The “World Rich List”:http://www.globalrichlist.com/ site reveals just where you rank relative to global per capita income. As things stand at the moment I don’t even make the top ten percent, apparently, but if you counted capital (and particularly accumulated cultural capital) my ranking would be higher…

Thanks to matt jones | work & thoughts for the link

People often use the Internet to try to get a personal glimpse of what things are like across the world. “Webcams”:http://www.comfm.com/webcam/ give you a peek but they can’t talk back, and travel guides written by travellers for travellers like “Wikitravel”:http://www.wikitravel.org/ or “igougo”:http://www.igougo.com/ but if you want a day by day slice of life account of life in a country weblogs can provide one. A very large proportion are “from the US and Europe”:http://www.blogcensus.net/?page=map but I recently heard about two weblog indexes from further afield sinosplice indexes weblogs in English from or about China and “Blog Africa”:http://www.blogafrica.com/ should be reasonably self-explanatory!

From the BBC World Service. This series – The Giving Game looks critically at how NGOs, business and local governments of developing countries interact. Some of those he interviewed suggested that NGOs – which are generally not formally accountable to anyone, particularly anyone in the developing countries they minister to – are getting to be more powerful than some governments in those countries. It is suggested that this undermines the role of democratically-elected governments (where the governments *are* democratically elected). A lot of the criticism of NGO power comes from “Michael Edwards”:http://www.futurepositive.org/Edwards.html, an ex-manager of Oxfam and Save the Children. “Clare Short”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/profiles/story/0,9396,-4749,00.html (now no longer Britain’s Secretary
of State for International Development) is also an advocate of trying to build governing capacity in less developed countries rather than doing an ‘end run’ around them by giving money to NGOs.

I can see their points of course, but it’s hard to justify giving money to a corrupt or just ineffective government when you could give it to an unaccountable but dedicated NGO in a country.

Another of the interesting points that comes out of the series is just how small the amount of money is that NGOs have to spend compared even to the inadequate amount of government-directed aid. It does suggest that they might be more useful in trying to guide aid policy than actually doing work on the ground themselves (though they argue that it is only by being ‘on the ground’ that they can understand the needs of the people they claim to be speaking for).

A rather densely-argued “academic paper”:http://www.brookings.org/dybdocroot/gs/events/paysatisfaction.pdf presented at the Brookings Institute has been summarised by “ScienceDaily”:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031003060615.htm – ‘our rank position within an organisation has a bigger effect on our happiness within that job than the happiness generated by our actual level of pay’.

Pretty uncontroversial I would have thought but this suggests that, for example, it might be better for a country to risk a lower standard of living if it could also produce a more equal standard.

Irwin M. Stelzer in a recent article about European vs American attitudes to income equality (referenced in “last week’s blog posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_europe.html#000892) casts doubt on an earlier study that showed this effect – I hope this latest, more large scale study will put an end to remaining doubts on this point.

When I “posted earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_online_media.html#000877 about The New Standard I forgot to mention another interesting example of alternative media different both from the IndyMedia and The New Standard styles. OhMyNews, a newspaper from South Korea, has thousands of “citizen reporters”. These get paid and go through the conventional editorial process but the pay is less than for conventional journalism and no credentials are necessary. This would seem to allow for the kind of “native reporting” (reporting by “ordinary people” and those directly involved in news events) that Chris Atton and others find a particularly appealling function of the new alternative media while preserving some of the quality standards that ensure good material is read and bad material hidden or discarded.

Significantly, OhMyNews seems to be successful as a business and a social phenomenon, though this may be in part simply because South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world.

“Indymedia”:http://www.indymedia.org/ and similar sites – created by unpaid, largely un-edited reporters – are one way in which the Internet is enabling alternative voices to be heard more widely, but this publishing model has its weaknesses. Because participants are unprofessional and unpaid, there tends to be more opinion venting and comments on existing coverage than original research. Also, the lack of editing means contributions can be ungrammatical, unreadable or even occaisionally “anti-semitic or racist rantings”:http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=44851. While many Indymedia sites have now started to hide or remove such postings, the problem is still bad enough that it is hindering the acceptance of Indymedia sites by the mainstream media and even “search engines”:http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/09/1639862_comment.php.

The New Standard wants to be a different kind of alternative media entity- one a lot closer to traditional news sources. It intends to pay its contributors to do real investigative research not just produce opinion pieces, and it will “charge its readers”:http://newstandardnews.net/promo/membership.cfm $4 to $10 a month when it launches in December.
(more…)

Uncle Sam teaches terrorism. In the early 80’s the CIA published a sabotage manual and distributed it throughout Nicaragua. The anti-Sandanista pamphlet is full of tips on bringing down the infrastructure of the country…

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Foreign Policy and the Centre for Global Development have produced an interesting “generosity league table” which balances rich countries’ aid, trade, investment and environmental policies to measure their overall effect on poorer nations. (I think it’s a mistake to put in a measure of environmental impact alongside the other straight economic measures, but let that pass).

