kerkko.fi

We are simply dramatically stupid. We act systematically against the evidence we have. We know everything that should not be done. There is nobody that does not know that. Particularly the big politicians know exactly what should not be done. Yet they do it. The more you have, the more greedy you become. And all this crisis is the product of greed. Greed is the dominant value today in the world. And as long as that persists, we are done.

The United States is the most dramatic example. I have gone as far as saying that the United States is an "underdeveloping nation," which is a new category. We have developed, underdeveloped, and developing. Now you have underdeveloping. And the United States is an example, in which the one percent of the Americans are doing better and better and better, and the 99 percent is going down, in all sorts of manifestations.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/22/chilean_economist_manfred_max_neef_us

Economist Makoto Watanabe has calculated that the optimum time to buy an airline ticket is eight weeks in advance of flying. His findings also suggests that airline tickets are cheaper in the afternoons than the mornings. The results stem from work published in the Economic Journal in which Watanabe and his colleague, Marc Möller, offer equations such as ∏A = gUG + min(k - g, (1 - g)(1 - r)) as part of the complex formula that determines advance ticket purchases.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/22/airline-ticket-eight-week-rule/print

An interesting yet disheartening series of socioeconomic experiments shows that those on the lower-income levels are more likely to give and be charitable than their higher paid counterparts. The findings come from experiments carried out by UC Berkeley doctoral student Paul Piff and his team. A recent national survey in the US reiterates the results, revealing lower-income people give more of their hard-earned money to charity than the wealthy.

At a time when the richest one percent of Americans own more than the bottom 90 percent combined, the findings are timely. "Our data suggests that an ironic and self-perpetuating dynamic may in part explain this trend," the researchers write. "Whereas lower-class individuals may give more of their resources away, upper-class individuals may tend to preserve and hold onto their wealth. This differential pattern could exacerbate economic inequality."

Prior research done by Piff and his colleagues suggests lower income people might be more compassionate because they are more closely rooted to and dependent on others, therefore more empathetic. It is also thought that the more money the lower-earning people make in their lifetime, the higher their status becomes. As a result, their ability to connect with others' point-of-view disappears, including the low-income population they were once ties to.

http://www.physorg.com/news201364510.html

Money really can buy you happiness -- or at least one form of it, according to the biggest study to examine the relationship between income and well-being around the world. Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall -- whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages. The survey, dubbed the "first representative sample of planet Earth," was conducted by Gallup and involved detailed questioning in 2005 and 2006 of 136,839 residents age 15 and older in 132 countries throughout the world. The samples in each country were designed to be nationally representative and represent about 96 percent of the world's population.

"Yes, money makes you happy; the effect of income on life satisfaction is very strong and virtually ubiquitous and universal around the world," said Ed Diener, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois who led the study. "But it makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good. Positive feelings are less affected by money and more affected by the things people are doing day to day." Previous studies had suggested that money was associated with happiness, but the relationship appeared weak. Earlier work tended to focus on individual countries and global evaluations of life without parsing out the effects on specific positive and negative emotions or examining differences across nations.

The new survey -- the first large international study to differentiate between overall life satisfaction and day-to-day emotions -- makes that crucial distinction, allowing researchers to explore the elusive concept of happiness in much greater nuance. "When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity," said Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. "That was unexpected."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/01/AR2010070100039.html

Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate has been cut by nearly three quarters. The percentage of the world population living on less than $1 a day (in PPP-adjusted 2000 dollars) went from 26.8% in 1970 to 5.4% in 2006. Although world population has increased by about 80%, the number of people below the $1 line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006.

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4508