nature

26 May 2017

Posted on May 26, 2017 Leave a Comment

Megan Roberts’ “The state of the world: report card on international cooperation” summarizes the main findings of the Council of Councils’ 2017 Report Card. It is depressing. The data come from asking the heads of 25 think tanks across the world to grade international cooperation efforts on global challenges. The 2016 overall grade is C minus, down from previous years in the aggregate as well as throughout specific issues from climate change to global health to global trade and conflict. The main driver behind this poor score is the global wave of nationalism coupled with the declining trust in institutions. The report card also ranks global risks and opportunities. Top 3 risks: conflict between states, transnational terrorism, and internal conflicts. Interestingly they are all security-related while the WEF Global Risks Report 2017 had three environmental risks topping its list this year. Top 3 opportunities: combating international terrorism, promoting global health, and advancing development. I cannot draw any comparison with the WEF report as it only looks at risks, contributing to the overall depressing feeling.

Andrew Mayeda’s “World Bank’s star economist is sidelined over war on words” recounts how the World Bank’s Development Economics Group staff mutinied against chief economist Romer and his rough demands to make research more straightforward. Romer requested that researchers connect their work to public debates, define clear purpose for each publication, and make emails shorter. He also had strong views on style, asking for less convoluted wording and more use of active voice while tracking frequency of “and” in reports (which he would not clear if above 2.6%). From this story it seems that requests were conveyed in a painful way. This aside, the rules seem pretty good to me. Especially as I recalled this World Bank research showing that while the Bank spent one quarter of its country service budget on reports, one third were never downloaded and only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times in their shelf-times.

A little extra this week as it is a long week-end for some of us and Bill Gates just shared his summer reading picks. I read two. Homo Deus which I recommended here as a good cerebral trip. It was no surprise to see it in the list as Gates had loved the prequel. What was surprising to me was to see Maylis de Kerangal’s The heart which is more of an emotional trip. de Kerangal is a great writer who can make a page turner out of the science of building a bridge. In The heart, which was entitled “mending the living” in French, you follow a heart being extracted from the body of a young man killed in a car accident to its transplantation in the body of a middle age woman dying of a heart malfunction. It is about grief and how every person around these two protagonists deal with it. It is powerful. I enjoyed it.

My map this week is from Fred Stolle’s “We discovered 1.8 million square miles of forest in the desert”. Stolle and colleagues counted trees on satellite images and found the equivalent of a whole Amazon worth of trees hiding in drylands and deserts. This is good news for the planet. But it also good news for the 2 billion people, most of whom very poor, who live in drylands and depend on these trees for their livelihoods.

My quote this week is from Dame Helen Mirren’s “Tulane commencement speech“: “We do need you to fix things, to make things right, to answer the big and troubling questions of this extraordinary modern world. How is it that we have figured out how to put everything from our resting pulse rate to every book or song we’d ever want to read or listen to on our iPhones – and yet for six years we haven’t found a way to stop little children in Syria from being murdered by poisonous gas?”

18 December 2015

Posted on December 18, 2015 Leave a Comment

Tis’ the season of “best-ofs”. Falalalala, lala, lala.

Analysts are selecting their books of the year (See here for lists from finance and economics gurus). I am finishing Tetlock and Gardner’s Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction which is on top of several lists and look forward to telling you what I think. Editorialists are picking out their favorite long essays (see here for David Brooks’) of which I recommend the WeChat piece showing how it is shaping the future of mobile payments. Journalists are electing their women of the year (see here); and their person of the year (see here for the FT and here for Time) and end up choosing the same woman: Angela Merkel. Linguists are picking out their word of the year (see here for Oxford and here for Merriam-Webster) which are not even words. Bloggers are counting their clicks and ranking their posts.

