Vaccine apartheid

A week ago, I blogged about the insanity of state governments here in the US falling over each other with incentives so that residents in their states will get themselves the Covid vaccine.  Incentives to get a free vaccine that could be the difference between life and death.  How insane is it to offer a million dollar raffle in order to lure the hesitant crowd to the needle!

Many people in many countries around the world would gladly pay to get the vaccine into their deltoids. (Why always into the arm muscle?  Click here to know why.)  Yet, here, we have to offer people pizza, beer, and even million dollar lotteries!

Poor people in poor countries are screwed because they might not get the vaccines until 2023.  Yes, you read that correctly.  2023.  Most covid vaccines going to high- and middle-income countries.

According to Nature, as of mid-March, those countries had secured more than six billion out of 8.6 billion doses. Less than a week later, the Times reported that “86 percent of shots” that went into arms across the globe were “administered in high- and upper-middle-income countries.”

Why should we care? "simple humanity and simple biology."

If left unchecked, the loss of human life for families and societies worldwide will be staggering. Viruses are international travellers, and over time they mutate. Wherever vaccine coverage is patchy, there is selective pressure for the virus to evolve resistance.

If "vaccine apartheid" makes you feel squishy because you are being compelled to think about the awful apartheid regime, then a more palatable phrase "a two track pandemic" might provide you the incentive to think about how "richer countries having access and poorer ones being left behind."

A recent proposal from IMF staff puts forward a plan with clear targets, pragmatic actions, and at a feasible cost. It builds on and supports the ongoing work of WHO, its partners in the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator initiative and its global vaccine access programme COVAX, as well as the work of the World Bank Group, the WTO and many others. 

At an estimated $50 billion, it will bring the pandemic to an end faster in the developing world, reduce infections and loss of lives, accelerate the economic recovery, and generate some $9 trillion in additional global output by 2025.  It is a win for all — while around 60 percent of the gains will go to emerging markets and developing economies, the remaining 40 percent will benefit the developed world. And this is without taking into account the inestimable benefits on people’s health and lives.

Hmmm ... $50 billion.  A big number, right?  Let's compare that number against the US annual spending for its military.  President Biden has proposed spending $715 billion on national defense.  $50 billion is practically a rounding off error. 

It is not that we do not have the money.  We clearly lack the will to do the right thing--vaccinate the world. 

The rare success of a cult leader

In what feels like a million years ago, I blogged wondering whether we should think about the money that is donated as philanthropy.  Was the money earned through justifiable means?  Or, is it the case that most people simply do not care about the stink of the money.

In that post, I quoted the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote about "Mother" Teresa, whom he referred to as MT:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.

She was a friend of poverty.  I loved the way Hitchens phrased it.

Back then, there were two frequent commenters.  One was from the right side of the political spectrum here in the US, and another came from the right side of the political spectrum in the old country.  And, of course, true to their political ideology, they commented that money has no stink and that MT did nothing but good to the poor.

Ten days ago, Michelle Goldberg asked in her NY Times column if MT was "a cult leader."

I wonder if the right-wing commenters of the past read that column.  Perhaps not.

Goldberg writes about Mary Johnson, who spent 20 years in Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity:

“The Missionaries of Charity, very much, in so many ways, carried the characteristics of those groups that we easily recognize as cults,” Johnson told me. “But because it comes out of the Catholic Church and is so strongly identified with the Catholic Church, which on the whole is a religion and not a cult, people tend immediately to assume that ‘cult’ doesn’t apply here.”

Goldberg continues:

The former sisters describe an obsession with chastity so intense that any physical human contact or friendship was prohibited; according to Johnson, Mother Teresa even told them not to touch the babies they cared for more than necessary. They were expected to flog themselves regularly — a practice called “the discipline” — and were allowed to leave to visit their families only once every 10 years. 

A former Missionaries of Charity nun named Colette Livermore recalled being denied permission to visit her brother in the hospital, even though he was thought to be dying. “I wanted to go home, but you see, I had no money, and my hair was completely shaved — not that that would have stopped me. I didn’t have any regular clothes,” she said. “It’s just strange how completely cut off you are from your family.” Speaking of her experience, she used the term “brainwashing.”

Cult leaders maintain a tight grip over their flock.  It is difficult to flee from the leader.

Meanwhile, MT has been recognized by the Pope as as saint.

And you thought cult leaders always end up in trouble!

The poor you will always have with you

 In October 2009--yes, 2009--I wrote in this post:

When I was in India this past summer, as reports of swine flu came to dominate the news and conversations, I sincerely suggested to my parents that they should frequently wash their hands, and time it by humming the “happy birthday” song.

Wash hands and time it by humming the "happy birthday" song.  How familiar is that one now, right?  But, that was the public health advisory 12 years ago too.

In that post, I also wrote how absurd such a suggestion was:

As the words slipped out of my mouth, I knew it was a stupid and incongruous advice because of the water shortage in the city.  Apartment complexes were paying hefty amounts to private operators who supplied water by transporting them in special water-tankers.  When that was the condition for middle-class households, I cannot imagine the less affluent spending their precious money to wash hands in order to battle an invisible enemy.    Clean water is a super-luxury for the poor.

Which is why I suggested back then--yes, 12 years ago:

I do not mean to minimize the risks of a global pandemic, particularly if the swine flu virus were to mutate into a highly virulent form.  But, I do want to point out that the global focus on the swine flu, which we have rightfully managed to accomplish, should remind us that being a good citizen of the world also means that we ought to pay attention to the priorities of the rest of the world—in particular, the sufferings of the poor, who are almost always voiceless in the international arena.

Unfortunately, our track record has not been one that we can proudly hold up when it comes to supporting public health programs for the world’s poor.

We know well how much the 45th President of the US loved supporting the rest of the world, especially its poor.  His America First policy extended to global public health during the pandemic too.  He couldn't care to work with the world's countries on vaccine development and distribution because he hated the World Health Organization.

The Biden administration has been doing things to re-integrate into the world, and to participate in fighting the world's challenges.  The US rejoined WHO on day one of Biden's presidency.

