Category Archives: economy

Medicine and Sustainability

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Two important stories that will make sense to all of you, but specifically to those “I wanna be a doctor” folks among us.  As you’ll learn in the California story, doctors get paid by the task — office visit, exam, surgery, etc.  This is not sustainable given where health care may be headed; it’s certainly not beneficial to the consumer.   Also as you’ll hear, given the cost of medical school and the loans MD’s have to pay back after graduation, specialization in the system drives doctors away from where they are indeed needed — primary care.

In California, Facing Down a Family Physician Shortage

In another story that shows us how wonderful we are, this is concerns Global Health.  In fact, this link will take you to several stories concerning Global Health — cholera perhaps spreading to the DR and Miami, organ trafficking, and a global food crisis.

As you ponder your last “mini” essays, think about some of these challenges.

The Harry Potter Alliance

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This, according to the famous Henry Jenkins, media scholar at MIT, could be the way the next wave of activists gets nurtured.  Jenkins calls this “Avatar Activism.”

About 100,000 Harry Potter fans have been mobilized by HPA for causes including marriage equality, genocide prevention and literacy. They raised enough money to send five cargo planes to Haiti bearing medical supplies after the earthquake there, and they’ve bought thousands of books for libraries in Rwanda and the Mississippi Delta.

Harry Potter: Boy Wizard … And Real Life Activist? addresses what may be an evolving phenomenon around activism.   Reading this, I am reminded of Plato’s Republic and how he warned that the poet is a threat to the State. I’m wondering whether this new form of narrating could be a place for storytelling for a new generation?

Robert Moses and Majora Carter – Terrible Infrastructure and Environmental Justice

I had an interesting discussion with my architecture professor, James Butler, who introduced me to the source of New York’s horrible infrastructure in low income areas. Robert Moses, who is seen as a savior to residents of Westchester County, Rockland County and Long Island, pushed for the construction of major freeways throughout NYC. One of his projects, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, abruptly cut through the South Bronx, demolishing countless apartments and displacing over 600,000 working class people on a month’s notice. Since Moses was well-connected with the upper-class and was also backed up by Master’s from Oxford and a fancy PH.D from Columbia, he neglected the voice of the neighborhoods he destroyed and just let business dominate. My professor states “Moses was so politically powerful, that all he needed was to find the most talented architectures, and manipulate them to fullfil his projects.”

Another point about Moses is that his environmental projects, i.e Riverside Park, East River Park and Central Park were reserved for areas where mostly the upper-class lived. Although willing to destroy and increase car pollution in countless neighborhoods for highways, he never decided to place a pool or a park in Hunts Point or Bed-Stuy.

Also,

I also found an interesting interview with Majora Carter. Addressing the same tensions, Carter states the reasons why environmental concerns in low income areas are inevitable. Her point express how corps can still profit by engaging in projects that equalize environmental sustainability in all neighborhoods.

Check it out. It was intriguing to listen to, and they typed-up the interview if you just want to read through the ideas.

Edit 11/16/10 : Her interview basically reiterates the points in Cooper’s essay which we read today. Thanks Cooper for introducing us to Majora Carter’s ideas.

For those of you driving back home for Thanksgiving, think about the cities/towns you pass by. Is it evident that infrastructure has cut through low income areas near you? Please share.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/22/neither_the_destruction_of_the_9th – link to  Carter interview.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

http://gothamist.com/2007/01/25/caro_gets_snubb.php

Pic of the Cross Manhattan Expressway Moses designed.

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”  – Johann Wolfgang

Best,

Frederic

Obama visits India

President Obama is on a trip to Asia to promote economic relations between United States and the region. He is spending three of the ten day visit in India, where he has been welcomed with open arms. However the students at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, asked some tough questions during his talk there. In India, Obama Faces Questions From Students, a article in the New York Times, discusses some of the questions asked by the students. For example, one of the questions that piqued my interest was about Pakistan, and why the United States hasn’t labeled it a “terrorist state”?  Granted that this is India, there was bound to be questions regarding Pakistan, however, India needs to take a look at itself.

