Ferraris for all

Who has the Financial Times got blogging on this week’s Millennium Development Goals conference at the United Nations in New York? None other than Bono and his sidekick, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

Bono describes his week ahead as follows: “A sleepless cocktail of rabble-rousing, meetings with politicians, chief executives, faith leaders and NGOs. People such as Nicolas Sarkozy, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania and Gordon Brown.” It seems that not only does he regard himself as extremely important but senior politicians, businesspeople and religious leaders do too.

A few things to note about this week in relation to the conference:

* The Clinton Global Initiative looks like it will play a prominent role. Clinton - Bill rather than Hillary - will be appearing on the Daily Show on Tuesday to promote the campaign. It is billed as: “the almost first husband talks about the Clinton Global Initiative”.

* According to Bono there will be a “historic and innovative announcement on malaria on Thursday”. I would guess it probably has something to do with anti-malarial bednets.

Labels: America, celebrities, development, economics, health

No doubt the new report on global health inequalities by a commission backed by the World Health Organization (WHO) will repay close study. It is a comprehensive work on an important subject. It also looks certain that some will use the fact that there is not a 100% clear correlation between income levels and health as a way of downplaying the importance of economic growth. To quote the press release:

“Wealth alone does not have to determine the health of a nation's population. Some low-income countries such as Cuba, Costa Rica, China, state of Kerala in India and Sri Lanka have achieved levels of good health despite relatively low national incomes.”

Thankfully the report is not as laughably crude as the leader in today’s Guardian which almost reduces the question to unhealthy lifestyles and even low self esteem:

“We know now that people do not only die of coronary heart disease because of a failure on the part of their local hospital. Such deaths reflect unhealthy lifestyles, and unhealthy lifestyles are often connected to poor education, bad housing, low-paid work and the low self-esteem that accompany them.”

The arguments put forward by the likes of Michael Marmot, the chairman of he WHO commission, and Amartya Sen, a member of the commission, are more sophisticated and harder to take up.

Labels: development, health, inequality

It’s always nice to be proved right on something but it doesn’t often happen right on cue. After noting in yesterday’s post that inequality is a big debate in America many competing views have been expressed in relation to the Poverty, Income and Health Insurance report published by the US Census Bureau.

The New York Times ran a leader entitled “Where’s the Prosperity?” arguing that the benefits of wealth need to be widely shared:

“What is clear is that economic growth alone will not cut it for most American families. The benefits must be shared more broadly. This means more progressive taxation, increasing access to affordable health care, investing more in public education. “

Meanwhile, Mark Thoma on the Economists View blog has done a good job of summarising responses to the report including those of Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong.

Labels: America, economics, health, inequality

The cover story of the July-August issue of Harvard Magazine is a piece by Elizabeth Gudrais on American inequality. Compare it to last Friday’s post.

Labels: America, health, inequality

Pranab Bardhan, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, has an interesting article in the Boston Review (“What makes a miracle” January / February 2008) on myths of Chinese and Indian development. His concern is to show the misconceptions in the standard account of recent rapid growth in China and India. He describes the orthodoxy as follows:

“The answer that continues to dominate public discussion in the United States runs along the following lines: decades of socialist controls and regulations stifled enterprise in India and China and led them to a dead end. A mix of market reforms and global integration finally unleashed their entrepreneurial energies. As these giants shook off their “socialist slumber,” they entered the “flattened” playing field of global capitalism. The result has been high economic growth in both countries and correspondingly large declines in poverty.”

However, for Bardhan the facts do not fully correspond with the account. For example, “China has indeed made large strides in foreign trade and investment since the 1990s, but well before then, say between 1978 and 1993, the country had already achieved an average annual growth rate of about nine percent.” And in relation to poverty reduction in China he argues that: “World Bank estimates suggest that two-thirds of the decline in extremely poor people (those living below the admittedly crude poverty line of one dollar a day per capita at 1993 international parity prices) between 1981 and 2004 had taken place by the mid-1980s. Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s may have been principally the result of domestic factors that have little if anything to do with global integration: a spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, in which output increased at 7.1% per year on average between 1979 and 1984, almost triple the 1970-78 rate; a land reform program, involving a highly egalitarian distribution of land-cultivation rights subject only to differences in regional average and family size, which provided a floor for rural income; and increased farm procurement prices.”

