All the rest of Rosling's figures are aggregates or averages, which can easily mask worsening conditions for the majority of the population.
Which single country of those you name, is part of the international division of labour?
Which international division of labour? Niceragua and Serbia were certainly parts of an international division of labour.
And which war was about the Washington consensus?
Nicaragua, Iran, Grenada, El Salvador, arguably Palestine, East Timor and Lebanon (if propping up WC supporting states count - Israel, Indonesia and Israel, respectively), arguably Serbia (depending on which historians you ask).
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Two years after the invasion, there was no majority view of what the US action has been ... a Rescue Mission Ordained by God (the Gairy-ite position), a legal Intervention Sanctioned by the OECS (the position of anti-Gairy-ites who had fallen away from New Jewel), an Illegal Invasion overthrowing an Illegal coup d'état (the main New Jewel position) ... but an overwhelming majority of support for the action, whatever the action may have been. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Mike Bygrave: Where did all the protesters go? | World news | The Observer
Small armies of economists study these questions. In pursuit of the answers, I attended a lecture by Professor Robert Wade at the London School of Economics. He began with the usual depressing figures: 80 per cent of world income goes to the top 20 per cent of people while 60 per cent of the world's population have to make do with 6 per cent of the income. Then he moved on to 'the thunder and lightning of current debate': whether the situation has been getting better or worse over the past 20 years. His answer was twofold: we don't know for sure; but the balance of the evidence is, it's getting worse and inequality is increasing. It turns out the statistics relied on by the pro-globalisers, led by the World Bank, are suspect. There are different methods for determining global poverty and inequality and the answers you get depend on the techniques you use. The World Bank, Wade implied, may have chosen the one that supports its own neo-liberal agenda. 'The Bank is a very political institution,' he said.
Small armies of economists study these questions. In pursuit of the answers, I attended a lecture by Professor Robert Wade at the London School of Economics. He began with the usual depressing figures: 80 per cent of world income goes to the top 20 per cent of people while 60 per cent of the world's population have to make do with 6 per cent of the income. Then he moved on to 'the thunder and lightning of current debate': whether the situation has been getting better or worse over the past 20 years. His answer was twofold: we don't know for sure; but the balance of the evidence is, it's getting worse and inequality is increasing.
It turns out the statistics relied on by the pro-globalisers, led by the World Bank, are suspect. There are different methods for determining global poverty and inequality and the answers you get depend on the techniques you use. The World Bank, Wade implied, may have chosen the one that supports its own neo-liberal agenda. 'The Bank is a very political institution,' he said.
And Professor Rosling uses World Bank data for his neat graphical presentations. Of course you can argue that Professor Wade is political too (he very much appears to be).
I think poverty is hard to get good statistics on. Nobody measures it without having an agenda, and the poorest are the least likely to show up on routine measurements, the kind that Rosling loves. I would like to note that wealth has also turned out to be measured in fraudulent ways to serve political agendas.
I use my own poverty index, which is the number of apparently homeless I see in the streets. For example, by that measurement poverty has increased in Sweden the last twenty years. That average income and wealth also has increased (as Rosling would point out) only means that inequality has increased even more.
To be fair, if you should use Rosling to argue that there is less inequality between persons - not countries - you are better of picking when he looks at mortality rates for newly-borns. That is a measurement that is often connected to structural poverty. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
