Why GDP per head is a flawed measure of economic well-being

One reason is that, being expressed as an average, it hides shocking disparities between the top and the bottom. So, for example, if you look up Gross World Product in the World Factbook at www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook, you find that in 2011 it was 79 trillion US dollars, which is orld population was just approaching seven billion, the average for every man, woman and child on the planet was $11,800 per person per year. 

Compare this to the widely quoted statistic that more than one billion people live on a dollar a day, which is mentioned for example in “Millennium Development Goal 1 – To eradicate extreme poverty” at http://www.oxfam.org.uk/education/resources/change_the_world_in_eight_steps/files/goal_1_updated.pdf

www.oxfam.org.uk/education/resources/change_the_world_in_eight_st

Similarly, the UK average hides shocking disparities between the top and the bottom. In 2011 GDP per person per year was average for every man, woman and child on the planet was $36,600 or £23,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. This would be £92,000 a year for a family of four.

‘High pay is good for Britain' ...?

‘High pay is good for Britain. In fact it is vital.’ So wrote Michael Spencer, chief executive of interdealer broker, ICAP, who has a fortune worth half a billion pounds, in the Independent on 10 March 2012. Not true, as shown in this rebuttal of “trickle-down” economics by Stewart Lansley of The Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research at Bristol University and the author of The Cost of Inequality: why economic equality is essential for recovery.

See Inequality and instability: why more equal societies have more stable economies at www.cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/CPAG-Poverty142-inequality-instability.pdf

Marx's Ecology

Went to “The End of Oil: Capitalism and the Future of Energy” at Marxism 2012 on 9/7/12: excellent workshop by Gareth Dale. I asked him about Schumacher’s comment that Marx’s labour theory of value takes for granted that the earth provides natural resources free, and he referred me to "Free Gifts” by John Bellamy Foster. a leading proponent of Marxist ecology. Can't find it but Mr Google comes up with “Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature", which sets out a “basis for ecosocialism grounded in Marxist science rather than mysticism.”
On my question how the planet can cope with growing population amid dwindling resources he referred me to his article, The growth paradigm: a critique, in International Socialism, March 2012
Further reading also at http://www.green-blog.org/2012/07/04/the-growth-machine-is-killing-our-planet-so-why-hasnt-it-been-stopped/

Germany sets new solar power record

On Sat 26 May, German solar power plants produced "nearly 50 percent of the nation's midday electricity needs" according to a Reuters report:

Germany sets new solar power record - German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour - equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity - through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday … Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50 percent of the nation's midday electricity needs.

The point was also mentioned, slightly wrongly, by Bill McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, on Democracy Now! on 27 June.

Contrast this with DECC’s statistic that UK renewables contributed 9.5% of electricity in 2011.

Mystery Of The Missing Clocks

From a thought-provoking blog on Truth by David Edwards of Media Lens:

"The truth peeks out at us from the most unexpected places. It can be seen, for example, in the empty spaces where one might otherwise hope to find a clock in shops. The average retailer doesn’t approve of customers clock-watching - they might realise they have something more important to do and cut short their shopping trips."

Edwards goes on to explore the importance of self-awareness and meditation later in the Cogitation, a refreshingly spiritual tack in what is normally an entirely political blog.  Or maybe it's just an example of how the personal is political.

Elsewhere Edwards refers to Chomsky's point that Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 would not have become literary classics if they'd criticised our society, rather than that 'reviled enemy', the Soviet Union. On the subject of literary classics, I'm just re-reading Jack London's White Fang and The Call Of The Wild in a Penguin Popular Classics edition which features a two-page bio of the author that makes no mention of his revolutionary socialist politics nor his third most important novel, The Iron Heel. That is the kind of airbrushing out of history that Chomsky and Edwards are talking about.

FoE UK abandoning opposition to nuclear power?

Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees, has published a revelation that Friends of the Earth is seriously considering abandoning its decades-long opposition to nuclear power, according to FoE’s head of policy, science and research Mike Childs. Now that George Monbiot and James Lovelock have gone pro-nuclear, I was worried that this was another anti-nuclear stalwart doing an about-face. On closer reading, however, the interview does not reveal anything like what Lynas claims. Moreover, on the same day, FoE announced that Britain’s energy future lies in renewables and energy saving, not nuclear power.

Lynas was high in my estimation, as I'd just read Six Degrees, and found it readable and well-argued, well-informed but not too technical. Not any more.

Still, technical confusion abounds: comments on Lynas' blog and elsewhere refer to Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) technology and how it may provide a solution to the problem of existing nuclear waste.

Cultural and atmospheric pressure

Culture is a collective force that presses down on the individual from all sides. In that way it is like atmospheric pressure. The key features of atmospheric pressure that I want to compare with cultural pressure are that it is very heavy but you don’t notice it and that it is crucial to life. The key contrast is that cultural pressure is entirely man-made and can therefore be changed.

1. Atmospheric pressure is 15 pounds per square inch at sea level but as it’s just normal you don’t notice it. But you’d soon notice if you had to carry a few extra 15lb weights on your back.
2. Atmospheric pressure is crucial to life because without it the air is too thin to breathe.  On Mount Everest, for example, which is some 8,000 metres above sea level, mountaineers need bottled oxygen or they would asphyxiate.
3. Human culture goes back thousands or maybe millions of years to the dawn of human evolution, some one million to five million years ago. It weighs a ton, but as it is as normal as the air your breathe, you hardly notice it.
4. Like atmospheric pressure, human culture is crucial. Without the accumulated knowledge and culture of our billions of ancestors we couldn’t farm, cook or even speak. We’d barely know what to eat as our instincts are almost defunct.

But here’s the rub. Although necessary our culture is oppressive.  It embodies features like sexism, racism and militarism, which contribute to human suffering. It is only when you start thinking critically about it that you notice how hard it bears down and how hard it is to shift it. In free-thinking Western societies it appears to have no resistance – like air at sea-level – yet it bears down relentlessly. It is man-made so it can be changed. The first step is to acknowledge it is there, rather than ignore it, as we tend to do with atmospheric pressure.