He makes similar points in relation to India. For instance. “As for poverty, the latest Indian household survey data suggest that the rate of decline, if anything, slowed somewhat in 1993-2005—the period of global integration—compared with the ’70s and ’80s. Moreover, some non-income indicators of poverty such as those relating to child health, already rather dismal, have hardly improved in recent years.”

There are many other points in the article that are worth pondering.

Labels: Asia, china, development, economics, health, inequality

Unicef’s latest annual report on The state of the world’s children (PDF) reveals enormous improvements in infant mortality. Evidently the number of deaths of children under five fell from about 20m in 1960 - the earliest year for which such figures are available - to under 10m in 2006. This despite a large increase in total population over the period. Between 1990 and 2006 infant mortality fell by 23% to 93 deaths per 1,000 live births to 72.

Clearly the figures could and should fall much further still. But it would be wrong to underplay what has already been achieved.

Labels: development, health, progress

The current Economist (19 December) has an article savaging those who romanticise hunter-gatherer societies. It argues against the view put forward by the likes of Jared Diamond that the development of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history.

Evidently in the 1970s some experts began to argue that the advent of agriculture led to a decline in human health – as people were short of protein and caught diseases from domestic animals – and the emergence of significant social inequalities. However, it now seems that hunter-gatherer societies were exceedingly violent:

“Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.” (For another reference to Keeley’s work see post of 30 July 2006. On living conditions before the Industrial Revolution see 14 August 2006 and 7 April 2007 posts).

The Economist also makes an interesting parallel with the Industrial Revolution:

“When rural peasants swapped their hovels for the textile mills of Lancashire, did it feel like an improvement? The Dickensian view is that factories replaced a rural idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and illness. Factories were indeed miserable and the urban poor were overworked and underfed. But they had flocked to take the jobs in factories often to get away from the cold, muddy, starving rural hell of their birth.”

Labels: cities, happiness, health, inequality, progress

In contrast to the gloom in the previous entry, Dick Taverne, a Liberal Democrat Peer and chair of Sense about Science, has written a defence of Genetically Modified (GM) agriculture for the November issue of Prospect magazine:

“Seldom has public perception been more out of line with the facts. The public in Britain and Europe seems unaware of the astonishing success of GM crops in the rest of the world. No new agricultural technology in recent times has spread faster and more widely. Only a decade after their commercial introduction, GM crops are now cultivated in 22 countries on over 100m hectares (an area more than four times the size of Britain) by over 10m farmers, of whom 9m are resource-poor farmers in developing countries, mainly India and China. Most of these small-scale farmers grow pest-resistant GM cotton. In India alone, production tripled last year to over 3.6m hectares. This cotton benefits farmers because it reduces the need for insecticides, thereby increasing their income and also improving their health. It is true that the promised development of staple GM food crops for the developing world has been delayed, but this is not because of technical flaws. It is principally because GM crops, unlike conventional crops, must overcome costly, time-consuming and unnecessary regulatory obstacles before they can be licensed.”

Labels: health, technology

Good news on malaria. An Economist article raises the possibility of a vaccine to eradicate the disease.

Labels: health

Helene Guldberg writing in the latest spiked review of books reviews several works arguing, among other things, that affluence is damaging children’s lives. Guldberg counters that the problems are exaggerated and on balance children have benefited immensely from greater affluence.

A particularly interesting passage looks at how the idea of childhood can be seen as relatively new. She discusses the work of Philippe Aries, a French historian, who she describes as arguing: “In the seventeenth century the modern view of childhood first emerged, but it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the advent and extension of compulsory schooling and a corresponding decline in child labour, that childhood really existed in the modern sense.”

Labels: affluenza, book, health, progress, spiked

Growth sceptics sometimes make the point that life expectancy in America is lower than in many less rich countries. The implication is that countries stop benefiting from greater wealth beyond a certain point. But an article in Real Clear Politics by John Stossel throws a different light on this discussion. He argues that factors such as America’s high murder rate and the high number of car accidents – in other words factors not related to affluence – skew the statistics for American life expectancy.