Further, Biden put our money where our mouth is:

In a reversal of his predecessor's U.S.-centric approach to tackling the coronavirus pandemic, President Biden is ramping up pressure on America's wealthiest allies Friday to get COVID-19 vaccine doses into poor and developing countries. Mr. Biden told his fellow G7 leaders during a virtual summit that the U.S. would contribute up to $4 billion to COVAX, the World Health Organization-backed initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to vaccines around the world.

Virus knows no borders.  And we have a moral responsibility to help out the poorer countries:

So far, richer countries have been able to buy far more Covid jabs than poorer ones.

Covax hopes to deliver more than two billion doses to people in 190 countries in less than a year.

In particular, it wants to ensure 92 poorer countries will receive access to vaccines at the same time as 98 wealthier countries.

Often, people don't care for moral arguments. As a fellow-graduate school student put it once, material incentives beat moral incentives!

Even the dollars-and-sense approach shows that it is in the rich countries' interest to subsidize vaccines for the poorer countries:

[Unequal] vaccine access among countries will likely lead to a “total cost for the world” between $1.8 trillion and $3.8 trillion, with up to half the losses paid for by wealthier nations. In contrast, the cost of vaccinating one-fifth of the world’s vulnerable population, as the World Health Organization’s covax initiative aims to do, would cost less than forty billion dollars, with expenses decreasing over time. 

If only we understood that we are all in this together!

In sickness and in health

A few Decembers ago, when I was visiting with my folks in India, the maid came a tad later than usual and set about her tasks.  She started coughing.  My father told her that it was ok not to show up for work as long as she called and gave them a heads up.

But, there is a reason that maids and other workers report to work even when they are not well, or well enough: In most cases, they will suffer a cut in their earnings if they don't show up for work.  It is only a fraction of the labor force in India that has the benefits of sick leave and paid vacations.

Now, superimpose on such a framework the possibility of a viral disease. An epidemic, like COVID-19.  The scenario easily unfolds in your minds too, eh.

The US is only marginally better.

Service industry workers, like those in restaurants, retail, child care and the gig economy, are much less likely to have paid sick days, the ability to work remotely or employer-provided health insurance.
The disparity could make the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory illness known as Covid-19, harder to contain in the United States than in other rich countries that have universal benefits like health care and sick leave, experts say. A large segment of workers are not able to stay home, and many of them work in jobs that include high contact with other people. It could also mean that low-income workers are hit harder by the virus.

It is a large labor force without sick leave:

For many workers, being sick means choosing between staying home and getting paid. One-quarter of workers have no access to paid sick days, according to Labor Department data: two-thirds of the lowest earners but just 6 percent of the highest earners. Just a handful of states and local governments have passed sick leave laws.
Only 60 percent of workers in service occupations can take paid time off when they are ill — and they are also more likely than white-collar workers to come in contact with other people’s bodies or food.

And, yes, they are the ones who interact a lot with other humans, unlike the app-developing software engineer who tries his best to not deal with fellow human beings!  The low-wage and part-time workers in the US are, thus, in a situation similar to that of the maid at my parents' home:

for the average worker without paid sick-leave access, the lost wages associated with staying home for about three days would amount to their household’s entire monthly grocery budget or monthly utilities budget.
The outlook can be similarly bleak for gig workers for, say, a rideshare company or food-delivery service — many of whom aren’t eligible for benefits that would allow them to stay home and receive health care when they’re sick,

It is not difficult to understand how the virus has already spread far and wide, right?

Can anything be done?

Expanding the law to include pandemics as major disasters – as some lawmakers have urged – would make it possible for the president to make sure individuals affected by an outbreak have the support they need.
It would only take small changes like these to make the unemployment insurance program more useful to those sick, quarantined or temporarily idled during a pandemic.
While this will not solve all the economic problems caused by COVID-19, or the next pandemic disease, it would give American workers and the broader economy a lot more breathing room.

Giving workers a lot more breathing room is what I have often argued as the urgent need to rework the social contract and implement a stronger safety net.  If only 63 million Americans cared!

Source

What kind of society does “America” mean?

I remember John Steinbeck's line somewhere that the poor in America don't consider themselves to be poor--they have been brainwashed into thinking that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires.  Poverty is a minor setback, and it is only a matter of time before they become another Gatsby.

Except, it is not any minor setback.  And not everybody easily climbs up the ladder to become millionaires and gazillionaires.  Especially if you are not white in America!

But, when the dominant narrative is driven by whites, who shrug their shoulders and ask "Why can’t they get their act together?," to talk about inequality means that the trolls would immediately attack with name-calling. Socialist!

That shoulder-shrugging approach has always been the MO for the whites-only party, aka the GOP:

Republican orthodoxy is that inequality is not necessarily a problem. And if rising tides substantially lifted everybody’s boat, it might matter less that the yachts parked at the North Cove Marina a stone’s throw from Goldman Sachs rode a bigger swell. Tides in America don’t work like that anymore, though.

Most other boats are leaky.  And many don't even have boats!

Your heart doesn’t even have to bleed to care. The United States risks its prosperity by leaving so many Americans behind.

Republicans. Don't. Care. "Republicans just passed another round of tax cuts to offer a helping hand to the upper crust."

I have always wondered why there is simply no rioting on the streets. Why there is no looting. Why aren't the poor jumping into their broken down cars and rushing to ransack the Versailles of the greedy gazillionaires?

As Catherine Rampell noted in The Washington Post, populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.

To refer to trump as a populist is a twisted interpretation of what populism means.  He is no populist; he is merely a loud-mouthed racist, misogynist, ...

So, what happens to the poor?  Especially those who are not white?

Let them eat frog legs!

I made the Trump/Romney photo black and white, and it looks like a Twilight Zone episode where a guy just made a foolish deal with the Devil pic.twitter.com/froiDYDJei

— Adam 'Stuhlbarg' Murray (@Atom_Murray) November 30, 2016

In the name of efficiency

In graduate school, when I was just about learning to write essays--that was some struggle!--I wanted to write a paper questioning the primacy of efficiency.  I had an intuitive understanding that there was something wrong with the pursuit of efficiency.  After all, if I had worshiped efficiency, I would have then stayed in engineering, which is all about making "things" less inefficient.

