Category Archives: Women and Children

China: Mothers Helping Daughters Fly

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For the chief cleaner of the new city courthouse, service is all she’s ever known. Serve the parents. Serve the pigs. Serve the future. Serve the family.  Right now Xiao Zhang is serving the people with a feather duster, carefully working round the gold stars on the crimson emblem of state above the judge’s high-backed chair.

Across the empty courtroom, her husband is perched on a window ledge, polishing the glass that looks out on to iron bars, security gates and a city street that 10 years ago was an expanse of shimmering green rice paddy.

Xiao Zhang does not miss that greener past. For her, there was nothing romantic about life on the land.  She’d started helping with the farm work almost as soon as she could walk and when she was 11, she dropped out of school.  “Every family was poor but we were poorer,” she says.

When I started coming here 10 years ago to chart the transformation of White Horse Village into a city, Xiao Zhang was already complaining that change was too slow.  Amid all the anguish of elderly farmers forced to give up their fields and move into tower blocks, she was impatient, longing for the day the government would demolish her home and concrete over her fields.

Women like Xiao Zhang’s position are making sure their duaghters have every educational opportunity the sons do.  They want their daughters to be able to be teachers and doctors and business people.  And CHinese girls are taking advantage.

Chinese Women Leaving the Farm

 

Entrepreneur Alert: Addressing the Obesity Epidemic

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Kenneth Rogoff writes:  To what extent should governments regulate or tax addictive behavior? This question has long framed public debate about alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and other goods and services in many countries worldwide. And now, in the United States – arguably the mother of global consumer culture – the debate has turned toward the fight against the epidemic of childhood obesity.

It is ironic that in a world where childhood malnutrition plagues many developing countries, childhood obesity has become one of the leading health scourges in advanced economies. The World Bank estimates that over a third of all children in Indonesia, for example, suffer from stunted growth, confronting them with the risk of lifetime effects on fitness and cognitive development. Yet, the plight of malnourished children in the developing world does not make obesity in the advanced countries any less of a problem.

Indeed, though perhaps not on a par with global warming and looming water shortages, obesity – and especially childhood obesity – nonetheless is on the short list of major public-health challenges facing advanced countries in the twenty-first century, and it is rapidly affecting many emerging-market economies as well. Yet solving it poses much more difficult challenges than the kind of successful public-health interventions of the last century, including near-universal vaccination, fluoridation of drinking water, and motor-vehicle safety rules.

The question is whether it is realistic to hope for success unless the government resorts to far more blunt instruments than it currently seems prepared to wield. Given the huge impact of obesity on health-care costs, life expectancy, and quality of life, it is a topic that merits urgent attention.

The US leads the world in obesity, and is at the cutting edge of the debate. Almost everyone agrees that the first line of defense ought to be better consumer education. First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” educational campaign aspires to eliminate childhood obesity in a generation, though its impact so far remains unclear. Other efforts include appeals by celebrities like the chef Jamie Oliver and attempts to use peer-based learning, such as the Sesame Street-inspired platform Kickin’ Nutrition (full disclosure: the creator is my wife).

The right place to start to address it is by creating a better balance between education and commercial disinformation. But food is so addictive, and the environment so skewed toward unhealthy outcomes, that it is time to think about broader government intervention. That should certainly include vastly enhanced expenditures on public education; but I suspect that a long-term solution will have to involve more direct regulation, and it is not too soon to start discussing the modalities.

 Obesity Epidemic

Should We Decriminalize Drugs?

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Christopher Ingraham writes:  Portugal decriminalized the use of all drugs in 2001. Weed, cocaine, heroin, you name it — Portugal decided to treat possession and use of small quantities of these drugs as a public health issue, not a criminal one. The drugs were still illegal, of course. But now getting caught with them meant a small fine and maybe a referral to a treatment program — not jail time and a criminal record.

Whenever we debate similar measures in the U.S. — marijuana decriminalization, for instance — many drug-policy makers predict dire consequences. “If you make any attractive commodity available at lower cost, you will have more users,” former Office of National Drug Control Policy deputy director Thomas McLellan once said of Portugal’s policies.

