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Category Archives: Poverty

Alexander Skarsgård Explains the Answer to Everything

The New York Times – (It Involves Doing Some Math – Opinion / Video) “Partha Dasgupta is a Cambridge University economist who in 2021 prepared a more than 600-page report for the British government about the financial value of nature. Not your average bedtime reading. But believe us when we say his report, the culmination of decades of scholarship, is incredibly important. Or at least believe the United Nations, which awarded him the title Champion of the Earth for his work. Or King Charles III, who this year made Mr. Dasgupta a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire — an extremely rare honor — for his services to economics and the natural environment. Mr. Dasgupta’s voluminous study [The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review] is so important, that we decided to publish a short film about it, the Opinion video above. To make his complex review digestible, the film employs old-timey cartoons, some cursing, a clip of Boris Johnson in a hard hat while dangling from a cable, a very apt soccer metaphor, a bit of Strauss and a title that could be viewed as an exaggeration. We even hired the Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgard to help simplify its concepts and convey why the report is, if not required reading for everyone, at least something everyone should know about…”

Freedom in the World 2023

Freedom House – Marking 50 Years in the Struggle for Democracy – Key Findings Global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year.  Moscow’s war of aggression led to devastating human rights atrocities in Ukraine. New coups and other attempts to undermine representative government destabilized Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Peru, and Brazil. Previous years’ coups and ongoing… Continue Reading

Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation in US housing markets

Gourevitch, J.D., Kousky, C., Liao, Y.(. et al. Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation in US housing markets. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01594-8 “Climate change impacts threaten the stability of the US housing market. In response to growing concerns that increasing costs of flooding are not fully captured in property values, we… Continue Reading

Strengthening and Democratizing the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Innovation Ecosystem

Strengthening and Democratizing the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Innovation Ecosystem: An Implementation Plan for a National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource. National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, January 2023. “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing our country and our world. From how citizens navigate their daily lives to how researchers drive discoveries in the lab to how… Continue Reading

The State of Open Humanitarian Data 2023

A report by the UN’s Humanitarian Data Exchange. “This report was produced in February 2023 by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Centre for Humanitarian Data, which manages the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform…In our fourth year of producing The State of Open Humanitarian Data, we can report the highest… Continue Reading

New Online Tool Provides Health Snapshot of All 435 U.S. Congressional Districts

“Today, researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), unveiled the Congressional District Health Dashboard (CDHD), a new online tool that provides critical health data for all 435 congressional districts and the District of Columbia. The dashboard incorporates 36 key measures of health, such as deaths from… Continue Reading

Google will pay $9.5 million to settle Washington DC AG’s location-tracking lawsuit

engadget: “Google has agreed to pay $9.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine, who accused the company earlier this year of “deceiving users and invading their privacy.” Google has also agreed to change some of its practices, primarily concerning how it informs users about collecting, storing and using… Continue Reading

The End of Roe v Wade and New Legal Frontiers on the Constitutional Right to Abortion

Cohen, I. Glenn and Murray, Melissa and Gostin, Lawrence O., The End of Roe v Wade and New Legal Frontiers on the Constitutional Right to Abortion (July 8, 2022). The Journal of the American Medical Association, published online July 8, 2022, at E1-E2. (2022). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 2460. DOI No.: 10.1001/jama.2022.12397… Continue Reading

Understanding the decline in poverty will help us continue the decline

Clinical Trends: “The past quarter century witnessed an unprecedented decline in child poverty rates. In 1993, the initial year of this decline, more than one in four children in the United States lived in families whose economic resources—including household income and government benefits—were below the federal government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) threshold. Twenty-six years later,… Continue Reading

Pandemic creates new billionaire every 30 hours — now a million people could fall into extreme poverty at same rate in 2022

“As the cost of essential goods rises faster than it has in decades, billionaires in the food and energy sectors are increasing their fortunes by $1 billion every two days. For every new billionaire created during the pandemic — one every 30 hours — nearly a million people could be pushed into extreme poverty in… Continue Reading

Pollution and health: a progress update

The Lancet Planetary Health: “The Lancet Commission on pollution and health reported that pollution was responsible for 9 million premature deaths in 2015, making it the world’s largest environmental risk factor for disease and premature death. We have now updated this estimate using data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuriaes, and Risk Factors Study… Continue Reading

Democracy Report 2022 – Autocratization Changing Nature?

“Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) produces the largest global dataset on democracy with over 30 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2021. Involving over 3,700 scholars and other country experts, V-Dem measures hundreds of different attributes of democracy. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 is down to… Continue Reading