The professor, Michael Dear, liked my thesis.  He encouraged me.  But, back in those days, I had difficulty even piecing together a couple of sentences that made sense, leave along a 2,500-word essay. Long story short, I didn't do well! But, hey, I live to tell the tale ;)

One of the efficiency routes that we increasingly encounter is also one that should worry us a lot: Automation.  It is one thing when we employ automation in our personal lives.  But, in a collective decision-making process, automation can be a boon or a disaster depending on what we want it to do.  (Set aside for now the machine learning, which takes these to another level altogether.)

If we go about using automation with an explicit goal to help people, then efficiency helps us.  Like in this context:

Virginia Eubanks says policymakers can look to successful models when implementing an automated system. "In Chicago there's a great system called mRelief," she says. "mRelief basically allows you to sort of ping government programs to see if you might be eligible for them. And then the folks who work for mRelief actually help step you through — either in person or through text — the process of getting all the entitlements that you are eligible for and deserve."

But, such systems are rare.  More common are the kinds that are setup in order to hurt the poor even more!

In Indiana, the governor there signed what eventually became a $1.4 billion contract with a coalition of high-tech companies that included IBM and ACS in an attempt to automate and privatized all of the eligibility processes for the state’s welfare programs. When seen as a question of simple efficiency, I think it makes a lot of sense.
But one of the assumptions that was built into the system was that the relationships between caseworkers—particularly public local case workers and the families that they served—were invitations to collusion and fraud. And that part of making the system more efficient actually lay in breaking the relationship between caseworkers and the families that they develop relationships with and serve. The system was built to replace a casework-based system with a task-based system. So 1,500 public caseworkers were moved into regional call centers far away from their homes.
And rather than carrying a docket of families that they served, they responded to a list of tasks that dropped into a computerized queue. So nobody saw cases through from the beginning to the end. And every time a recipient called the call center, they talked to a new person.  

Guess what happened?  Mistakes can happen in any step along the way, right?  "Any fault, any accident, any mistake was [considered] the fault of the applicant rather than the responsibility of the caseworker."

One million applications were denied in the first three years of the program, a 54 percent increase from the three years before that. And these are really horrifying cases—like an African-American woman in Evansville, Indiana, who missed a recertification appointment because she was in the hospital dying of ovarian cancer. She was kicked off her Medicaid because she missed those appointments.

Technological tools that make us more, ahem, efficient, "are not disrupters so much as they’re amplifiers."

It shouldn’t surprise us when a tool grows out of our existing public assistance system to be primarily punitive. Diversion, moral diagnosis, and punishment are often key goals of our public-service programs. But if you start with a different values orientation—if you start from an orientation that says everyone should get all of the resources they’re eligible for, with a minimum of disruption, and without losing their rights—then you can get a different tool.

Which means, what we are really doing is hiding our real agenda behind the rhetoric of "efficiency."  I wish I could have articulated that in graduate school!

we actually smuggle all of these political decisions, all of these political controversies, all of these moral assumptions, into those tools. Often they actually act to keep us from engaging the deeper problems

Yep, we are systematically making sure that we won't engage with the deeper problems.  We are apparently getting highly efficient in this :(     

Cactus and boiled ash make an awesome meal!

The demagogue and the millions who voted for him continue to spin whatever stories that suit them.  But, the laws of physics are the laws of physics, and--unlike the brainless Republicans--are not affected by moronic and misleading tweets from the demagogue.

One of the many, many lessons from this election is that despite all the benefits that we people enjoy from the progress in scientific understanding, a great many are clueless about the scientific method.  The laws work " regardless of political or social prejudices, and they are indisputably true."

But the most basic scientific concept that is clearly and disturbingly missing from today's social and political discourse is the concept that some questions have correct and clear answers. 

The scientific method is not how one feels and does not work by name-calling. It is not faith-based either.  It is the scientific method that leads scientists to conclude:

2016 will go down as the warmest year globally since record-keeping began, with preliminary reports indicating that 2016 was 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

And one of the consequences?

As temperatures rise, we’re also learning more about how these rising temperatures affect our weather – and extreme weather events, in particular.
With the help of new and evolving climate research, we’re detecting a stronger link between warming and changing weather patterns.

Yep, extreme weather events.  When it rains it floods creating records. Droughts are record-setting. People old enough to have experienced a sense of predictability are now our living witnesses on how how unpredictable meteorological events have become.

Source

While the demagogue and most of the people who voted for him continue to dismiss climate change and its human cause, the effects of climate change are already being felt all over the world.  Especially in poor countries that do not have the resources to adapt to the rapid changes.  Like in Madagascar:

Southern Africa’s drought and food crisis have gone largely unnoticed around the world. The situation has been particularly severe in Madagascar, a lovely island nation known for deserted sandy beaches and playful long-tailed primates called lemurs.
But the southern part of the island doesn’t look anything like the animated movie “Madagascar”: Families are slowly starving because rains and crops have failed for the last few years. They are reduced to eating cactus and even rocks or ashes. The United Nations estimates that nearly one million people in Madagascar alone need emergency food assistance.

 And the understanding through the scientific method is this:

New research, just published in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, concludes that human-caused climate change exacerbated El Niño’s intensity and significantly reduced rainfall in parts of Ethiopia and southern Africa.
The researchers calculated that human contributions to global warming reduced water runoff in southern Africa by 48 percent and concluded that these human contributions “have contributed to substantial food crises.”

Of course, all these are nothing but hoax manufactured by the Chinese!

Flying high ... what about those down below?

We engaged in meaningless chatter which is what family gatherings are essentially about.  The conversation threaded its way to travel and flying.  "So, here's a question for all of you" the professor in me kicked in.  Why not make the family get together also a class discussion, eh!  Hey, they should be thankful that I did not crank up a PowerPoint presentation ;)

"There are more than seven billion people on this planet, right?  What percentage of the people do you think have ever flown?" I asked them.

I am sure the manner in which I asked loaded up the dice.  They figured it had to be way low.  The responses were as low as half-a-percent.  

"Only five percent of the population has been up in a plane" I told them, recalling the data from a post that was less than a month ago.  (And you thought I blog and then forget everything, eh! tsk, tsk, tsk ...)  "In fact, even in the US, a fifth has never been in a plane" I added.

The group seemed to appreciate this.  Damn, I should teach or something.  Oh, wait, that is my day job!

"Given the multiple trips each of us here has made, it means that we all are not only the elite in India, but among the elite on this entire planet.  By this measure alone, we have nothing to complain about.  We ought to be thankful" I continued.