But in Portugal, the numbers paint a different story. The prevalence of past-year and past-month drug use among young adults has fallen since 2001, according to statistics compiled by the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which advocates on behalf of ending the war on drugs. Overall adult use is down slightly too. And new HIV cases among drug users are way down.

Now, numbers just released from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction paint an even more vivid picture of life under decriminalization: drug overdose deaths in Portugal are the second-lowest in the European Union.

Among Portuguese adults, there are 3 drug overdose deaths for every 1,000,000 citizens. Comparable numbers in other countries range from 10.2 per million in the Netherlands to 44.6 per million in the U.K., all the way up to 126.8 per million in Estonia. The E.U. average is 17.3 per million.

Perhaps more significantly, the report notes that the use of “legal highs” — like so-called “synthetic” marijuana, “bath salts” and the like — is lower in Portugal than in any of the other countries for which reliable data exists.

Drug use and drug deaths are complicated phenomena. They have many underlying causes. Portugal’s low death rate can’t be attributable solely to decriminalization.

The reality is that Portugal’s drug situation has improved significantly in several key areas. Most notably, HIV infections and drug-related deaths have decreased, while the dramatic rise in use feared by some has failed to materialise.

As state legislatures debate with issues like marijuana legalization and decriminalization in the coming years, Portugal’s 15-year experience may be informative.

Drug Deaths

Poverty and the Developing Brain

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Madeline Ostrander writes: The brain’s foundation, frame, and walls are built in the womb. As an embryo grows into a fetus, some of its dividing cells turn into neurons, arranging themselves into layers and forming the first synapses, the organ’s electrical wiring. Four or five months into gestation, the brain’s outermost layer, the cerebral cortex, begins to develop its characteristic wrinkles, which deepen further after birth. It isn’t until a child’s infant and toddler years that the structures underlying higher-level cognition—will power, emotional self-control, decision-making—begin to flourish; some of them continue to be fine-tuned throughout adolescence and into the first decade of adulthood.

Pat Levitt, a developmental neuroscientist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, has spent much of his career studying the setbacks and accidents that can make this construction process go awry. In the nineteen-nineties, during the media panic over “crack babies,” he was among a number of scientists who questioned whether the danger of cocaine exposure in utero was being overstated. (Levitt spent two decades examining the brains of rabbit mothers and their offspring that were dosed with the drug, and says that the alarm was “an exaggeration.”) More recently, as the science director of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, he has become interested in another sort of neurotoxin: poverty.

As it turns out, the conditions that attend poverty—what a National Scientific Council report summarized as “overcrowding, noise, substandard housing, separation from parent(s), exposure to violence, family turmoil,” and other forms of extreme stress—can be toxic to the developing brain, just like drug or alcohol abuse.  Poverty and the Developing Brain

Poverty and the Developing Brain

FIFA Indictments and the Aftermath

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Will Hobson writes:   A few years ago, FIFA made a move that seemed to indicate a desire for reform. Facing growing criticism after its controversial decisions involving the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, FIFA hired Michael J. Garcia, a former U.S. attorney, as an ethics investigator. Garcia spent more than a year investigating the bidding process, but resigned in protest after he said FIFA officials inaccurately summarized his findings. FIFA refused to release Garcia’s 450-page report, but announced that it found minimal rule violations. Garcia disagreed, alleging he had uncovered “serious and wide-ranging issues” regarding how FIFA awarded those two World Cups.

Who got hurt in the US? U.S. taxpayers, for one. Charles Blazer, a former FIFA official who pleaded guilty and cooperated with this investigation, admitted to evading taxes for years, and has paid $1.9 million in restitution. More charges of tax evasion could come. Also: poor children who want to play soccer around the world. Many youth soccer organizations in developing countries depend on FIFA grants, acting U.S. Attorney Currie said Wednesday, so money diverted into the pockets of FIFA officials was money not spent on youth soccer in poorer nations.

