[Magdalen] Speaking of Stats [was Yet another case of race abuse?

Sat Oct 3 05:09:02 UTC 2015

Well, I for one think that's pretty darn amazing information.

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 3:05 PM, Jim Guthrie <jguthrie at pipeline.com> wrote:

> As a nation we have to come to terms with the use of statistics.
>>
>
> Nicolas Kristoff nailed some positive stats yesterday:
>
> "We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and
> disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen
> corruption, dysfunctional government.
>
> Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover
> planes that crash, not planes that take off. Indeed, maybe the most
> important thing happening in the world today is something that we almost
> never cover: a stunning decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.
>
> Huh? You’re wondering what I’ve been smoking! Everybody knows about the
> spread of war, the rise of AIDS and other diseases, the hopeless
> intractability of poverty.
>
> One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion
> of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over
> the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had
> remained roughly the same.
>
> That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the
> proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t
> doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half, from 35
> percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2011 (the most recent year for which
> figures are available from the World Bank).
>
> When 95 percent of Americans are completely unaware of a transformation of
> this magnitude, that reflects a flaw in how we journalists cover the world
> — and I count myself among the guilty. Consider:
>
> • The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than
> $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the
> middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades.
> Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.
>
> • In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this
> toll has since dropped by more than half.
>
> • More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the
> 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary
> school; now, 80 percent do.
>
> The most important thing going on in the world today is something we
> almost never cover: a rapid decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.
>
> Granted, some 16,000 children still die unnecessarily each day. It’s
> maddening in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were
> born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
>
> But one reason for our current complacency is a feeling that poverty is
> inevitable — and that’s unwarranted.
>
> The world’s best-kept secret is that we live at a historic inflection
> point when extreme poverty is retreating. United Nations members have just
> adopted 17 new Global Goals, of which the centerpiece is the elimination of
> extreme poverty by 2030. Their goals are historic. There will still be poor
> people, of course, but very few who are too poor to eat or to send children
> to school. Young journalists or aid workers starting out today will in
> their careers see very little of the leprosy, illiteracy, elephantiasis and
> river blindness that I have seen routinely.
>
> “We live at a time of the greatest development progress among the global
> poor in the history of the world,” notes Steven Radelet, a development
> economist and Georgetown University professor, in a terrific book coming in
> November, “The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World.”
>
> “The next two decades can be even better and can become the greatest era
> of progress for the world’s poor in human history,” Radelet writes.
>
> I write often about inequality, a huge challenge in the U.S. But globally,
> inequality is diminishing, because of the rise of poor countries.
>
> What does all this mean in human terms? I was thinking of that last week
> while interviewing Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Nobel Peace Prize winner.
> Malala’s mother grew up illiterate, like the women before her, and was
> raised to be invisible to outsiders. Malala is a complete contrast:
> educated, saucy, outspoken and perhaps the most visible teenage girl in the
> world.
>
> Even in countries like Pakistan, the epoch of illiterate and invisible
> women like Malala’s mother is fading; the epoch of Malala is dawning. The
> challenge now is to ensure that rich donor nations are generous in
> supporting the Global Goals — but also that developing countries do their
> part, rather than succumbing to corruption and inefficiency. (I’m talking
> to you, Angola!)
>
> There’s one last false argument to puncture. Cynics argue that saving
> lives is pointless, because the result is overpopulation that leads more to
> starve. Not true. Part of this wave of progress is a stunning drop in
> birthrates.
>
> Haitian women now average 3.1 children; in 1985, they had six. In
> Bangladesh, women now average 2.2 children. Indonesians, 2.3. When the poor
> know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters,
> when they access family planning, they have fewer children.
>
> So let’s get down to work and, on our watch, defeat extreme poverty
> worldwide. We know that the challenges are surmountable — because we’ve
> already turned the tide of history.
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-most-important-thing-and-its-almost-a-secret.html?_r=0
>
> Cheers,
> Jim Guthrie
>