But, complain we all do.

"It seems like the gap between the rich and the poor is rapidly increasing in India" father chipped in.  The professor was happy that the class discussion was being productive.  Students in the non-traditional settings are way more excited about such things than are the traditional students going to college straight out of high school.  The more I teach, the more I seem convinced that college for the vast majority of high school graduates is the wrong choice at the wrong time.  Instead, they need to do something in the real world--learn at the school of hard knocks, as my neighbor often remarks--and should then decide whether they want to attend college.

"Yes, that's what the data also shows" I replied.  "Think about it, do you think that the maid has even been inside a two-tier air-conditioned coach in the trains?"

"I doubt that she has even been in a reserved compartment" replied my sister.

It is so incredibly easy to understand how lucky we are; yet, we conveniently forget that there are hundreds of millions who are relatively way more materially deprived than we are.  We are so quick to resort to "woe is me!"

In an opinion piece on India's wealth inequality, Professor  Asit K. Biswas and Kris Hartley, who is a doctoral candidate, conclude:

India should examine its collective soul to ask whether an economy by and for the obscenely wealthy is just. The inability to establish a political consensus on the extent of redistribution is a convenient excuse for ideological purists to abandon redistributive policies altogether. However, there is a line beyond which inequality is too high, and India is close to – if not already beyond – that line. “Who decides how much inequality is unacceptable?” is no longer an excuse for inaction.

Something is rotten in the country of India.

The quest for happiness

I always seem to have a tough time conveying to twenty-year old students in any of my classes that happiness might not be correlated with, nor dependent on, higher incomes.  I think they think that I am setting them up for something when I say that plenty of poorer folks are happy with their lives.  But then I would not have believed me either when I was an undergraduate student.

Source

I wonder if even what happiness is can be truly understood only with age and experience, after all the teenage angst, and the troubles of the twenties, and everything else that unfolds in life.  Not age alone--after all, one can be old and foolish, and there are too many of those among us.  Aging is natural, but wisdom about happiness we systematically have to work for.  Old and wise is something to hope for, I suppose.

We work and earn money but are less happy than the poorer folks?  So, who then is happy?

Plato believed that the best of all lives were based upon a quest, and an arduous quest at that. People who sought the Truth were the ones who, to Plato, lived with the most intensity and even joy.

Interesting stuff from Mark Edmundson, as always.  His point of departure is this Louis CK bit.  Say more, sir.

[Plato] was devoted to finding a truth that would apply to all people at all times. What is a just state? What is a well-balanced soul? What are the uses of art? How do you educate children? When Plato attempted to answer these questions, he was trying to do so for all time. He might well have failed: Even Plato, confident as he was, understood that. Others might come along in time to do better.
The quest for Truth is an ideal. When men and women engage it, their days are alive with meaning and intensity. They know what they are doing on Earth. They know what they want. They don’t need everything to be amazing. They know that happiness comes from picking out a noble goal, an ideal, and dedicating themselves to it.

So, all we need to do is to somehow get these across to the young?

People don’t talk much about ideals any more. We don’t usually offer them as viable options to the young.

Edmundson is on to something that I have often worried about.  Maybe it is just me, I used to think, but now that I read Edmundson, I now am convinced that among the young there are fewer and fewer who seem to at least talk about grand ideals.  Is it because we adults do not talk much about ideals anymore?  Are we so focused on material comforts and ease and navel-gazing that we have no place and time for ideals?  When we don't, and when everything else that surrounds us--from movies and television to internet and even books--are far from ideals, and with a world that is increasingly secular with even the religious paying only lip-service to their religions, are we doomed to lives without ideals?  And, hence, unhappiness?

These people will feel that life ought to be more than sleeping and eating and hoarding, getting and spending and having a good time. In our current culture those people may feel confused. Where are they to go for an alternative?
There is Plato behind them but still out ahead of them; there is Homer; there are Jesus and Confucius and Lord Buddha. And perhaps they will turn to them and see a new world of possibility open up.

That's wishful thinking.  But, this happy and content guy will take that, at least for now.

Nuke coal: Poverty, electricity, and the environment

The few days that I spent in Tanzania were eye-opening in many ways, including how energy-starved people were.  There was no electricity grid network in the village small town--the house where we stayed had its own generator--and women were hunched over smoke as they cooked.  It was no surprise, therefore, that upper-respiratory infections were high in the community.

Poverty and low energy consumption are highly correlated.  But, even worse is how expensive the energy that the poor consume is--the out-of-pocket expenses and the price they pay in terms of health problems.

If only electricity can be generated and delivered to them, right?  Inexpensive at that.  I wonder what that least expensive route is!  Of course, we know that answer, don't we?

While the United States is just now finding ways to try to keep coal a viable part of its power system, the rest of the world is riding even greater technological advances to a brighter future for the dark fuel.

Yep, coal.

the world today faces two contradictory and interrelated challenges: While billions of poor people in the developing world need a lot more energy to pull them out of poverty and drive economic development, improve life expectancies, and bolster human health, the world also faces a looming and possibly existential threat from climate change—caused in large part by greenhouse gas emissions that are the bitter harvest of the world’s reliance on coal and other dirty fossil fuels over the past several centuries.

Yep, all I have to do is picture that Tanzanian community for a real example of the interrelated issues those sentences highlight.

As history shows, without energy there is no economic growth. From 1000 to 1820, global growth averaged about 0.2 percent a year. Since then, growth has been 10 times higher. Modern prosperity, in other words, is built upon the vast amounts of chemical energy first unleashed by coal.

Wait, is that some empty rhetoric based on the old stories of Industrial Revolution in England and the US, or do we have any contemporary ones too?

And there has been no better student of this lesson than China. It has  relied on smoldering coal to achieve a nearly four-decade economic metamorphosis—
lifting more than 600 million people out of poverty, even as it housed them in polluted cities—that has transformed a once-backward agrarian state into the world’s second-largest economy.

But, don't economists say there is no free lunch?  So, any price to pay for that economic miracle?

Meanwhile, this economic miracle has created a large, relatively wealthy Chinese middle class that has brought an ecological consciousness to the Middle Kingdom. Environmental nightmares, especially the choking air pollution fundamentally caused by the country’s overwhelming reliance on coal, have in recent years sparked huge protests by people questioning the legitimacy of the unelected leadership in Beijing.

