Trickling ...

Interestingly, no one has admitted supporting 'trickle down' economic theory.  The actual category is 'supply side economics'.   There's been discussion and accusation for more than a century about such practices, but the critical concern through it all is policy and regulation favoring the wealthy and corporate interests.  Particularly since the 1970's, wealth has flowed to the top 10% at the expense of the bottom 90%.

The result of those decades, the GAP, the deadly end-product of it.  It has spread like a plague through the developed and developing world.

All's fair in love and football.

Football!
Play to win.
  Winning is good.
    That's competition.

As long as you don't underinflate the ball or have too many guys on the field ... you know how it works; it's fair, and losing is just a disappointment.  No big deal; nobody dies.

But what if they did?  What if life depended on winning the game?

What if all the players on the winning team got jobs and homes in a nice neighborhood, and what if the losers never got a fulltime job or a decent place to live ... would that still be fair? Depends on the rules, doesn't it.  If the rules say it's okay, well, that's fair.  That's the way it works.

Ever wonder about competition?  It's a centerpiece in our economy and culture, but sometimes it starts doing damage.  And people die.

It two farmers sell corn competitively, the lower priced stuff will sell first.  That's fair.
But what if one farmer got subsidies and the other one didn't?    That's NAFTA, and more than a million Mexican family farms went broke; they couldn't compete.  The families abandoned their homes and migrated elsewhere, usually to the cities, looking for work and survival.  It hasn't gone well.

In a small country near the equator with rich soil and good rain, people struggle for food because competition has dedicated their land to producing mostly exports, and competitive fishing has depleted their territorial waters.  Foreigners own much of their land, and the income generated by productivity goes to corporations outside the country.

So then, playing by the rules, is that good enough?

International finance and trade are troublesome today.  Since about 1980, business competition has escalated radically in the pursuit of profit to the detriment of both employees and customers.  When it crosses country boundaries, it's even more volatile. At the core, it's a competition for resource extraction and profit by corporations that are bigger than countries.  Unintended consequences happen on a large scale and continuously.    

One example among many, national attempts (World Bank) (Vox.Eu) at dealing with price spikes in the real food markets do as much harm as good.  They're trying to minimize the impact of price fluctuations on the poor, but the folks at the bottom of the income ladder are the ones who are the most adversely affected by the results, of course.

Do your own inquiry.

Samantha Powers, before she was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., asserted that "we're neither the shining example, or even competent meddlers.  It's going to take a generation or so to reclaim American exceptionalism..."  A generation?  Or do we perhaps need a better goal and a better plan.

As things change which they must, what might we do as individuals?  There are plenty of opportunities to make a difference, are there not?




You might appreciate Humanomics 101
All are created equal, but few are treated equally.
If we're to love one another, can we do this degree of competition?

Fit in.

Fit in.  That's the pressure point 
  in most venues 
    on most issues 
      for most folks 
        most of the time.  
It's the right path, perhaps. 
Cooperation, collaboration, careful compromise ... it's a fragile world, a vulnerable culture, and difficult times for us all.

Hogwash.  Life is filled with opportunity, end to end, wall to wall, and as far as the eye can see.    Be the person you know you should be, not the one you squash into some corner.  


Every life moment needs a hero, does it not? 

Say what's right, always, and with a good heart ...
 º  it might help you see the way forward,
   º   it might turn a friend to the right path,
     º    it might turn a business down a better road,
       º     and it might change something really big into
                  something really great.     

Turn on your best light. :) 
  
(and don't be a butthead about it, but that's an entirely different subject.)

And here's a perhaps refreshing way to start the day.
Notice the full engagement by the young folks.
Encouraging stuff. 

Care for an example? You might appreciate Recent Past Remembered
Or an ancient understanding which As a youngster, I was told with a smile ...

Curious how poverty works?

In a report published this month by the Brookings institute, we're offered a look at American poverty for adults aged 25 to 61.

Let's consider how certain disadvantages might combine to make life more difficult. How do those play out across racial categories? Not surprisingly, such impediments tend to afflict blacks and hispanics more than whites. Here's the list:

1.                 Low household income 

(Less than 1.5 x the poverty line)

2.               Limited education 

(Less than a high school)

3.               Lack of health insurance

4.               Low income area 

(Area poverty rate 20+ percent)

5.                Household unemployment

About half of us in America encountered at least one of these disadvantages in the inquiry year, 2014. But, if you are black or hispanic, you were about twice as likely to face that disadvantage as your white acquaintance.

Moving on to those occasions of dealing with two or more such obstacles to upward progress, the racial gap widens.  Most white adults don't face any of the five difficulties, most black and hispanic adults do.

Black residents are more likely to live in a poor area and perhaps in a jobless family.   Hispanics are more likely to lack a high school education and perhaps health insurance as well.  Why is that?  Are they welcomed differently or treated differently?

If we're going to understand and deal with inequality and with poverty, understanding the difficulties a family might face will help us know how to help with government and organizational assistance efforts.  And individual efforts as well will benefit from understanding.  Change makers and help bringers must be knowledgeable and skilled.

