While many in the West take a very dim view of China, China expert John Ross is far more positive, telling MintCast that China has seen the highest sustained economic growth of any country in world history. "People don’t understand the scale of China’s success, and they still don’t understand what it means, therefore, in the transformation of the lives of ordinary Chinese people,”
The post Why China’s Rapid Rise is Terrifying the United States, with John Ross appeared first on MintPress News.
Something new and troubling is happening as economies grow across much of the globe. In contrast to prior decades, when human health improved as global GDP swelled, the link to health progress has been broken. No longer is economic growth delivering a health dividend, it seems.
Meanwhile, another metric, the health of the environment, has continued to deteriorate with economic growth. We now face a “ghastly” global environmental crisis,
The post Guess What Has Decoupled from Economic Growth? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Like a doctor measuring a patient’s vital signs, environmental scientists use various indicators to assess the health of the global ecosystem. These planetary vital signs are reckoned in a variety of units, such as tons of greenhouse gas emitted or hectares of land deforested. Meanwhile, conventional economists try to measure everything in terms of dollars (or other currencies). For example, they assign monetary values to the “ecosystem services”
The post Tons, Hectares, or Dollars? Measuring the Pressure Exerted by the Economy on the Biosphere appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued what Greenpeace International called the “final warning” in the global effort to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. After three decades of increasingly insistent wake-up calls, the Panel laid out the sobering reality: Meeting the temperature goal set by the global community in 2015 is impossible without an immediate response, “a quantum leap in climate action,” in the words of United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
The post A “Final Warning” on Climate appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
I’m having an ongoing conversation with a friend about the merits and drawbacks of degrowth as a climate action strategy. She is easily the most astute climate thinker I know, with insights available only to those deeply immersed in the nuances of climate finance and decarbonization. She’s wary of the degrowth movement, as are many prominent players in the climate transition. She views it as an unhelpful distraction from humanity’s efforts to grapple with the climate crisis.
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On a scale of one to ten, COP15—the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal last month—was a solid five. That may not sound like a ringing endorsement, but it represents significant progress from prior COPs, which dabbled along in the one or two range for the better part of three decades. The progress was evident from the start, when UN Secretary General António Guterres kicked off the conference by noting,
The post COP15: The Good, the Bad, and the Smugly appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Australia’s economy was performing exceptionally well in the lead-up to the Delta variant lockdowns, propped up by a barrage of government spending in the three months to June and impressive household spending.
The June quarter national accounts published on Wednesday show inflation-adjusted production, income and spending (gross domestic product) climbed 0.7% between March and the end of June, ahead of the NSW lockdown that began on June 26.
Were it not for a surge in imports and a weather-related decline in the volume of exports (each of which cuts measured GDP) gross domestic product would have climbed 1.7% in the June quarter.
Over the year to June economic activity grew a record 9.6%, as it climbed back from a record 7% slide in the three months to June in 2020.
Australian quarterly gross domestic product
At the risk of being political – and politics is important, it will determine how we are governed for the next three years – economic conditions could scarcely be better for a government seeking re-election.
The economic things that matter most to most people are, in my view:
jobs – if employment is climbing rather than falling, most people are not at much risk of losing their job
economic growth and wages growth – if things are getting better rather than worse, even in small ways, people feel better about the future
the ability to buy a home – if it is getting hard, even for other people or for their children, they are concerned about what the future will become
mortgage rates – as long as rates stay low they know their own personal budget won’t go out of whack
How much cash would you need to be paid to agree to live without a smartphone for a year?
If you are like the typical American, the answer is US$10,000 – which is far, far more than what we are actually charged for having and using smartphones.
How much would you need to be paid to live without a computer?
According to the same research, just published by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a typical American would want US$25,000 to live computer-free for a year.
For the GPS system that lets us map where we are on all our devices, the answer is US$3,000; for streaming services such as Netflix the answer is another US$3,000.
For refrigeration the answer is US$10,000; for air conditioning, another US$10,000; and for running water US$50,000.