Damn!  No free lunch, after all.

For the developing world, as India’s struggles show, simply getting power at all is a huge challenge. Globally, for the 1.3 billion people who lack electricity of any sort, shunning a gleaming, new, reliable coal-fired power plant on climate-change grounds is almost an impossible luxury. 

So, let's recap.  There are poor people on this planet.  Their poverty and various aspects of life are interrelated and to untangle them all will require energy.  Coal provides energy at low prices, but then it also generates a whole lot of smog and godawful health issues.  Anything else at this point?

Of course, global climate change, for which burning coal is one awful contributor.  So, can we do anything as we now add climate change to all that interrelated set of issues?  I suppose that will require turning away from coal.  I wonder what the International Energy Agency has to say about this.

The International Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency suggest in a report released Thursday that nuclear will have such a significant role to play in climate strategy that nuclear power generation capacity will have to double by 2050 in order for the world to meet the international 2°C (3.6°F) warming goal.
With fossil fuels growing as sources of electricity across the globe, the IEA sees nuclear power as a stable source of low-carbon power helping to take polluting coal-fired plants offline.

No kidding!  Nuclear power.  I am sure that will, oh wait, there was that first paragraph:

Since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan chilled global attitudes toward nuclear power, the world has been slowly reconciling its discomfort with nuclear and the idea that it may have a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change.

Ok, let's recap. There are poor people on this planet.  Their poverty and various aspects of life are interrelated and to untangle them all will require energy.  Coal provides energy at low prices, but then it also generates a whole lot of smog and godawful health issues.  And coal is making things worse for the global climate.  Nuclear power is more expensive, but is a low-carbon alternative.  But then something like the catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi can make people's lives godawful.

Globally, nuclear energy is already making a comeback with 72 nuclear reactors now under construction worldwide, mainly in Asia.“This marked the greatest number of reactors being built in 25 years,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement. “Nuclear energy also remains the second-largest source of low-carbon electricity worldwide. And, indeed, if we are to meet our collective climate goals, nuclear energy is critical.”

You and I, dear reader, don't have to worry about all these, right?  Because, you and I are in comfortable homes, and comfortable temperatures maintained by air-conditioning or heating.  Ours, for all purposes, is merely an intellectual discussion at this point, as we sip wine or coffee: let's talk about coal and nuclear energy.  We are the modern versions of Marie Antoinette!  But, for the global poor, and those who are not poor but are energy-starved, these are real life hassles that they worry about.  

So, at the end of it all, what do you want to tell those poor folks in Tanzania, and Nigeria, and India, and Bangladesh, and ...?

I, for one, have no answer :(

Father, uber-happy, during our visit to Neyveli in 2002
(Lignite is a low-energy coal. Yep, lots of electricity generated there)

The poor problems of longer life expectancy

The December days in India are about family and friends, yes.  But, it is also about guavas.  Every day, I eat a guava with breakfast, a guava or two after lunch, and a guava in the evening.  I suppose it is a pedestrian fruit to the locals who don't seem to care for it at all.  The locals do not know what they are missing out on ;)

A couple of days after landing in Chennai, I walked--bag in hand--to the guava vendor at the street corner. He said it was forty rupees for a half-kilo.

"Forty?" I was genuinely surprised because I think it was only thirty a year ago.

"Usually it is fifty, sir.  Because you are a regular customer it is forty."

The guy was trying to humor this customer!

Two days ago, I walked over there to restock.  He was not there.  No guavas.  I came home empty-handed.  As if the cosmos were watching out for me, my sister came home with a bag of "farm-fresh" guavas.

I wonder about that vendor.  His livelihood is from selling guavas.  If he is sick and is unable to work, then he loses the day's income.

That's is no different from the story of the tailor whose business is nothing but a foot-pedaled sewing machine and needles and threads on the sidewalk.  He has been gone for a few days now because of an appendectomy.  The guy is now financially set back that much more.

Or, take the case of the maid, er, domestic help, at my parents' home.  An older woman, she has been off and on this past week because she is not feeling well.  Even though I have no idea about the local protocols, I told her that she need not come to work if she is not well.  My father joined me.  "At some age, you need to retire and let your sons and daughter take care of you" he said.

She snorted.  "Like they will take care of me.  If I don't earn my livelihood, I won't get any food."

I think about these real people as I consider the celebratory news on the global increase in life expectancy:

Global life expectancy for men and women has increased by about six years over the past two decades, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of global health done so far. The rise in global life expectancy is mainly the result of dramatic advances in health care.
In richer countries longer lifespans are spurred by a big drop in deaths related to heart disease, while poorer countries have seen big declines in the death of children from ailments such as pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria.

In the old country:

In India, which is on track to become the world’s most populous country in less than two decades, life expectancy at birth rose from 57.3 years to 64.2 years for males, and from 58.2 years to 68.5 years for females, according to the Lancet study.

Which is wonderful, indeed.  But, who takes care of the living? In the bad old days, when average life expectancy at birth was a low number, one really did not need to worry about the burdens of old age; there was no need when even living until forty was a big deal.  But, increasingly the worries of the old maid will be the stories all over the world.  As a species, and like other animals, we would have died much younger.  We have artificially lengthened our life spans and created hassles along the way.  I love the fact that we have been able to conquer many ailments that killed us by the millions.  But, am I in the minority to be concerned about the individual and collective responsibility over the tail end of our unnaturally long lives?

"I won't come tomorrow because I am going to the doctor" the maid said as she was leaving.  "But, I will be back the day after that."

All I could do was helplessly nod my head.

Later today, I hope to see the guava vendor.

Source

My life as a middle-class academic ... is one gross lie!

Back when I was a kid, I gathered from family conversations that my people in Pattamadai and Sengottai were rich.  Which confused me because I didn't see any evidence of that wealth.  At our home, heck, we didn't even have a fridge because we couldn't afford one.  The old beaten up car had already been sold and my father bicycled to the store even though he was a part of the upper management in the company town.  "Rich, my ass!" is what I would have said if I had known such language back then ;)

I suppose they were framing it within the contexts of Sengottai and Pattamadai and Neyveli, while my yardstick was, well, my classmates and schoolmates, some of whom had cars and scooters and bikes and, yes, refrigerators.  "Rich" is a relative concept.

