to Hong Kong, she said, she was instructed to write a letter thanking the police for the trip and enabling her to understand the great development of the motherland.

. . .

“I have never denied China’s economic development,” Chow wrote on Instagram. “But how can such a powerful country send people who fight for democracy to prison, restrict their freedom of movement, and even require them to go to mainland China and visit patriotic exhibitions in exchange for their passports? Is this not a kind of fragility.”

For the full story, see:

Elaine Yu. “Activist Flees Hong Kong After China Trip.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, December 5, 2023): A8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 4, 2023, and has the title “Activist Flees Hong Kong After Re-Education Trip to China.”)