Stephen Moore, opines in today's WSJ about a new United Nations report, "State of the Future". Of it he says:
A new United Nations report called "State of the Future" concludes: "People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer."Yes, of course, there was the obligatory bad news: Global warming is said to be getting worse and income disparities are widening. But the joyous trends in health and wealth documented in the report indicate a gigantic leap forward for humanity. This is probably the first time you've heard any of this because--while the grim "Global 2000" and "Limits to Growth" reports were deemed worthy of headlines across the country--the media mostly ignored the good news and the upbeat predictions of "State of the Future."
But here they are: World-wide illiteracy rates have fallen by half since 1970 and now stand at an all-time low of 18%. More people live in free countries than ever before. The average human being today will live 50% longer in 2025 than one born in 1955.To what do we owe this improvement? Capitalism, according to the U.N. Free trade is rightly recognized as the engine of global prosperity in recent years. In 1981, 40% of the world's population lived on less than $1 a day. Now that percentage is only 25%, adjusted for inflation. And at current rates of growth, "world poverty will be cut in half between 2000 and 2015"--which is arguably one of the greatest triumphs in human history. Trade and technology are closing the global "digital divide," and the report notes hopefully that soon laptop computers will cost $100 and almost every schoolchild will be a mouse click away from the Internet (and, regrettably, those interminable computer games).
It seems almost too good to believe that things are getting better. So programmed are we to bad news that good news seems almost impossible, inconceivable, and suspect. With that in mind I decided to look more at the actual report - at the context.... Here is the opening paragraph of the executive summary:
People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, and increasingly connected and they are living longer, but at the same time the world is more corrupt, congested, warmer, and increasingly dangerous. Although the digital divide is beginning to close, income gaps are still expanding around the world and unemployment continues to grow.
Ok, so it isn't quite as rosy as Mr. Moore writes...
Although the majority of the world is improving economically, income disparities are still enormous: 2% of the world’s richest people own more than 50% of the world’s wealth, while the poorest 50% of people own 1%. And the income of the 225 richest people in the world is equal to that of the poorest 2.7 billion, 40% of the world.
This is a little more than "the obligatory bad news". There is actually a lot more bad news in the report - huge threats to continued growth, huge threats to life, huge threats of war and so on.
But at the end of the day Mr. Moore is more right than he is wrong. There is much good news in this UN report and our progress should be lauded because for many, many people things have gotten better and that is objectively good. We need this kind of hope because if we are all lead to believe that things are only going to get worse it becomes very easy to just give up and declare efforts to help futile.
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Skipchurch these are different times and I agree with your last paragraph but for me the solution is our default policy should be no tax, no tariff no regulation and a very good, clear and transparent reason for any deviation. Mind you, that's how I vote. What I expect is thievery by workers, lawyers and businessfolk supported by protectionism, regulations and border enforcement.
One of my favorite political quotes is from Adam Smith. I don't have time to look up the exact words but the substance is that businessmen cry fervently for open markets and yet two cannot share a table without conspiring against the public.
Doug, I guess you are content to do without pure food and drug regulation,the SEC, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals, interstate highways, the Coast Guard, national parks, regulations against sweat shops-child labor-etc, the Centers for Disease Control, etc etc... things that most people value as federal government services and would never ever be sacrificed to get no taxes & no regulation.
Don't think I'm not sympsthetic-- I was a Cato Institute supporter for years and years, from it's inception. Now that might be because I like o see a certain type of conservative to get hammered from the libertarian side! But be that as it may... And I like Ron Paul in a perverse kind of way. I very much WANT these libertarian ideas out there all the time. I WANT individual liberty to be a keystone of our political thinking. What I grow in my garden is my business. But the bottom line is that the libertarian utopia is so far from having any political reality as to be almost a kind of crackpotism in the mind of most voters. So I think those with a libertarian bent have to accommodate to that reality.
If I read you right, you see-- as I do-- a kind of anti-democratic Big Government Authoritarianism as the biggest peril. That, and a political elite seemingly devoid of principles of any kind whatsoever.
Uh, no Skipchurch. Default doesn't mean universal. I am troubled that so little is done to measure the benefit of government programs, to debate whether their goals can't be done better either by private citizens or even by a refocussed government. I'm not a pure libertarian, I just don't trust the political process enough to say "We want X so let's pass a law mandating that and start a department to insure people follow the law.
In government there's a rarely used technique called zero-based budgeting. The process as I understand it is you imagine the world without whatever you're budgeting for, then imagine what the entity would do with half the most recent budget, then imagine what you would do fully funded and then, maybe, imagine what you would do with more money. That's the kind of thinking I trust as compared to the liberal-conservative spectrum which seems currently based on the idea that if something bad happens anywhere you need a law against it and a department of it-prevention and punishment.
On your third paragraph, that's pretty true although I'm no populist either.
Doug, zero-based budgeting is something I've 'in theory' been through in a state agency-- at the agency level only. And it does create a framework in which some of the more absurd things can be given the heave-ho.But as always in organizations, the entrenched interests and little bureaucracies are very adept at preserving their turf. Any kind of cost/benefit analysis seems to come up against endless debate about one side of the equation or the other. I could tell you stories...but we all have them. Large organizations just proliferate this sort of nonsense.
Then too the electorate, or 'stakeholders', or whatever they're called in the particular case, are no more decisive. Everyone wants everything, and nobody much wants to pay for it.
Skipchurch, I was just at a "stakeholder meeting" exactly as you've described in Sacramento on Friday. This is the kind of thing that confirms my basic conservatism. People who need help deserve help and ought to get help, but any help that can be given by someone other than a government or law has a better shot. For the rest, ok, government.
I think the main thing is this: change is never made by consensus and politics is a vampire gouging the throat of good intentions.
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