Poor and poverty is easy to define, but once past the abject poverty, are we poor or rich?  I, therefore, settled on identifying my family as "middle class." Sometimes I said "upper-middle class."  Of course, now I know better, but wisdom is always a day late!

Who might be the middle-class in India now?  A fairly straightforward question to ask, right?  The older I get, even simple questions become difficult, it feels like.

The rapid growth of the Indian economy over the past three decades has led to a substantial expansion of India’s “middle class”. This has triggered a robust debate over who in India actually belongs to the “middle class,” its size, composition, and political and social behaviour.

A "robust debate" means that this is no simple question.

But even if acceptable measures and hard data could be marshalled, they would still be ill-equipped to nail down a rather elusive concept: whether Indians actually believe and behave as if they are part of the middle class. Self-identification of class status is important because it suggests the possibility that Indians may behave in ways that are actually at odds with material realities.
To investigate this, the latest Lok survey asked respondents from across the country whether they considered their family to be a “middle class” family.

"the possibility that Indians may behave in ways that are actually at odds with material realities" is an interesting phrasing that immediately signals that there is something exciting coming.  So, what is that?

To our surprise, nearly half (49 per cent) of all survey respondents believed their family is a middle class family. There was, as one would expect, great variation in responses across states. For instance, while 68 per cent of respondents in Karnataka believed their family belonged to the middle class, just 29 per cent of respondents in Madhya Pradesh felt the same. Self-identification as middle class is expectedly more prevalent among urban respondents (56 per cent) but the share of rural individuals claiming to be middle class is also remarkably high (46 per cent).

It is a surprise because:

But the extent of “middle class” identification is striking, not simply because of its size or the fact that it seems to run counter to households’ own economic realities, but also because it appears to have powerful experiential effects on respondents’ social attitudes.

If only somebody would say all these in easy to understand words, right?  Here it is:

The results show an extraordinary tendency for people to consider themselves middle class even if they are in fact very poor. The study defined the "lower" annual income bracket as those earning RS 36,000 per year or less, which works out to approximately $1.50 per day. And yet 46 percent of urban residents in that income bracket reported that their families were "middle class," as did 44 percent of those in rural areas.

That's right, folks--even those earning a buck-and-a-half a day identify themselves as middle class.

The economic well-being is a state of mind, once past that horrible, abject poverty.  You are as rich or as poor as you think you are.

Which is why we folks who are rich--yes, you and I are part of the global rich, despite what my "poor" socialist colleagues claim--feel like we are sliding down from the middle class.  After all, our frames of reference are, well, those Facebook and Wall Street people we read about, who earn gazillions.  The football coach at the university in the town where I live earns in a year twice the total amount that I hope I will be able to earn before I die!  Won't I feel poor then?  Am I not justified in thinking, believing, that I am slipping down to the category of low-income, after having lived a life of "upper-middle class?"  Woe is me!

If only!

I am one heck of a rich man.  My parents were right (dammit!)--my people were rich.  To think otherwise is the grossest of insults to the happy "middle class" that earns even as low as $1.50 a day.

On the worry that the least-skilled will fall further behind

Charles C. Mann notes in his insightful essay on the rhetoric and (in)action regarding climate change:

In the 3,600 years between 1800 B.C. and 1800 A.D., the economic historian Gregory Clark has calculated, there was “no sign of any improvement in material conditions” in Europe and Asia. Then came the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution was one hell of a game-changer.  China and India, which at that point accounted for more than a half of the world's GDP, had no idea what lay ahead; no surprise that they are both terribly wounded civilizations that are even now trying to figure out what happened and why they are not the admired and prosperous lands, though China is in a hurry to reclaim its status.

In his book, his talks, his interviews, well, anywhere, Andrew McAfee stresses the importance of the Information Revolution by reminding us about the Industrial Revolution:

As historian Ian Morris writes in his fascinating book Why The West Rules — For Now, “the industrial revolution… made mockery of all that had gone before.”

If that changed the world in a hurry, then, as McAfee likes to point out, we ain't seen nothin' yet with respect to how much the next revolution (that is underway?) will completely overhaul everything.

That is not a new topic in this blog.  I keep coming back to it because of a deep concern that the vast middle class was perhaps a freakish accident in history, and that we will revert to conditions that prevailed throughout almost all of recorded history--the patricians and the plebeians.

The concern over the plebs is nothing but another way of saying that inequality is a troubling issue to me.  Not merely within the US, but across the world.  Now, I have quoted Branko Milanovic and others who have correctly noted that global inequality has narrowed, as this chart from an old post shows:

But, within countries, the gap is widening.

And even the Economist pitches in with "why globalisation is not reducing inequality within developing countries"

Economists are puzzled: the data contradict the predictions of David Ricardo, one of the founding fathers of their discipline. Countries, said Ricardo, export what they are relatively efficient at producing. Take America and Bangladesh now. In America the ratio of highly skilled to low-skilled workers is high. In Bangladesh it is low. So America focuses on products requiring highly skilled labour, such as financial services and software. Bangladesh focuses on downmarket products such as garments.
Comparative advantage predicts that when a poor country starts to trade globally, demand for low-skilled workers will rise disproportionately. That, in turn, should boost their wages relative to those of higher-skilled locals, and so push down income inequality within that country. The theory neatly explains the impact of the first wave of globalisation. In the 18th century, Europe had a high ratio of low-skilled workers relative to America. When Euro-American trade took off, European inequality duly tumbled

Any time the Economist or the Wall Street Journal runs such pieces, then I joke that it means it is time to say "holy shit!"

Anyway, what might be the story here?

[Eric Maskin's theory] relies on what he calls worker “matching”. Unskilled workers can be more productive when matched with skilled ones—that is, when they work together. Assigning a manager to a group of workers can do more for total output than just adding another worker. He places workers into four classes: skilled workers in rich countries (A); low-skilled workers in rich countries (B); high-skilled workers in poor countries (C); and low-skilled workers in poor countries (D). Crucially, he thinks low-skilled workers in rich countries (the Bs) are likely to be more productive than high-skilled workers in poor ones (the Cs).
Before the current wave of globalisation started in the 1980s, skilled and unskilled workers in developing countries—the Cs and Ds—worked together.