Like Pakistan, India has also not signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation  Treaty, which calls for non-proliferation, disarmament, and peaceful use of nuclear energy. India is an asset to the US, especially considering its proximity to China, and its developing market, but is it right for us to overlook certain qualms to achieve a peaceful relationship with India?

Harlan Beckley – US Poverty “It’s Time to be Ashamed”

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I attended the Student Organized Symposium’s (Topic of US Poverty) opening lecture today. Dr. Harlan Beckley gave insightful presentation on the ethics of the US poverty rate, while focusing on how to aid the more disadvantaged communities. Working closely with Washington and Lee University and Middlebury Alumni, Nancy Shepherd, Beckley is the founding program director for the Shepherd Program, which is a program that promotes the academic study of poverty and human capability to undergraduate and law students. The program strives to combine this academic rigor with the personal experience of its students. The resulting goal is a cognitive approach and initiative to engage in various endeavors to counter this rising conflict. I found that Beckley himself exemplified this in his lecture by combining his mastery of economics with the behavioral struggles poverty causes.

Beckley commenced by explaining that the set poverty rate for a US household of four is under $22,000 and currently 14.3% of the US population lives under that statistic.  What’s even more disappointing is the break-up of that percentage. Both Single Parents and 31% of people who have not acquired a high school diploma directly affect the high poverty rate. As a developed nation, it is essential that we have an organized method of countering this portion, but I feel there is a reluctance of the public to look for these statistics rather than maintaining an “Illusion of Happiness” that doesn’t confront this reality. Yet, the sad truth is still that one in every five children currently lives under impoverished conditions, and if you are Black/Latino your chances of living below the poverty line are also multiplied by three.  Our infant mortality rate is also repulsively higher than most developed nations, confirming 21 countries with better rates. Yet, Beckley also pointed out however that the poverty rate for citizens above the age of 65 has been reduced as a result of social security. So if we can identify an importance in protecting our elderly in this system, than why not our infants and children? Why can’t we improve living conditions for our bottom wing? Is this the result of inequity of voice in our society?

I also found remarkable how Beckley compared the Poverty Rate to Per Capita GDP. His statistics exhibited that Per Capita GDP of a nation may rise, but the poverty rate does not have to fluctuate as a result. So a nation can undergo vast economic growth and while having half of its citizens still below the poverty line. I was shocked to see Beckley’s statistic, which illustrated a wage comparison between the poorest wings in the USA to that of Germany. The lowest economic branch of US Citizens, still having a Per Capita GDP that is 20% greater than Germany, collect less than half the wages of the lowest Germans. This is the income inequality that the forces society to have unequal environmental concern, and class struggle. If wages aren’t going to be properly distributed, how can we expect market forces to act accordingly? This also made me wonder, if GDP wasn’t even a recorded statistic, could the US possibly be considered a developing country?

A reason we study history is to learn not repeat the same political mistakes our species has made in the past. However, we still consistently make the same mistakes in other things, like how we value numbers. Would it be ranting to be connecting the “Illusion of Wealth” our GDP creates to the “Illusion of Wisdom” in our SAT scores? If not, that comparison should run parallel to a history lesson.

Here’s a link to the Shepherd Program: http://www.wlu.edu/x12034.xml

The Economy Beats the Environment Once Again

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Today I was looking around The Wall Street Journal online and I came across this article about Frito-Lay’s biodegradable packaging for Sun Chips. The article explained how the company’s switch from the standard, polluting food packaging to biodegradable, environmentally-friendly packaging has actually caused a great decrease in Sun Chip sales in the last eight months. Apparently, the newer, clean packaging is “noisy” and annoying to consumers, so they stopped buying and switched to a substitute good.

When I first heard of the biodegradable bag, I respected PepsiCo (the company that owns Frito-Lay) for coming up with this innovative idea, and hoped that the company would set an example for others – I thought that maybe this environmentally-friendly type of packaging would eventually become the norm. But after reading this article, I was disturbed to see how easily PepsiCo succumbed to economic pressures. While I first thought that PepsiCo might actually care about the environment, at the end of the day it seems that it still cares about capital and monetary gain most above anything else.

Here’s the link to the article: Sun Chips Bag to Lose Its Crunch