America measures poverty with an income-only yardstick.  Are they missing some important details?  Of course.  

"A more multifaceted approach to measuring poverty, like the one offered here, reveals some of the insights that can be gained in the U.S. by framing the issue more broadly—from revealing the deep racial and ethnic disparities that exist to shedding light on the differing dimensions of disadvantage experienced from one group to the next." ~Brookings, Richard V. Reeves, Edward Rodrigue and Elizabeth Kneebone | April 14, 2016

Helping without hurting isn't simply a money handout, is it.  The most extraordinarily counterproductive attempt to help might be just giving money without plan or goal.  The only less informed position would be to just tell them to get a job.

Poor

'Poor' is not a character flaw.  

It's a container.

No one chooses to live without enough to feed their family.  No one chooses to live where it isn't safe and there are dangerous people influencing their children. No one chooses to prevent their children from having a better life.

Poverty is done to you by others, most often by neglect. Opportunity is denied to you by others; fair treatment, fair education, fair wages, acceptance, support, encouragement, a hand up and a way out ... those things are denied by culture, prejudice, policy, and practices of governments who favor the wealthy at the expense of most others.  It trickles up, not down, and the injustice persists from generation to generation.

We can make a difference, we can perhaps help break the container if we can climb above common thinking, common acceptance of such practices.  Uncommon might be better.  So what specifically might we do?




Change makers and help bringers have more fun.

The century's deadliest idea

In 1970, Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman declared that the purpose of business was profit, exclusively and without apology.  Wages have stagnated since then as employers have taken his advice and prioritized profit and shareholder value over everything else in their business model.

Milton Friedman at the establishment of the International Monetary Market (IMM), the world’s first
 in foreign currencies.

"No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times...."  ~Forbes, Denning
Among the most destructive turns in national history, our subsequent and almost exclusive focus on corporate profit changed not just our business environment but our culture.  It has spread through the developed world and into the developing world.

The visible effect, the widening GAP between the wealthy and all the rest.  The unintended consequence, a death toll that goes far beyond that of all the century's wars combined.*

Among our children today, 21,000 die daily.  More than 100 million have died since the turn of the century, and perhaps twice that many more since Friedman's pronouncement.

The killers are poverty, hunger, easily preventable health issues, and malnutrition. Despite the scale of this daily/ongoing catastrophe, it rarely manages to achieve, much less sustain, prime-time, headline coverage.

It wouldn't be fair to blame Friedman, of course.  He was just reducing the factors of finance to the functionally relevant ones.  Friedman never intended or expected the transformation we've seen, and I doubt he would approve.  Economics since the 1980's is math and money and winning.

From UNICEF, the world’s premier children’s organization, part of the United Nations, we find that:

• 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation
• 1 billion children are deprived of one or more services essential to survival and development
• 148 million under age 5 in developing regions are underweight for their age
• 101 million children are not attending primary school, with more girls than boys missing out
• 22 million infants are not protected from diseases by routine immunization
• 7.6 million children worldwide died before their 5th birthday in 2010
• 4 million newborns worldwide are dying in the first month of life
• 2 million children under 15 are living with HIV
• >500,000 women die each year from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth
• All the above are after years of improvement.  Some countries have made significant advances in health and nutrition.  Others have lost ground.   

 *Death by war in the 20th century is estimated at 200+ million.  The death toll from preventable causes among children under age five and just since 1970 exceeds 300 million, and that is just the children.  Each one was a great loss to their family. Across populations, death and suffering from poverty, economic inequality, and disenfranchisement (all unnecessary and addressable) are beyond measure.  Or excuse.

While there are many difficult problems associated with poverty, it's worth remembering that poverty from generation to generation is not chosen by the victims, it is chosen by policy makers and imposed by rules of trade and finance.  

______________________________________________

20 APR 2016 -- This morning with my doctor, he was lamenting the changes in medical practice that he'd seen in his 30 years.  The science is magnificent, but the business has changed, he explained.  It used to be about the patients, it was a service, not a business.  Doctors entered the field because they wanted to help, to make a difference, to save and improve lives.  Today, healthcare is a business about the money and not about the patient's needs.  It's a business like every other.

Note: Despite the Nobel Prize, Friedman's premise turns out to have been problematic. It changed big business, and it took almost half a century to see that it wasn't going to work well.

Following Friedman's philosophy and theory, Jack Welch made GE the largest corporation in the world, and in 1999 was named CEO of the century. "It turned out that the fabulous returns of GE during the Welch era were obtained in part by the risky financial leverage of GE Capital, which would have collapsed in 2008 if it had not been for a government bailout."

"In due course, Jack Welch himself came to be one of the strongest critics of shareholder value. On March 12, 2009, he gave an interview with Francesco Guerrera of the Financial Times and said, “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world." ~Forbes, Denning

Much in popular economic theory has fallen flat. Supply-side and trickle-down are perhaps the most familiar failures. Meanwhile, the GAP widens.

Things are changing, and it is going to be different. Whether it will be better or not remains to be seen. Our great concern remains, how will we treat the poor and deal with persistent and imposed poverty?