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 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!

The virtual is for the poor?

It was in 2011 that I first came across a reference to EM Forster's The Machine Stops, and since then I have quoted from that masterpiece many times.  I will quote from that story again in order to get you warmed up for what this post will deal with:

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other.  "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind." 
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

A century ago thinkers like Forster were worried about the potential for human-human face-to-face interaction to be replaced by human-machine interactions. We are now living that science-fiction!

Life for anyone but the very rich — the physical experience of learning, living and dying — is increasingly mediated by screens.

"For anyone but the very rich."

Consider online classes, for instance.  I have taught online classes from the bad old days when we used dial-up modems.  Even though I teach online classes, I have always argued that students are being shortchanged.  And here's how I often make that argument: Students do not go to Harvard to take online classes there.  So, if Harvard's students, who are, on an average, way more talented and able to learn with very little guidance, go to college for a learning environment that is guided by real humans and in the company of real humans, then how is it that we market online classes only to the less privileged?

Online classes are an example of contemporary life that is "increasingly mediated by screens" for those who are not rich enough. This contrast between the rich and the rest begins from a young age:

In Silicon Valley, time on screens is increasingly seen as unhealthy. Here, the popular elementary school is the local Waldorf School, which promises a back-to-nature, nearly screen-free education.
So as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more.

As it turns out, the wealthy even resort to fraud in order to get their children to colleges where real humans with real intellectual prowess will engage with students.  There is a reason they don't commit fraud in order to get their kids to my online classes!

I particularly like this point that the author makes: "Human contact is becoming a luxury good."

Sad!

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

Me too!

Despite the best efforts of many, the gap between the numbers of rich and poor college graduates continues to grow.

To which all I want to say is this: Duh!

In guarded and polite ways, I have on many occasions asked students over the years: My university awards BA degrees, and so do the flagship university, the university where I earned my PhD, and Harvard.  Are all these BAs the same?  If some BAs mean something more than other BAs do, well, what is the point of awarding those "lesser" BAs?

Of course, not all BAs are created equal; some are more equal than others.  The gap between the more-equal BA graduates and the less-equal BA graduates means that people will seek the more-equal BA, right?  Who are the children who end up at these more-equal colleges?

The wealthy spend tens of thousands each year on private school tuition or property taxes to ensure that their children attend schools that provide a rich, deep college preparatory curriculum. On top of that, many of them spend thousands more on application coaches, test-prep tutors and essay editors. They take their children on elaborate college tours so that their children can “find the right fit” at schools with good names and high graduation rates. Enrollment strategists at these same schools seek applicants from areas where the data they buy confirms that income levels and homeownership are high.

At the end of the day, "the odds against children who come from families earning the median income or less actually graduating from college seem to grow more formidable."

Creating a true meritocracy in higher education would require serious, politically daring changes to our housing policies and the tax code, neither of which seems likely in the current climate. Yet people of means (and I include myself here) are complicit in a system that seems unable to stop itself from extending privileges to the privileged.

Yep, the privileged group includes me too. 

Over the years, I have blogged a lot about these issues, and have even authored op-eds--like this one in 2009.  Yes, 2009.  In that op-ed, I wrote:

[While] it is a wonderful ideal that the sticker price of higher education should not prevent any Oregonian from pursuing knowledge, we ought to recognize that knowledge, like most things in life, has costs associated with it. ...
Thus, it is a no-brainer that when state governments decrease allocations for higher education, universities are then forced to suddenly increase tuition and fees — even if that were not in prior plans and even if it means disastrous public relations.  The lack of state funding has, therefore, resulted in the shifting of the cost burden onto students and families. ...
[If] dramatic reductions in state funding are now making it more expensive for students to attend public universities, what happens then to the original notion to ensure that Oregonians do not walk away from higher education because of lack of money?

In all the op-eds, however, I intentionally never raised the uncomfortable question that I have sometimes asked students: If some BAs mean something more than other BAs do, well, what is the point of awarding those "lesser" BAs?

It's a wonderful life ... if you are rich!

“The salary has been at the same level ... I haven’t seen my pay go up in five years.”

One might immediately think that it was somebody in the US who said that, right?  After all, here I am in the US where wage stagnation has been a puzzle to experts, leave alone the regular people.

But, that was from Norway.  From a 49-year old man in Oslo.