Stossel’s concern is to defend America’s health care system. But there is a case for looking at the relationship of life expectancy and affluence more generally.

Labels: America, health

The Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper, leads today with the strange headline: “Blood pressure epidemic spiralling as doctors warn our lifestyle is killing us”. Although it may be true that the number of Britons with high blood pressure is soaring the article clearly lacks perspective. It remains the case that life expectancy is rising overall. So it is hard to see how the headline can be true except in the obvious sense that most of us could be said to have a modern lifestyle and we all eventually die.

As it happens the Lancet, a British medical journal from which the Mail drew its material for the article, does argue that hypertension is becoming more of a problem. However, it also points out that there are very effective and cost-effective treatments available.

To the extent there is a problem it needs to be put in its proper context.

Labels: health

The Economist challenges the common distinction between the diseases of the rich and the diseases of the poor in its current issue (9 August). Poor countries are increasingly suffering as a result of chronic diseases while infectious ones become relatively less important. The main reason for this shift seems to be rising life expectancy in the poorer countries – so in many ways the shift can be seen as a sign of success. But people in the poor countries tend to get chronic diseases earlier than in the rich ones and they have a more deadly effect.

“Heart disease—supposedly an illness of affluence—is by far and away the biggest cause of global mortality. It was responsible for 17.5m deaths worldwide in 2005. Next comes cancer, another non-infectious sickness, which caused more deaths than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria put together (see chart 1). Chronic conditions such as heart disease took the lives of 35m people in 2005, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO)—twice as many as all infectious diseases.”

“If you look at lower-middle income countries, such as China, or upper-middle income ones, like Argentina, you find that what kills people there is the same as in the West (see chart 2). Four-fifths of all deaths in China are from chronic sicknesses. That is also true of countries as varied as Egypt, Jamaica and Sri Lanka.

"The main difference between these countries and rich ones is that chronic illnesses are more deadly there. Five times as many people die of heart disease in Brazil as in Britain, though Brazil is not five times as populous. Rich countries have become better at dealing with chronic conditions: death rates from heart disease among men over 30 have fallen by more than half in the past generation, from 600-800 per 100,000 in 1970 to 200-300 per 100,000 now.

"This has not happened in middle-income countries. In 1980 the death rate for Brazilian men was below the rich-country average (300 compared with 500-600). Its death rate has not changed—and is now higher than all but a few rich countries. Russia is worse off. In 1980 its death rate was 750 per 100,000. Now it is 900, about four times as high as most rich countries."

Only in Africa are infectious diseases killing more people than chronic conditions. But even among low income countries the balance is likely to shift over the next few years.

Labels: Africa, development, health

Good news in the fight against malaria. Scientists have shown, at least in principle, that genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes could help quell the disease. Scientists in the lab have created a malaria-resistant mosquito that can better survive than those carrying the disease. According to a BBC online article:

“GM mosquitoes that interfered with development of the malaria parasite would make it more difficult for the organism to become re-established after it had been eradicated from a target area, they said.”

Labels: development, health, technology

Spiked has published my interview with Indur Goklany, the author of the excellent The Improving State of the World (Cato 2007).

Labels: book, health, progress, spiked

My review of Indur Goklany's Improving the State of the World (Cato 2007) for Fund Strategy magazine (15 January 2007) can be found below. An article based on an interview with Goklany should appear in spiked later on this week:

One of the great tragedies of contemporary life is that we are gripped by what could be called the "miserabilist tendency". There is a pervasive sense that things are generally worse than in the past and the outlook for the future is even more negative. This bleak view is embodied in popular books such as Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur's Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? (Time Warner 2005). Unfortunately, it is not just them. The whiners, who would previously have been assigned the status of pub bore, have become hugely influential in policy making, the media and academia.

Under such circumstances Indur Goklany, an American policy analyst, has written a genuinely important book. From a careful analysis of masses of data he shows that life for human beings is better than ever before. Of course the world is far from perfect. But the combination of economic growth and technological development could make things better still in the future.

