The Lowy Institute Interpreter has highlighted a new video from Vox giving a simple, quick and easy breakdown of Iran’s government and upcoming parliamentary elections that will be held on 26 February.
They say: Often Western media portrays Iran as just another top-down dictatorship with ‘no politics to speak of’, but there is real ideological ‘tussle’ within the Islamic Republic and its complex institutions. Iran has also been the subject of that question in the West: are Islam and democracy ‘compatible’?
Confirmation bias, idealogical/doctrinaire policy “imperatives” or good-old special interests are all part of what contributes to our sense of progress in the human condition.
Is it actually true that we are building a better world? Or are those who claim that things are always getting worse the ones in the right? Whether we’re discussing the way of the world over a pint in the pub or dissecting the issues at an academic conference, it’s a topic that lingers constantly: how is the world changing?
Roser points out in a series of research that:
incomes are growing in all parts of the world,
world poverty is declining rapidly
and that the poorest countries now have the highest growth!
[ Human Development – Source: Max Roser via Prados de la Escosura (2014) – CC BY-SA License
I was a school student when this first Club of Rome Report was widely heralded.
I was in University studying Geography, History, Literature and Politics when I looked closely at its research and findings.
I was teaching when the “20 year old” report was critiqued as flawed and plain wrong.
As Limits to Growth concluded in 1972:
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth’s forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research.
-The Guardian
The task was very ambitious. The team tracked industrialisation, population, food, use of resources, and pollution. They modelled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. If that didn’t happen, the model predicted “overshoot and collapse” – in the economy, environment and population – before 2070. This was called the “business-as-usual” scenario.
The book’s central point, much criticised since, is that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead to a crash.
So were they right? We decided to check in with those scenarios after 40 years. Dr Graham Turner gathered data from the UN (its department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, the food and agriculture organisation, and the UN statistics yearbook). He also checked in with the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration, the BP statistical review, and elsewhere.
That data was plotted alongside the Limits to Growth scenarios.
The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario.
As described below, data from the forty years or so since the LTG study was completed indicates that the world is closely tracking the BAU scenario. In the BAU, during the 20th century increasing population and demand for material wealth drives more industrial output, which grows at a faster rate than population.
The exact size of the page you see depends on the screen resolution on your computer/device, but the page is almost 1 mile (1.6 Km) high and 800 feet (250 m) wide.
A fascinating photo-essay in the current The Atlantic, featuring Reuters photographer Carlos Barria’s amazing shots, recreating the same framing and perspective as a photograph taken in 1987, showing what a difference 26 years can make in the life of a city.
Shanghai 1987 and 2013 – Carlos Barria -Reuters
Follow the links to see the full animation on the Reuters website.
The OECD has published a series of country notes that assesses progress that countries have made in responding to Going for Growth policy recommendations since 2011.
It identifies and discusses new priority areas where structural reforms are needed to lift growth across OECD and BRIICS countries. The Australian country note is below.
Visualizing.org is displaying some animated age-pyramids that tell a unique story of the challenges of growth in the coming decades.
From the site:
On October 31, 2011, demographers at the United Nations reported that the earth’s population had reached 7 billion. That number marks an increase of 1 billion in a single decade, and is projected to approach 9 billion by 2050. Data visualization can help us understand the evolving demographic composition of the world population, the economic implications of such growth, and the challenges we must overcome to accommodate a global community of 7 billion with Earth’s limited natural resources.
We know that the long term trend for TOTAL global population is slowing and will plateau, somewhere in the range of 7.5 and 10.5 billion by 2050. We also know that most of the rapid growth and the families with 4-5 + children per family are in sub-Saharan Africa, whilst many other modern economies are at or below replacement-rates for their populations. So while the overall global trend is positive, regionally, the variations are huge.
The impact for resource use, resource allocation and global co-operation remain profound.