So, yes, globalization.  What happened?

The latest bout of globalisation has jumbled the pairings: high-skilled workers in poor countries can now work more easily with low-skilled workers in rich ones, leaving their poor neighbours in the lurch. ...
The Cs work with Bs and end up being more productive. The Ds are left by the wayside.

The Ds number in the hundreds of millions.   Which is why the Economist concludes with this thought:

 if he is right, he poses a challenge to globalisation’s advocates: figuring out how to reap its rewards without leaving the least-skilled in poor countries behind.

Well, hey, it might be a realization that is a tad too late.  But, better late than never, right?

There is one easy solution to this; can you guess what that is?  Hint: it cannot happen again, now that we are already here ;)

WTO versus the country with 400 million in extreme poverty

Through all those years that I studied math and science and engineering, understanding the materials and working out the problems was not a big deal, even if challenging at times, compared to my life as a student since then for one simple reason which is this--it appears that the subjects I have been studying since graduating from engineering college rarely ever have something called "the correct answer."  Instead, questions and problems always seem to have multiple answers, and every one of them could be argued to be correct--unless, of course, the answers are from the bizarro world of the like of Palin or Bachmann or ...

Thus, there are plenty of instances where I feel like outsourcing the question to somebody and asking them to tell me what I should believe is the correct answer.  But then I do not go by faith and am a skeptic, which means that I am all the time running around those multiple options like a kid in a candy store who cannot decide which one to buy!

Today's exhibit: India rejecting some World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement.  WTF is the issue I simply cannot figure out.  Is it because I have hit the wall and these are beyond my abilities to understand?  I think not; after all, this is about a WTO agreement and not even about the old 8086 Intel chip!

So, what happened, you ask?

India's tough diplomacy blocked a landmark world trade treaty late on Thursday, despite last-ditch talks to rescue what would have been the first global trade reform since the creation of the World Trade Organization 19 years ago.

That is what happened.  Who knew India had such cojones, eh!

There is no confusion over the reporting that India successfully blocked the deal.  And if not for India, it seems like the agreement was all kosher with the rest.

Was that good for India? Bad for India? Good or bad for India's poor? Bad for the world?

source

Turns out there is no correct answer.  Yet another confirmation that this is no electrical engineering problem!

What was India's, ahem, beef?

India wants its farm subsidies exempt from WTO review and wants the latitude to stockpile enough grains to meet the food-security needs of 800 million Indians, who by law are entitled to subsidized food. But Schott says India has taken the Bali Trade Facilitation Agreement hostage until it gets in accord on agriculture. ...
Policy Research Center analyst Bharat Karnad says India fears that once the countries of the developed world obtained Delhi's signature on any agreement, they will lose interest in negotiating an exemption on subsidies for India's farmers. Subsidies can lead to overproduction, then dumping, then sanctions for distorting trade. Karnad says Modi has shrewdly rejected the Bali agreement to get new subsidy rules.

So, that is one way to answer the question.

Another answer lists nine reasons for why:

Trade diplomats in Geneva have said they are "flabbergasted", "astonished" and "dismayed" and described India's position as "hostage-taking" and "suicidal".

Shrewd according to one is suicidal according to another.  Go figure!

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal says that Modi is acting like an economic nationalist. Say what?  Certainly the paper is not comparing Modi to the likes of Hugo Chavez?

The Bali deal already gave the Indians a four-year "peace clause," allowing New Delhi to increase temporarily the otherwise WTO-incompatible subsidies. The four years were to give India time to come up with a more economically defensible system. But the four-year exemption was not enough for Mr. Modi, who demands a permanent exemption to subsidize as much as he wants—and right now, thank you.
How many more rupees does India intend to dole out in the name of "food security"? Many diplomats in WTO headquarters in Geneva would like to know the answer to that question.

I thought that the relatively centrist Brookings Institution might make things clear for me about this food security and subsidy and dole.  Not!  This document is all gobbledygook for me.

The "All-India Convenor of the BJP's Economic Cell," whatever that position means, provides his spirited defense and concludes with this:

the government's tough stand has also taken the wind out off the left parties' sails and robbed them of their stereotyped rhetorical critique of a "sell-out by the government".Finally, the Modi government's line has also sent a clear message to the "neo-liberalisers" and advocates of a "no-holds barred globalisation" that the country's economic interests would be the principal determinant in economic policy making under a BJP regime.

So, who you gonna believe?

Finally, from the proverbial horse's mouth--as in Modi himself:

Should we choose in favour of our farmers or for getting good publicity in the international media? We have chosen the former. We have chosen the interest of the poor people of the country

So, if the interests of the poor are the defense, then the government has way more to be worried about than the WTO, it seems like:

food worth $8.3 billion, or nearly 40% of the total value of annual production, is wasted.
This does not capture the full picture: for example, meat accounts for about 4% of food wastage but 20% of the costs, while 70% of fruit and vegetable output is wasted, accounting for 40% of the total cost. India may be the world’s largest milk producer and grow the second largest quantity of fruits and vegetables (after China), but it is also the world’s biggest waster of food. As a result, fruit and vegetable prices are twice what they would be otherwise, and milk costs 50% more than it should.
It is not only perishable food that is squandered. An estimated 21 million tons of wheat – equivalent to Australia’s entire annual crop – rots or is eaten by insects, owing to inadequate storage and poor management at the government-run Food Corporation of India (FCI).

It is a good thing that I don't have much hair left to pull out ;)

What is worse than horseshit?

"Did you watch the horse race?" asked my neighbor a couple of days ago.

He was referring to the madness over the triple crown in horse-racing, fully knowing that I don't care about such races.  Yet, he asked me that because he knows I am a news junkie.  Of course, I was aware that the triple-crown didn't happen.

"One of the owners is from Bakersfield" he added.  We are both neighbors here in Oregon after his initial three decades there and my much fewer years in that part of California.

"Did you know that despite the horse not winning the Triple Crown, there are people ready to pay ten million dollars for it?"

I hadn't known that.  As in it will be as high as $10 million.

"That much for breeding?" I was genuinely shocked at the amount.  "The world is really screwed up.  They spend gazillions on things like this, and you ask the same people to spare ten dollars to feed the homeless and they yell at you!"

