Banned in China: know your air
The powerful film (with English subtitles) on pollution – initially hailed, then banned, by Chinese officialdom:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM
From New York Times story on the ban:
On Friday evening [the day the film was banned], Xinhua, the state news agency, posted on Twitter, which is also blocked here, that “President Xi Jinping vows to punish, with an iron hand, any violators who destroy ecology or environment, with no exceptions.” That night, the United States Embassy air monitor in Beijing rated the air “hazardous.”
Read more here.
POSTSCRIPT: Chinese officials are not the alone in trying to suppress bad news on the environment. Check out the latest from Florida, here.
Guaranteed income from common wealth
Peter Barnes writes in Yes! magazine:
THERE’S LONG been a notion that, because money is a prerequisite for survival and security, everyone should be assured some income just for being alive. The notion has been advanced by liberals such as James Tobin, John Kenneth Galbraith, and George McGovern, and by conservatives like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Richard Nixon. It’s embedded in the board game Monopoly, in which all players get equal payments when they pass Go. And yet, with one exception, Americans have been unable to agree on any plan that guarantees some income to everyone. The reasons lie mostly in the stories that surround such income. Is it welfare? Is it redistribution? Does it require higher taxes and bigger government? Americans think dimly of all these things.
But then, there’s the exception.
Read all about it here.
Rising student demand for new economics
From the Economist:
“I DON’T care who writes a nation’s laws, or crafts its advanced treatises, if I can write its economics textbooks.” So said Paul Samuelson, an American economist who more than achieved his aim by producing a bestseller. But debate swirls around the teaching of the dismal science—nowhere more so than in Britain.
Read more here.
A glimpse of the future economy
From the E3 Network’s Future Economy Initiative:
Source: http://www.futureecon.org/
Inequality.org
http://inequality.org/
Let them eat toxic waste?
A video made by UMass-Amherst students compares wealth-based to rights-based principles for allocating environmental quality:
Global wealth: who has how much?
The latest edition of the 2014 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse sheds light on the distribution of assets worldwide:
Source: http://savvyroo.com/chart-1365549786238-our-unequal-globes-billions-and-trillions
Read more here.
Inequality of opportunity
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz writes:
A rich country with millions of poor people. A country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, but in which a child’s prospects are more dependent on the income and education of his or her parents than in other advanced countries. A country that believes in fair play, but in which the richest often pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than those less well off. A country in which children every day pledge allegiance to the flag, asserting that there is “justice for all,” but in which, increasingly, there is only justice for those who can afford it. These are the contradictions that the United States is gradually and painfully struggling to come to terms with as it begins to comprehend the enormity of the inequalities that mark its society.
Read more here.
More on Ebola and profit-guided health care
Unusually blunt words from World Health Organization Director Margaret Chan:
Ebola emerged nearly four decades ago. Why are clinicians still empty-handed, with no vaccines and no cure?
Because Ebola has historically been confined to poor African nations. The R&D incentive is virtually non-existent. A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay. WHO has been trying to make this issue visible for ages. Now people can see for themselves.