Is anyone in the US involved?  Attorney General Lynch accused an unnamed American sportswear company of being involved in a bribery scheme to obtain a sponsorship deal for the Brazilian national team. When a reporter asked her if the unnamed company was Nike – the Oregon-based superbrand that has long had a relationship with Brazil’s soccer team – Lynch declined to comment.   Fifa Indictment

FIFA Indictments

Coal Power and Immigration in Southeast Asia

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Report from Southweat Asis:

Reliance on Coal:  The government intends to push ahead with plans to increase Burma’s reliance on coal-fired power plants to 33 percent of the country’s total generating capacity by 2030, according to a deputy minister from the Ministry of Electric Power.

Coal-fired power plants that use clean-coal technology will not be abolished while natural gas, wind power, solar energy and hydro-power electricity projects must be implemented to produce more electricity for the benefit of the public and state.

Burma’s current energy mix sees 69 percent of electricity generated from hydro-power sources, 29 percent from natural gas and just 2 percent from coal.

Environmentalist Win Myo Thu said relying on clean-coal was akin to “breathing with someone else’s nose,” with Burma’s own deposits of the carbon fuel not sufficient for the ambitious expansion of coal-fired power generation.

Immigration:  Scores of Burma’s minority Rohingya Muslims are paying off people smugglers and returning to the squalid camps they used to live in after being held for months on overcrowded ships that were to take them to Thailand but did not move far from shore.

Often beaten, and given little food and water, at least 50 Rohingya came back over the weekend after paying boat captains between US$200 and US$300 per person, people in one of the camps said.

A crackdown on the people-smuggling network in Thailand, usually the first stop en route to Malaysia, has meant that at least three ships loaded with hundreds of Rohingya and impoverished Bangladeshis were staying off the coast of Burma, they said.  The people in the camp survive off rice distributed by charities. They have no access to adequate health care—nor proper education or jobs.

One man close to local traffickers, who did not want to be identified, said that before the crackdown in Thailand a boat with 10-15 people would leave one of the nearby Rohingya villages and camps every 7-10 days—and there are dozens of them peppered along the Arakan State coast.Immigration Burma

Extreme Poverty in the US

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The number of adults on welfare has dropped dramatically since its reform in 1996. As of 2011, a little over 1 million adults remained on the welfare rolls in a typical month, down from about 4.6 million at the program’s peak in the early 1990s. As these numbers plummeted, the number of single mothers joining the workforce or returning to it grew at rates that were largely unexpected. For these reasons, welfare reform has been touted as a success.

At the same time, in the years since 1996, a new group of American poor has emerged: families with children who are living on virtually no income—$2 or less per person per day in a given month. These are America’s “extreme poor.” The U.S. official poverty line for a family of three would equate to roughly $17 per person per day. What scholars call “deep poverty”—incomes at less than half the poverty line—is about $8.50 per person per day, over four times higher than our cutoff. This new group of American poor, the extreme poor, are likely experiencing a level of destitution not captured in prior poverty measures, one that few of us knew even existed in such a rich country.   Rise of Exttreme Poverty in US

What Would Happen if Women Were the Financial Regulators?

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William Greider asks:  If women were in charge of banking regulation, could they save us from the Wall Street cowboys who crashed the global financial system?

That provocative question was the implicit subtext for an all-day conference of banking and financial officials in Washington this week, held at, of all places, the soberly serious International Monetary Fund. The IMF’s managing director, as it happens, is a woman—Christine Lagarde of France—and she appeared alongside an even more powerful woman—Janet Yellen, chair of the US Federal Reserve System. Neither of them was in charge when the system crashed in 2008.

The IMF event was not a rump rally of feminists who somehow crashed the halls of power. But all of the 18 speakers on various panels were women, prominent as bank regulators or financial authorities. The one-sided gender line-up was not exactly an accident. The men in suits could hardly miss the message.

But just in case they did, IMF Director Lagarde prompted them with a droll question: “What would have happened if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters?”

What she meant was that different values might have prevailed if women had held the controlling positions at the brokerage or were the government regulators enforcing prudent standards. Women, as Lagarde has observed, worry more about financial exclusion. Worldwide, 42 percent of women have no access to financial services. Only a measly 3 percent of bank CEOs are women.