The inclusion of so many statistics does not make for easy reading but it is worth the effort. Statistics are not perfect but they are necessary to help overcome impressionism. Too many people rely on a vague sense of how they think life today compares with the past. Far better to look at the hard data. Perhaps the single most important set of statistics relate to life expectancy. It is staggering to realise the average life expectancy in the world before the industrial era was 20-30 years. In other words, the average person would be lucky to reach the age of 30. By 2003 the figure had risen to 66.8 years. So thanks to growing prosperity the average person had more than doubled their lifespan, with an extra 36.8 or more years of life.

Of course there remain inequalities between the rich countries and the developing world. The average person in the developing world today lives 63.4 years - although this is still more than double that in the pre-industrial era - compared with 75.6 years in the developed world. However, today's gap of 12.2 years between the two compares with 25.2 years in the early 1950s. Both sets of populations are living longer, although the gap between the two is narrowing.

A similar trend is apparent in relation to infant mortality. In the pre-industrial era it was more than 200 per thousand live births - more than 20% of babies died before reaching their first birthday. It was a common experience for parents to see their babies die. Today the global average figure is 56.8 and in the developed world it is 7.1

The single most important factor behind these improvements is the spectacular rise in agricultural productivity. Food is cheaper and more easily available than ever despite massive increases in the world's population. For example, average daily food supplies rose from a global average of 2,254 calories per person in 1961 to 2,804 calories in 2002. Whereas food supplies in the developed world rose by 24% over that period, the increase for developing countries was 38%.

The improving trend disguises some remaining tragedies. Globally more than 850 million people are undernourished - they cannot meet their basic needs for energy or protein. About 3.75 million deaths a year can be attributed to insufficient food supplies.

Under such circumstances, Goklany is strongly in favour of genetically modified crops. He argues that such technology could boost agricultural productivity still further, making it possible to feed more people better than ever before.

He also dismisses health and environmental concerns in relation to GM as unfounded. On health he points out that 300 million Americans and tens of millions of visitors have consumed GM food with no apparent ill effects since 1996. If there are any as yet undiscovered problems, they are likely to be hugely outweighed by the benefits of higher agricultural productivity.

The Improving State of the World also argues that greater use of GM crops could be better for the environment. If less land is needed to produce food then more will be available for forestry and other uses. This greater availability of unfarmed land could also bolster biodiversity.

Although Goklany's book is heavy in its use of figures it would be wrong to see it as a statistical almanac. It includes useful and insightful arguments too. For example, it argues that economic development is typically characterised by an "environmental transition". In the early stages of development, as countries industrialise and urbanise, their environments tend to worsen. But then, as they become more prosperous, the environment generally improves.

Most key indicators follow this trend. For instance, British cities were hellish places to live when Charles Dickens was writing in the mid-nineteenth century. Goklany quotes a passage from the The Old Curiosity Shop describing a London darkened by coal dust and factory smoke. It should also be remembered that at that time diseases such as cholera and typhoid, carried by polluted water, were rife. In contrast, London today is an immensely clean and healthy place. And even third-world cities are much better than Victorian London as they have learned from the experience of the developed world.

Goklany uses the concept of environmental transition to draw astute conclusions about future possibilities. He concedes that the world's fish stocks are currently on the wrong side of the environmental transition, with supplies dwindling through over-fishing. However, the conclusion he draws is the need to develop modern aquaculture - farming the sea using modern technology - just as agriculture was developed in the past. That way the productivity of food production from the sea could rise enormously.

The Improving State of the World is an excellent antidote to the painful whining of the miserabilist tendency. The world is far from perfect but complaining about how bad everything is only reinforces cynicism rather than opening the way to improving things further.

Labels: book, economics, Fund Strategy, health, progress, review, spiked

Science about Science, an independent charity, has produced an excellent leaflet with scientists debunking some of the pseudo-scientific claims made by celebrities. For instance, David Baddiel, Melinda Messenger and Sharron Davies have all complained that their bodies contain dangerous chemicals. What they neglect to mention is that the exposure is so tiny it will not have any damaging effect on their health. And Jamie Oliver says he prefers organic food because it is “grown with nature”. Yet all our crops and domestic animals have been created by selective breeding over 10,000 years.