His lament resonates far beyond Nordic shores. In many major countries, including the United States, Britain and Japan, labor markets are exceedingly tight, with jobless rates a fraction of what they were during the crisis of recent years. Yet workers are still waiting for a benefit that traditionally accompanies lower unemployment: fatter paychecks.
Why wages are not rising faster amounts to a central economic puzzle.

What is going on, right?

The reasons for the stagnation gripping wages vary from country to country, but the trend is broad.

Same trend, different reasons.  Yet, the experts pretend that economics is a science, and they even managed to set up a prize (ab)using Nobel's name!

On the other hand, unlike the working stiff who have not seen a wage increase in years, there are quite a few who profit phenomenally from the same system.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it,:"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me."  How different is their life?  Here's one example: If you have enough money, you can buy yourself a citizenship in quite a few countries!

Between 30 and 40 countries have active economic-citizenship or residence programmes, says Kälin, and another 60 have provisions for one in law. Some demand a straight cash donation, others investment in government bonds or the purchase of property. Some take a longer-term view of the potential economic benefits, offering passports to entrepreneurs who will set up a local company and create a minimum number of jobs. The required investment ranges from upwards of $10,000 (Thai residence, for instance) to more than $10m (fast-track residence in Britain). In some countries the original investment can be withdrawn after several years.

Do not forget that the fascist campaigned about the welfare of the middle class for whom his heart supposedly bleeds, but has a son-in-law who peddles this passport for sale:

The use of EB-5 by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, to lure Chinese investors into his family’s development projects has also tainted the programme. Some senators want it scrapped. Congress is due to decide soon whether to extend it.

Ahem, if you believe that Congress will scrap this passport-for-sale program, then I have a bridge to sell you for a million dollars!

The typical passport buyer is unlikely to settle, will care little about her new country’s politics and will have no interest in defending its values. Unless her new citizenship is American – the United States is particularly hot on extracting taxes from all its citizens – she may well pay her new nation no taxes. The normal means of acquiring citizenship acknowledges that there is a cultural component: naturalisation typically takes years and requires an applicant to establish a real connection to their new country. An industry whose main purpose is to allow people to skip those queues does not.

So long, losers; eat your damn cakes!

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.

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.

Republicans have become Social Darwinist dystopians!

The best sentence I read today:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. 

Well, this might be an insult to the British Empire, of which I am no fan either!  Even if it was from their own selfish interests, the British at least did a few good things--even something like this "anicut" in a remote small town in Tamil Nadu.

Anyway, that sentence is from this essay in The American Conservative (ht) that makes a wonderful point that "our financial elites are the new secessionists."

Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained.

Keep in mind that this is a criticism not coming from The Nation or Harper's, but from a conservative publication.  But then, this is a truly intellectually conservative publication, which has become a minority among the atrocious likes of the Weekly Standard.

The essay is only warming up.  The author, Mike Lofgren, "served 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees" and yet the following sentences of his might easily be mistaken as something that was authored by the late Alexander Cockburn:

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse.

The kind of true conservatism echoes Ralph Nader's characterization of the two parties as tweedledum-and-tweedledee:

After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the nominee for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him will be the incumbent president, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge-fund managers, merger-and-acquisition specialists, and leveraged-buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion. ...
the rich, rather than having the modesty to temper their demands, this time have made the calculated bet that they are politically invulnerable—Wall Street moguls angrily and successfully rejected executive-compensation limits even for banks that had been bailed out by taxpayer funds. And what I saw in Congress after the 2008 crash confirms what economist Simon Johnson has said: that Wall Street, and behind it the commanding heights of power that control Wall Street, has seized the policy-making apparatus in Washington. Both parties are in thrall to what our great-grandparents would have called the Money Power. One party is furtive and hypocritical in its money chase; the other enthusiastically embraces it as the embodiment of the American Way.

I am getting way more depressed and way more pissed off the more I think about all these.  What an awful state of affairs :(

Conservatives need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?

But then, can Lofgren get, for instance, Grover "bathtub"  Norquist to read this essay in the first place, and then make Norquist think about all these?

What if Christopher Lasch came closer to the truth in The Revolt of the Elites, wherein he wrote, “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses”? Lasch held that the elites—by which he meant not just the super-wealthy but also their managerial coat holders and professional apologists—were undermining the country’s promise as a constitutional republic with their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility.
Lasch wrote that in 1995. Now, almost two decades later, the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.

