Support the Movement?

I hesitate to admit this, but I haven’t paid much attention to the huge (or what I perceive from across the pond as huge) Occupy Wall Street movement. I have read a few tweets about it and a few articles, but I am not fully aware of the impact it is having, if any. But one thing that has come to my attention is that some celebrities have supported the movement and some have profited from the movement.

Jay-Z’s Rocawear clothing line has started to produce “Occupy All Streets” shirts which is clearly based on the title of what some are referring to as the largest social justice movement of our generation. The only hitch here is that the company has no intention to share profits with the movement. Jay-Z earned $63 million last year, a grotesque amount of money considering the current economic state of the world, but I digress, yet still refuses to share profits. As a result of his “Scrooge” like tendencies, sculptor, Daniel Edwards, who supports the Occupy movement sculptured a totem pole which represents Jay-Z as the base topped by Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, Scrooge McDuck from Disney’s “A Christmas Carol” and Richie Rich.

The only remaining question now is should Jay-Z’s company share the profits from the shirt with the organizers of the movement?

Question of the Day

Great news that Gavi (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation), revelling in the windfall it received at its funding conference in London earlier this year ($4.3bn, which is $600m more than it asked for)

I took this quote from a Guardian article, which focused on GAVI’s upcoming attempt to vaccinate girls in poor countries against cervical cancer. But my question is, in a global economy that is in distress, should we truly be excited that GAVI was given US$ 600 million more than they asked for? That is nearly $1 billion that they have been given but not planned for. With the upcoming Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, I think we need to ask how effective is this? Is there no other place this money could be channeled?

 

Homosexuality in Nature

A few months ago I read an article in the NY Times about squid that engages in same-sex sex. The discovery of this squid with homosexual tendencies adds it to an ever growing list of hundreds of species that engage in same-sex sex, including bottlenose dolphins, albatrosses and giraffes. So I guess that means homosexuality is nature as opposed to nurture!

Inequality-Adjusted HDI: One of the better units of measure

Back in April, I wrote a post about why GDP per capita is very limited in scope when it comes to representing the wealth of individuals in countries. With the release of the 2011 Human Development Report and subsequent HDI indexes for most of the world’s countries, I again find myself being critical of yet another measure of human development.

In general, I think that HDI is a great indicator for various social and economic aspects of individuals within countries and for comparison across countries. The unit of measure, conceptualized by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, takes into account life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling, and GNI per capita. While I find HDI to be much more useful than GDP per capita, when looking at the indices, I was struck by the fact that the measurement does not take inequality into account by using GINI coefficients or another calculation with which to measure inequality. Without accounting for inequality, HDI simply offers a glimpse of what is possible in a country as opposed to what the reality is. While this may useful for a globetrotter looking for a country to settle down in, is this useful for policymakers?

In the 2011 ranking by HDI, I was most struck by the fact that the US was ranked number 4, beating out Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark and many other highly developed countries. This ranking is what made me think about the uselessness of HDI indexes for policymakers. As an avid traveler and having visited Sweden and Switzerland and having lived in the US most of my life, I know for a fact that a poor person in the US is much much worse off than a poor person in Sweden. So I wondered how the US managed this ranking, thus realizing that it is a reflection of the potential within countries.

After a bit of research I found that in 2010, following criticism for a lack of inclusion of inequality measures, the Human Development Report began to include “inequality-adjusted HDI”. The IHDI takes inequality into account by using the Atkinson index. When taking into account inequality, the US falls to number 23 on the ranking of countries by IHDI. Seeing the Scandinavian countries all move in front of the US made me feel a lot more comfortable and confident in the fact that the IHDI is one of the better measures that we have to measure social and economic progress for people within and between countries.