Labels: health, science

There follows a review by me of George Monbiot’s Heat (Allen Lane 2006) from the 13 November issue of Fund Strategy magazine. James Heartfield also did a particularly astute review of the book for spiked.

It is almost possible to feel sorry for George Monbiot. The government's Stern report on the economics of climate change has overshadowed the climate campaigner and Guardian columnist's book on the same topic. The report is more thoroughly grounded in mainstream science and certainly more rigorous in its economics.

Nevertheless, there are reasons why it is worth reading Monbiot's book, Heat, alongside Stern. Whereas Sir Nicholas Stern is constrained by diplomatic considerations - he has to be guarded in what he says as his is a government report - Monbiot can be blunt.

Arguably Monbiot is more honest about the impact of a strategy based on curbing energy demand than Stern. Both Stern and Monbiot argue a broadly similar line, although the details and some of the conclusions they draw are different.

Monbiot's starting point is the incorrect assumption that there is a trade-off between popular prosperity and curbing climate change's impact. His premise leads to the conclusion that austerity and authoritarianism are needed to deal with global warming:

"For the campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all the public protests which have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. It is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves" (p215).

If humanity's survival depended on accepting austerity and dictatorship, perhaps these twin evils could be justified. But any such case would have to be incredibly strong since the strategy proposed by Monbiot, apart from anything else, would leave much of the world in dire poverty.

It should not be forgotten that, according to World Bank figures, a billion people still live on less than one dollar a day and 2.7 billion live on less than two dollars. Such poverty has terrible consequences for the health, longevity and well-being of the bulk of the world's population. In addition, rationing and curbing democracy are objectionable in principle.

As it happens, Monbiot's science is rather ropey. His argument that by 2030 the rich countries need to cut carbon emissions by 90% seems to be based on calculations by Colin Forrest, "who is not a professional climate scientist but appears to have done his homework" (p15-16). Monbiot does not say who Forrest is but, judging from a search on Google, he appears to be a member of Friends of the Earth in Scotland.

But even if the 90% figure is correct, it does not follow that Monbiot's strategy is right. Imposing austerity means, by definition, making the world poorer. But the reality is that the richer we are, the better a position we will be in to tackle climate change.

Monbiot is wrong to argue that global warming should be seen as a priority above all others. It is not an isolated challenge but linked to the more general struggle for social progress. Mass affluence is good in its own right, while also enabling humanity to have greater control over nature.

The need for more prosperity is particularly acute in the developing world. Not only would the abolition of poverty be good in itself but it would also put such societies in a better position to tackle global warming. They would have more resources at their disposal and more diversified economies.

But Monbiot uses the poor as an argument for austerity in the West. "By turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school, driving to the shops, we are condemning other people to death. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these acts without passion or intent" (p22). Such moralising is unhelpful and off-putting.

Contrary to Monbiot's argument, it is both possible and desirable to promote prosperity and tackle climate change at the same time. Indeed, the two are inextricably linked.

The key challenge is to find ways of substantially bolstering energy supplies while controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, such technologies already exist. Although no doubt they could be considerably improved, it is already possible to supply far more power with existing technology. Scientists and engineers are in the best position to identify the best mix of technologies, but an outline of possibilities is already feasible.

Nuclear power is likely to play a role. Although care must be taken when disposing of the waste, it has the potential to provide huge amounts of electricity without greenhouse emissions.

Further into the future, it might be possible to generate power from nuclear fusion (fusing together atoms) rather than fission (splitting atoms apart). Fusion's advantage is that its waste is water, not heavy radioactive materials.

Hydroelectric power is another existing form of energy that does not emit greenhouse gases. It has lost popularity in recent years as environmentalists have campaigned against it. But in many places it can provide abundant electricity.

Even fossil fuels can be made more green. Carbon capture and storage means emissions can be removed from power stations that use fossil fuels. They can then be stored underground or under the sea bed.

More prosperity would also provide the resources to help humanity adapt to climate change's effects. For example, Bangladesh could have modern flood defences similar to those already used in the Netherlands. Human settlements could be moved to higher ground if threatened by flooding in their present locations.

