The Capitalists Who Run the World
An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study by complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
Bitter Chocolate
The chronic crisis in the cocoa industry has contributed to Côte d’Ivoire's slide into civil war in two ways. First, and most significant, the persistent poverty and stagnation causes war. Second, the ethnic tensions, which arose in the cocoa industry itself, gave unscrupulous politicians the chance to make a bad situation even worse, for their personal gain. At the moment, the world cocoa price in London is high, roughly CFA 1,600 per kilo. The farmers are lucky if they get half of it for their sacks of beans. The Ivorian agents of Cargill, ADM, and Barry Callebaut offer much less than the world price. The corrupt government takes a big bite in "official" taxes. Finally, the farmers pay bribes at police roadblocks. Côte d’Ivoire over the past decades has done just about everything mainstream Western economists suggested -- and it remains trapped in poverty. The country concentrated on growing and exporting products it was "good" at, cocoa and also coffee, instead of trying to industrialize. But the chronically low world prices for these products kept the country poor. With better prices -- a little more like what protected and subsidized farmers in the US and Western Europe earn -- millions in the cocoa-growing regions of Côte d’Ivoire could have started to consume more themselves, which in turn would have promoted local industries, reduced unemployment, and gradually raised the country's standard of living. Every time those in the more prosperous parts of the world buy chocolate, we are exploiting the people who produce it. As long as we continue to tolerate this injustice, there will be no peace in Côte d’Ivoire. The crisis in Côte d’Ivoire is representative of deeply rooted structural problems in many other African nations.
http://www.thenation.com/print/article/159707/roots-cote-divoire-crisis
200 Countries, 200 Years
Hans Rosling tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers, all in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Rosling shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.
Pack of Hyenas
Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who makes more money in a day than most Americans in their lifetime. Hedge funds are the top of the Wall Street food chain, and Dalio runs the largest one of all, Bridgewater Associates.
Dalio, a self-described "hyperrealist," is author of a book of maxims leaked recently via the financial blog Dealbreaker. Dalio titled his collection "Principles," and he makes every Bridgewater employee memorize it. This is what Dalio has to say:
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young gnu, is that good or evil? At face value, that might not be "good" because it seems cruel, and the poor gnu suffers and dies. Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of apparently "cruel" behavior exists throughout the animal kingdom. Like death itself, it is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life. It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self-interest and the interest of the greater system, including those of the gnu, because killing and eating the gnus fosters evolution.
World poverty is falling
Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin have estimated the world's income distribution and suggest that world poverty is disappearing faster than previously thought. From 1970 to 2006, poverty fell by 86% in South Asia, 73% in Latin America, 39% in the Middle East, and 20% in Africa. Barring a catastrophe, there will never be more than a billion people in poverty in the future history of the world. 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
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