For a few years now, I have been remarking in appropriate contexts in my classes something I picked up from Joseph Stiglitz (I think it was him.)  And that is: the rich--I mean the real people and not the "corporations people"--live transnational lives, sometimes literally with more than one passport.  On the other hand, the middle and lower income classes are geographically tied down and their sense of nationalism has no effect on the transnationalism of the rich.  To some extent, Mike Lofgren is a tad late to this bottom-line.  That can only mean only one thing: we are way screwed than how much I thought we were!

The situation is so Category-5 that perhaps Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, would have fled from the GOP!

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:

The rich are different from you and me. But, wait, I am rich, too

My air travel to India last year was via Frankfurt, where I had to get a new boarding pass for my onward flight to Chennai.  It was more than two hours to boarding time and the gate was rather empty.  I approached the counter, which was staffed by two young women.  I kidded with them that perhaps it was my lucky day and that they would give me a free upgrade from coach to the first class. 

One of them replied, "from where I am, even a regular economy ticket feels like first class."

Her reply was a powerful reminder that being materially rich is, well, relative.  I felt rather stupid for joking with her about the first class upgrade.  In any case, she directed me to return to the counter after a few minutes because they had just about gotten there to the gate.

I wandered around, and about a half an hour later returned to the gate to find quite a few passengers already lined up at the counter. 

I waited my turn, and presented my passport ... and no jokes this time.

With the stereotypical German efficiency, she handed me my boarding pass and in a formal tone said "welcome to the business class."

How much ever I think that I am a lowly paid university professor, the reality is that even within the United States, and definitely among the nearly seven billion on the planet, I am not one of the hoi polloi.  I belong to a privileged group. I ought to be humbly thankful about it, and the Lufthansa employee reminded me that I have a lot to thank for.

Yesterday, too, was another learning opportunity on this very subject.  On my drive back from Seattle, I stopped to fill gas.  It was also a break for me from the couple of hours of driving in the rain.  (Here in Oregon, only the gas station attendant can legally pump gas.) 

I handed my credit card over to the young woman and when she returned it after starting the pump, I engaged in the casual chit-chat that we often do. 

"How you doin' with the rain and the wind?" I asked her. 

"I have one more hour to go, and I can't wait because even my socks are all wet already" she replied. 

These are not warm rains--it was just about 47 degrees. To be outside in the rain in wet socks at that temperature, versus me in the warmth and comfort of my car ... I reached into my bag, took out a chocolate bar, and gave her that while adding "hey, I hope this will warm you up."

"Thanks so much" she said.  Her facial response itself made it a worthwhile gas station stop.

The larger picture on unemployment and income inequality in the US is not looking good at all.   

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

Stephen Colbert explains Rand Paul's Nothingness :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Nothingness
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

How do they do such satire?  Wonderful creativity--watch out for that yin/yang humor in this piece :)

Poverty, generosity, and respect

Another gem from Subhashitani:

दाता लघुरपि सेव्यो भवति न कृपणो महानपि समृद्ध्या ।
कूपोऽतः स्वादुजलः प्रीत्यै लोकस्य न समुद्रः ॥

- पञ्चतंत्र, मित्रसंप्राप्ति

Even if a generous person is poor, he is to be treated with respect. A miser deserves no respect even if he is rich and prosperous. People like water from a small well but not from the mighty ocean.

- Panchatantra, Mitrasamprapti

Worse than the Swine Flu. Lots.

My niece asked me whether the Swine flu was really a huge issue. I told her something like this: It has the potential to become huge. However, it is gaining so much attention because of the potential in the rich countries. Otherwise, nobody would really care. Which is why malaria or other diseases that kill people by the thousands every day in poor countries barely register a blip in the global health radar.

Case in point: an outbreak of diarrhea has already killed more people in one Indian state than the Swine flu has killed in the entire country.

The deaths have been reported in several villages in Kalahandi district, Health Minister Prasanna Acharya said.

Local newspapers put the death toll at 38. Health officials say 237 people suffering from the disease have been admitted to hospitals.

Diarrhoea is a major killer in the world and is thought to be responsible for around 4% of all deaths.

Yet, all the attention is on Swine flu :-(

China's industrial revolution