Monbiot's misanthropic outlook means he either downplays these possibilities or ignores them completely. He has a dim view of human beings and their capacity to use ingenuity to transform their environment for the better.

Rather than seeing the promotion of mass affluence and tackling climate change as contradictory, they should be viewed as part of the same challenge. The drive for popular prosperity puts humanity in a better position to deal with environmental problems.

Labels: book, energy, environment, Fund Strategy, health, review, spiked

Monitoring the alleged sins of modern life

It seems that fatties are not just damaging themselves but destroying the earth too. An article in the New York Times quotes recent research to this effect (Gina Kolata “For a world of woes, we blame cookie monsters” 29 October):

“This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

“Their conclusion is in the same vein as a letter published last year in The American Journal of Public Health. Its authors, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much extra fuel airlines spend hauling around fatter Americans. The answer, they wrote, based on the extra 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990’s, is 350 million gallons, which means an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide.”

Thankfully some people are willing to defend the fatties. The November issue of Reason has a review of two books arguing that critics should lay off (Jacob Sullum “Lay off the fatties”). It contends that the obesity discussion is unnecessarily alarmist.

Labels: consumption, health, obesity, sin tracker

Some 1 billion people do not have access to safe water and 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation, according to a report by Unicef. This lack of access to clean water and sanitation contributes to the deaths of 1.5 million children under the age of five from diarrhoea every year. Young women and girls can also spend several hours a day carrying water to their communities. In sub-Saharan Africa less than half the rural population has access to safe water.

Labels: development, health, water

Philanthropy seems to be in fashion. Bill and Melinda Gates have donated huge amounts to ending global poverty. Warren Buffett has followed their lead. Bono and Bobby Shriver seem to be trying to popularise the movement further with their Product Red campaign.

The latest high profile event in London is Tuesday’s Fortune Forum dinner at Billingsgate including Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas, Deepak Chopra (spiritual guru), Zac Goldsmith (eco-toff and editor of the Ecologist), and a comeback performance by Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens). For those who are interested prices start at only £1,000 a plate.

On the face of it what could be wrong here? The wealthy are giving substantial amounts of money to worthwhile causes such as curing AIDS and malaria, tackling climate change and reducing global inequality. But closer examination shows that a dirty deal is implicit in this arrangement: the rich will give a little money to the poorest of the poor in return for the mass of the population giving up the ambition of broader development. Unpicking this arrangement will be one of my tasks over the coming months.

Labels: debt, development, ethics, health, inequality

A useful reminder in today’s Wall Street Journal Europe (subscription required) about the scourge of malaria and how it can be solved by economic development. Evidently malaria afflicts half a billion people a year and kills a million of them. One way to deal with the disease it to spray DDT, a pesticide, but such action is vetoed by environmentalists. The article also quotes Roger Bate, of Africa Fighting Marlaria, explaining the link between fighting malaria and economic development:

"We eradicated malaria in Malaysia in the '50s and '60s, and in Singapore at the same time. It came back in Malaysia in the '70s but not in Singapore, and the reason it came back is that there wasn't enough wealth for people to have screens on the windows. Singapore's economy, however, grew rapidly, and there isn't a problem there anymore."

Labels: Asia, development, health, progress, technology

Reading further on the work of Robert Fogel (see dispatch on July 30) I have discovered the useful concept of technophysioevolution. As I explain in the comment in the latest issue of Fund Strategy (August 7):

“The trend of improving morbidity is clear from the work of Robert Fogel, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and a federally funded project on ‘Early indicators of later work levels, disease and death’.

“Fogel's work shows that in an 80-year period - comparing those born in the mid-nineteenth century with those born in the early twentieth century - American life expectancy increased by 6.6 years. Over the same period the average age of the onset of common conditions such as arthritis, heart disease and respiratory problems increased by 10 years.

“Some researchers have even suggested a theory of "technophysioevolution" to explain these trends. As humans gain greater control over their environment there are rapid improvements in both mortality and morbidity.”

Also his March 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper on Changes in the physiology of aging during the twentieth century looks like a useful update of his previous work. A summary can be found in the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health .

Labels: America, economics, Fund Strategy, health, progress