Japan, which I always thought of as one of the good guys (it was until recently the largest foreign aid donor) turns out to be at the bottom of their league table because they don’t welcome foreign goods or workers and the large past aid loans are balanced by large debt repayments by poor countries.

Turns out the most generous countries are Denmark and the Netherlands and (to my surprise) Portugal, New Zealand and Switzerland. The UK is, “Consistently middling across categories, and dead center—11th—in the overall standings” while Canada’s extensive participation in peacekeeping operations is undercut by low aid and high greenhouse gas emissions – it ends up just 18th out of the 21 countries surveyed. The US is second lowest of developed countries – only Japan scores worse.

Of course you could change the weightings and come up with a different league table but still I think this table is thought provoking.one monitoring 3 in creditscore one 3 credit inneed credit american consumerstax 2007 federal creditaccreditation healthand credit services education americaneducation accounting credit5 card credit start Maptechnician psychiatric in schools california accreditedonline aba degree accredited lawcredit affinity in mn unionsunion utah america ogden credit firstchase aarp card credit bankarea cosmetic accredited in bay dentistveterinarian at-home degrees accreditedcredit american personal card express Map

There are several sites available to let you compare your favourite nations to one another online. Each has its merits and specialties so if you don’t find what you want from one, try one of the others.

NationMaster – the one I found out about most recently – lets you look at statistics in hundreds of different categories. Earlier I found the similar Your Nation.com – which relies on rather old CIA Fact Book data (1998) – and the UN’s “Infonation” aimed particularly at schoolkids which has a somewhat eccentric navigation system and a shorter list of countries to compare. It’s a pity someone doesn’t make a comparative database like these but which is dynamically linked to the latest sources of information – these while interesting will become increasingly out of date.

If you want to dig deeper Offstats provides a database of links to official statistics from several countries across the Internet, but without the whizzy direct comparison engine.

One key measure missing is the UN’s ever-popular quality of life (“Human Development”) index (report / index in PDF form). Of course how you score a country depends on what you value – one could come up with a different ranking with different criteria – but it’s always interesting to see how different countries fare. Canada long valued its top position through much of the 1990s (it dropped to 8th this year – behind the US(!)) and I notice the EU is blowing its own trumpet with six of the top ten countries.

The State Department’s assessment of the cost of living in many world cities is also entertaining, though it seems to find most places more expensive to live in than Washington DC which suggests to me that the “basket” of goods and services they use to generate the index is a little skewed.

Thanks to Eszter for the NationMaster linkringtone amber pacificcode nokia ringtone 3390650 free midi ringtone treoctu tv 24 show ringtoneringtone composer free nokia 3310ringtone blackberry 7290free 8390 download nokia ringtonedownload ringtone mosquito alarm Mapringtone nokia 33608700c ringtonephone ringtones alcatel cellfree absolutely ringtone sprintfor mp3 verizon agency ringtonesringtones alltel funnyringtone palm treo 6007600 nokia ringtones Map

I just finished reading Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God – a diatribe about the way in which 1990s business writers (particularly the prophets of the new economy) tried to assert that the changes in business practices then (casualisation, outsourcing etc) were inevitable and could not and should not be challenged. I found the book somewhat irritating because it was hectoring and repetitious but one or two of the footnotes were interesting.

The paper Family Income Mobility– How Much Is There and Has It Changed? [a PDF] by Peter Gottschalk and Sheldon Danziger was particularly interesting as it provides empirical evidence for what is generally just “folk wisdom” (at least in left wing circles). It concludes that in the US:

“even though there is substantial income mobility, the extent of mobility has not increased over this period. As a result, the gaps between those at the top and those at the bottom have widened and remained at least as persistent as they were in the 1970’s.”

Also (based on earlier research not available online)

“The fact that the US has a less-regulated, more decentralized labor market than the Nordic countries or Germany has not generated greater economic mobility here, either in earnings or family income. Likewise, the more extensive systems of social protection in the European countries have yielded lower poverty and lower family income inequality, but not at the cost of lower mobility.”

It seems from the data provided that 80% of people who were in the highest quintile of earnings in 1968-70 remained there in 1989-91 while of those who started in the lowest quintile, 31% remained there and 25.4% only rose to the next highest (the actual argument is a little more complex so if you want to really dig into the figures I recommend you look at the PDF).

I also ran across an international comparison of poverty and income inequality which included some interesting charts of how much inequality there was in a number of nations including several European countries, Canada and the US, in the 1980s and 1990s and how much difference taxes made to reducing inequality.