"You got that right" he chimed in agreement.

We differ on a whole range of topics, profound and silly.  But, we agree, always, on the highly misplaced priorities that we humans seem to have.  Our favorite of all is the screwed up priority on college sports.

The highly messed up priorities show up everywhere, especially when hysteresis is the word.  When the working class anywhere and everywhere seems to be getting screwed.

For Peter Singer, the case of millions being spent to acquire a work of art is the context of messed up priorities, in which he writes:

In a more ethical world, to spend tens of millions of dollars on works of art would be status-lowering, not status-enhancing. Such behavior would lead people to ask: “In a world in which more than six million children die each year because they lack safe drinking water or mosquito nets, or because they have not been immunized against measles, couldn’t you find something better to do with your money?”

The rich are all too eager to spend 41 million dollars for a "small image of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol," or $10 million dollars on a horse for its sperm.  The madness is that we hoi polloi are all the more excited and in awe about such wasteful expenditures when, instead, those big spenders should be considered for what they are: worse than horseshit!  Shame on us pathetic beings who worship the rich and the famous and serve those gods of horseshit.

Are you middle class? You think you are poor? Check this out

If ever you are like me, then, well, I feel sorry for you.   Haha!

Ok, kidding aside, if ever you have doubts on your own economic standing here in the US of A, and want to figure out where exactly you fall along the income spectrum, well, take a look at this table which will tell you which income percentile you belong to.

What is, however, more interesting is the following chart (in fact, it is this chart that led me to the income percentile table too)

 

"Oh my freaking lord" is probably what you are thinking.
Being rich or poor in material terms is all relative.  Check this map of the world:

How does trickle down economics help the poor? Here is how

Quote of the day: on income inequality

The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.

Boggles my mind, you say?  Yep.  It is from Catherine Rampbell's review of Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and Have Nots: (ht)

And, for those of you wondering is this been adjusted for purchasing power parity, Rampbell notes:

The household income numbers are all converted into  international dollars adjusted for equal purchasing power, since the cost of goods varies from country to country. In other words, the chart adjusts for the cost of living in different countries, so we are looking at consistent living standards worldwide.

Remember the "ovarian lottery" that Warren Buffett talks about?  Well, more evidence supporting that:

As Milanovic notes, an astounding 60 percent of a person’s income is determined merely by where she was born (and an additional 20 percent is dictated by how rich her parents were).

Which is why immigration laws become so important--if the borders were open,

A recent World Bank survey suggested that “countries that have done economically poorly would, if free migration were allowed, remain perhaps without half or more of their populations.”

And that is the very scenario imagined in the crazy dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints

No more debutante balls for the rich

The economic divide between the rich and the rest of us is very different from the Great Gatsby of F.Scott Fitzgerald, writes Chrystia Freeland in the Atlantic.  While the inequality numbers might seem to be the same, there are plenty of differences between the two, such as this one:

To grasp the difference between today’s plutocrats and the hereditary elite, who (to use John Stuart Mill’s memorable phrase) “grow rich in their sleep,” one need merely glance at the events that now fill high-end social calendars. The debutante balls and hunts and regattas of yesteryear may not be quite obsolete, but they are headed in that direction. The real community life of the 21st-century plutocracy occurs on the international conference circuit. 

What happens in in the international conference circuit?

it has the intense, earnest atmosphere of a gathering of college summa cum laudes. This is not a group that plays hooky: the conference room is full from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and during coffee breaks the lawns are crowded with executives checking their BlackBerrys and iPads. ... Though the china is Sèvres and the paintings are museum quality (Marie-Josée is, after all, president of the Museum of Modern Art’s board), the dinner-table conversation would not be out of place in a graduate seminar.

And then, of course, even the latest gazillionaires like Facebook's Zuckerberg soon becomes a philanthrocapitalist:

What is notable about today’s plutocrats is that they tend to bestow their fortunes in much the same way they made them: entrepreneurially. Rather than merely donate to worthy charities or endow existing institutions (though they of course do this as well), they are using their wealth to test new ways to solve big problems. The journalists Matthew Bishop and Michael Green have dubbed the approach “philanthrocapitalism” in their book of the same name. “There is a connection between their ways of thinking as businesspeople and their ways of giving,” Bishop told me. “They are used to operating on a grand scale, and so they operate on a grand scale in their philanthropy as well. And they are doing it at a much earlier age.”

So, ... ?

America really does need many of its plutocrats. We benefit from the goods they produce and the jobs they create. And even if a growing portion of those jobs are overseas, it is better to be the home of these innovators—native and immigrant alike—than not. In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever.
There is also the simple fact that someone will have to pay for the improved public education and social safety net the American middle class will need in order to navigate the wrenching transformations of the global economy. (That’s not to mention the small matter of the budget deficit.) Inevitably, a lot of that money will have to come from the wealthy—after all, as the bank robbers say, that’s where the money is.
It is not much of a surprise that the plutocrats themselves oppose such analysis and consider themselves singled out, unfairly maligned, or even punished for their success. Self-interest, after all, is the mother of rationalization, and—as we have seen—many of the plutocracy’s rationalizations have more than a bit of truth to them: as a class, they are generally more hardworking and meritocratic than their forebears; their philanthropic efforts are innovative and important; and the recent losses of the American middle class have in many cases entailed gains for the rest of the world.
But if the plutocrats’ opposition to increases in their taxes and tighter regulation of their economic activities is understandable, it is also a mistake. The real threat facing the super-elite, at home and abroad, isn’t modestly higher taxes, but rather the possibility that inchoate public rage could cohere into a more concrete populist agenda

Don't simply give foreign aid. Give Micronutrients

Bjorn Lomborg writes:

Billions of dollars are given and spent on aid and development by individuals and companies each year. Despite this generosity, we simply do not allocate enough resources to solve all of the world's biggest problems. In a world fraught with competing claims on human solidarity, we have a moral obligation to direct additional resources to where they can achieve the most good. And that is as true of our own small-scale charitable donations as it is of governments' or philanthropists' aid budgets.

So, where will be the largest return on investment?

Micronutrient deficiency is known as "hidden hunger." This is a fitting description, because it is one of the global challenges that we hear relatively little about in the developed world. It draws scant media attention or celebrity firepower, which are often crucial to attracting charitable donations to a cause.