In the spirit of the season, here is What I read’s 2015 best-of. Based on the number of clicks, here are your top fives:

Bevington and al’s “A multitemporal, multivariate index to dynamically characterize vulnerability of children and adolescents in Nepal: Using science in humanitarian response”. While the title is a mouthful, the map distills all this complexity to show children vulnerabilities at the village level, in real time. You can zoom in and out, you can map specific vulnerabilities (displaced children, available schools, functional healthcare facilities) or specific hazards (landslide from rainfalls, landslide from earthquakes, landslide post-quakes), or you can combine all this together in one map. The architecture behind the interactive map triangulates data of different nature and frequency from the Nepal National Census to NASA’s high-resolution satellite imagery.
Gonzales and al’s “Catalyst for change: Women and tackling income inequality” is the latest Staff Paper in the IMF series on inequality and growth. It looks at the links between gender inequality and income inequality in 140 countries over two decades. It shows that an increase in the UN multi-dimensional gender inequality index “from zero (perfect gender equality) to one (perfect gender inequality) is associated with an increase in net income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) of almost 10 points”. This is true for all countries, rich or poor. The paper also proposes policy recommendations from tax reform to improved family benefits such as parental leave and affordable childcare.
A quote from Nesta CEO Mulgan in “Meaningful meetings: How can meetings can be made better?”: “Some of the best meetings don’t happen.” (291 clicks). And let me expand a little: “Often people feel uncomfortable cancelling meetings, for fear that it implies that no work is being done. Similarly people feel uncomfortable in big bureaucracies not attending meetings – for fear that they may miss out on vital decisions, or be seen not to be a team player. The opposite would be a better approach – with cancelling or shortening meetings being taken as a sign of effective day to day communication and coordination that renders the meeting unnecessary.”
Ausubel’s “Nature Rebounds” presents positive trends with the combined effect of restoring nature. Farmland and forest use are reaching peaks; water, petroleum, and transportation uses are plateauing; and green vegetal cover expands. All this alongside a population growth slowdown. The paper concentrates on the US but Ausubel argues that “within a few decades, the same patterns, already evident in Europe and Japan, will be evident in many more places”. The only dark spot in this bright picture is oceans and fisheries damage.
Peleah’s “SDGs as a network of targets” captures the intrinsic connections among SDGs and their targets. Click and play with it: grab one target, say gender disparities in education, and drag it around to see how it pulls a huge part of the network with it. It shows how progress in some key targets will generate progress across the whole set. It illustrates the sectoral integration and complexity inherent to the SDG agenda.

2 July 2015

Posted on July 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

Publications on trends often focus on risks and threats, the depressing stuff. Inspired by the long week-end awaiting some of us, here is a selection of feel-good readings that came my way this week.

Ausubel’s “Nature Rebounds” presents positive trends with the combined effect of restoring nature. Farmland and forest use are reaching peaks; water, petroleum, and transportation uses are plateauing; and green vegetal cover expands. All this alongside a population growth slowdown. The paper concentrates on the US but Ausubel argues that “within a few decades, the same patterns, already evident in Europe and Japan, will be evident in many more places”. The only dark spot in this bright picture is oceans and fisheries damage. Technology optimism permeates the analysis. A little too much for my taste. Also it would have been useful to picture these trends vis-a-vis “planetary boundaries”. I asked myself: Is the rebound effect sufficient to stay within a safe environmental space? But overall this is a great read and a good reminder of the need to look back, to better look forward.

Roser’s “Visual history of the rise of political freedom and the decrease of violence” also takes the long view. The 19-slide presentation transports us from archeological evidence of widespread prehistorical violence when the share of people killed by other peoples was often more than 10%, all the way to today when the global rate of battle death is less than 1 for 100,000 people. The story, told through graphs and maps, links the decline of violence to improvements in education, literacy, political freedom and democracy. Like the rest of Roser’s work, this presentation exemplifies the power of good visualization.

My map of the week is from Bevington and al’s “A multitemporal, multivariate index to dynamically characterize vulnerability of children and adolescents in Nepal: Using science in humanitarian response”. While the title is a mouthful, the map distills all this complexity to show children vulnerabilities at the village level, in real time. You can zoom in and out, you can map specific vulnerabilities (children displaced, available schools, functional healthcare facilities) or specific hazards (landslide from rainfalls, landslide from earthquakes, landslide post-quake), or you can combine all this together in one map. The architecture behind the curtain triangulates data of different nature and frequency from the Nepal National Census to NASA’s high-resolution satellite imagery.

My quote of the week is from IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde’s Address at Grandes Conferences Catholiques: “If I had to pick the three most important structural tools to reduce excessive income inequality, it would be education, education, education.”[Emphasis in original]