More to the point, Largarde said research shows women are more risk-averse—a quality utterly missing in the reckless banks and brokerages rushing like lemmings to the cliff. Women in charge might have asked tougher questions.

Fed Chairwoman Yellen stayed away from the gender question. But Lagarde has invoked “Lehman Sisters” numerous times since the financial collapse and disappointing recovery.

“It takes a great deal of will power to direct the French economy,” Largarde wrote in 2010 when she was France’s finance minister. “I am not doing this for women but as a woman I am, perhaps, more keenly aware of the damage that the crisis has done through greed, pride and a lack of transparency…. I am determined to do everything within my power to change the rules of the game and do my best to ensure that a crisis such as this can never happen again.”

What women want, she wrote, is to be judged, like men, on the basis of their deeds. She added what Eleanor Roosevelt had to say on the subject. “A woman is like a tea bag—you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.”

One of the conference speakers, Brooksley Born, is a courageous example. Born was nearly drowned by “hot water” dumped on her by Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, and Larry Summers during the Clinton administration. As a regulator she was trying to impose some limits on dangerous derivatives. The men hammered her, blocked her, and effectively drove her out of government.

Institute for New Economic Thinking was co-founded and funded by investor George Soros and others, and it set out to sweep worldwide in search of new ideas and new economists who are breaking free of the old orthodoxy that failed.

Johnson was once asked,“If you could wave a magic wand and do one thing to make the financial system better, what would it be?” Johnson had a quick answer: “Only women get to regulate finance.”

Adamti, Provocateur, Instigator

Adamti, Provocateur, Instigator

EU: Immigrants for Some or All?

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The European Union is once again struggling to come up with a coherent asylum strategy for its 28 members. In recent years, the rising number of asylum seekers entering the European Union through countries such as Italy and Greece has generated friction among member states, fueled criticism of the Schengen Agreement and contributed to the growing popularity of nationalist parties.

However, the European Union will not reform its asylum policies in any significant way. Member states will provide more financial assistance to Mediterranean countries, but they will refuse to accept quotas of immigrants over the coming months and years. Anti-immigration sentiments will persist across the Continent, putting substantial pressure on one of the European Union’s founding principles: the free movement of people.

On April 23, the European Union submitted to pressure from Italy and Malta and held an emergency summit to address the immigration crisis in the Mediterranean. Between January and April, more than 1,750 migrants died in shipwrecks at sea, a death toll 30 times higher than that of the same period in 2014. Over the past year and a half, Italian ships have rescued more than 200,000 people in the Mediterranean Sea.

After the summit concluded, EU leaders decided to triple the financial resources for the bloc’s operations in the Mediterranean Sea and to boost cooperation with certain countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Mali and Niger to better control borders and combat human trafficking. They also asked EU Foreign Affairs Chief Federica Mogherini to begin preparing for a possible military operation aimed at identifying, capturing and destroying vessels before traffickers could use them. However, the bloc’s leaders did not reach any agreements on the distribution of asylum seekers across the Continent. Moreover, many of the goals discussed during the summit will prove difficult to achieve.  EU Immigration

Immigration to EU Countries?

Migration of Illegal Minors to US Slowing

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The Mexican government has been deporting illegal immigrants from Central America.  This concerted effort has in turn slowed down the migration of illegal minors across the US-Mexican border.

Those actions clearly have not halted migration. But the increasing difficulty of the trek — combined with high temperatures, the brisk pace of the deportation of Central Americans and a public-relations campaign warning people that they will not get visas in the US — is among the factors that may explain why fewer migrants are now crossing into the southwestern United States, with a particular decrease in the number of children traveling alone or with a relative.

Last month, 3,141 children traveling without a parent were apprehended at the United States-Mexico border, a 70 percent decrease from June.

Events this week in Baltimore show clearly that the US is not able to take care of its own young people, much less those of other countries. Slowing the Illegal Immigration of Minors to the US

Slowig Illegal Immigration of Minors