Powerful Critique Of Modern Capitalism - Business Insider

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Pope Francis is out with the first big, written text of his papacy. The full text can be found here (via Izabella Kaminska).

The section of the text that's getting the most attention is his powerful denouncement of our current financial system, the obsession with consumption, inequality, and the tyranny of capitalism.

The key part of the text is below, though first here a few lines that really stand out.

On the importance of remembering those who are less fortunate: "We can only praise the steps being taken to improve people’s welfare in areas such as health care, education and communications. At the same time we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day, with dire consequences."

On the seriousness of economic exclusion: "Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills."

On the failure of traditional economic dogmas:  "... some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting." 

On exploding inequality: "While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few."

On the world's obsession with money: "We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose." 

On the dangerous mix of inequality and consumerism: "It is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric."

On the role of the state in providing for the common good and regulating the economy: "This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. "

Here's the whole section:

I. SOME CHALLENGES OF TODAY’S WORLD

52. In our time humanity is experiencing a turning-point in its history, as we can see from the advances being made in so many fields. We can only praise the steps being taken to improve people’s welfare in areas such as health care, education and communications. At the same time we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day, with dire consequences. A number of diseases are spreading. The hearts of many people are gripped by fear and desperation, even in the so-called rich countries. The joy of living frequently fades, lack of respect for others and violence are on the rise, and inequality is increasingly evident. It is a struggle to live and, often, to live with precious little dignity. This epochal change has been set in motion by the enormous qualitative, quantitative, rapid and cumulative advances occurring in the sciences and in technology, and by their instant application in different areas of nature and of life. We are in an age of knowledge and information, which has led to new and often anonymous kinds of power.

No to an economy of exclusion

53. Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

No to the new idolatry of money

55. One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

56. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.

No to a financial system which rules rather than serves

57. Behind this attitude lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God. Ethics has come to be viewed with a certain scornful derision. It is seen as counterproductive, too human, because it makes money and power relative. It is felt to be a threat, since it condemns the manipulation and debasement of the person. In effect, ethics leads to a God who calls for a committed response which is outside of the categories of the marketplace. When these latter are absolutized, God can only be seen as uncontrollable, unmanageable, even dangerous, since he calls human beings to their full realization and to freedom from all forms of enslavement. Ethics – a non-ideological ethics – would make it possible to bring about balance and a more humane social order. With this in mind, I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs”.[55]

58. A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would require a vigorous change of approach on the part of political leaders. I urge them to face this challenge with determination and an eye to the future, while not ignoring, of course, the specifics of each case. Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and a return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favours human beings. 

No to the inequality which spawns violence

 59. Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If every action has its consequences, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. We are far from the so-called “end of history”, since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful development have not yet been adequately articulated and realized.

 60. Today’s economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric. Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve. This serves only to offer false hopes to those clamouring for heightened security, even though nowadays we know that weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create new and more serious conflicts. Some simply content themselves with blaming the poor and the poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging in unwarranted generalizations, they claim that the solution is an “education” that would tranquilize them, making them tame and harmless. All this becomes even more exasperating for the marginalized in the light of the widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in their governments, businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-pope-on-the-financial-system-inequality-money-2013-11#ixzz2lxshFeke

Social Capital Is as Important as Financial Capital in Health Care - HBR

by Alexandra Norrish, Nikola Biller-Andorno, Padhraig Ryan and Thomas H. Lee  |   11:00 AM November 20, 2013

Article link: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/social-capital-is-as-important-as-financial-capital-in-health-care/
For a discipline so fundamentally altruistic, health care is oddly dysfunctional around relationships. That’s changing fast, of course, as providers are finding that cooperation is as critical to caregiving as cutting edge tests and therapeutics. But effective cooperation, particularly in a setting as complex as health care, requires more than a resolve to play well together; it requires leadership to explicitly recognize the need to build social capital across the organization, and implement a strategy accomplish it.

Yet building social capital — the trust and reciprocity among individuals and between groups — is rarely a specific focus of organizational leaders, though we believe it is as essential as financial resources for health care delivery systems. More than a decade of research on social capital in healthcare has found that higher levels are associated with improved coordination, increased job satisfaction and greater commitment among the staff, faster dissemination of evidence-based medicine — and better patients outcomes. As high performance on these measures is as important to organizational health as having a solid bottom line, leadership needs to invest in social capital and cultivate its growth with the same focus and discipline that it has applied to financial capital in the past.

Our full article describing social capital, its roles in health care, and strategies for building it in health care organizations is available here (PDF). The paper draws on the broad social capital literature and the toolkit for building social capital developed by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The strategy at its core depends on nurturing five features of high-social-capital organizations: trust, reciprocity, shared values, shared norms, and openness. Among the tactics leaders can use to encourage these are communicating honestly (which should go without saying, but doesn’t always), building opportunities for interaction, establishing formal statements of responsibility and reciprocity, creating incentives for working together, establishing shared processes, engaging the staff in developing a statement of shared values, and using powerful stories about successes — and failures — in patient care to motivate staff and reaffirm organizational values.

To give just one example of storytelling, consider how the Cleveland Clinic made its decision to ask every patient seeking an appointment whether they would like to be seen today.  That policy did not come from the marketing department, even though it is prominently advertised today.  It came from one patient who sought an appointment, was given one in two weeks, and ended up in the emergency department that night.  The patient didn’t die, and wasn’t harmed in terms of any of the classical “outcome measures.”  But the leadership of the Cleveland Clinic had enough of a sense of “we” that they could decide “we find this intolerable,” and they began asking every patient if they wanted to be seen that day.  You can only make this kind of decision if you have social capital in the bank.
Ultimately, the key to success is authenticity.  Though social-capital building can be nurtured, it can’t be mandated.  As Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak, former director of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, wrote in their book In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work, “Social capital thrives on authenticity and withers in the presence of phoniness or manipulation…[Leaders’] interventions must be based on a careful understanding of the social realities of their organizations and (even more difficult) a willingness to let things develop, even if the direction they take is not precisely the one envisioned.”

Our more detailed paper provides a framework organizations can use to begin building their social capital.

Follow the Leading Health Care Innovation insight center on Twitter @HBRhealth. E-mail us at healtheditors@hbr.org, and sign up to receive updates here.

Leading Health Care Innovation
From the Editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine

• When M&A Is Not the Best Option for Hospitals
• The Big Barrier to High-Value Health Care: Destructive Self-Interest
• A Framework for Reducing Suffering in Health Care
• Fix the Handful of U.S. Hospitals Responsible for Out–of–Control Costs

More blog posts by Alexandra Norrish, Nikola Biller-Andorno, Padhraig Ryan and Thomas H. Lee

More on: Health, Leadership, Organizational culture

Alexandra Norrish

Alexandra Norrish is the Deputy Director of NHS Policy and Strategy at the UK Department of Health, and was a 2012-13 Harkness Fellow in Health Policy and Practice.

Nikola Biller-Andorno

Nikola Biller-Andorno is Director of the Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Zurich, Switzerland, a Safra Network Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Division of Medical Ethics, Harvard Medical School.

Padhraig Ryan

Padhraig Ryan is a visiting Fulbright Fellow in Harvard Medical School, and a HRB PhD Scholar in Trinity College Dublin.

Incomes of the top 1% of Americans grew by 31.4% from 2009 to 2012, compared to 0.4% for the remaining 99%. - WSJ

Article link http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2013/11/26/the-high-price-of-rising-income-inequality/?mod=e2tw

The High Price of Rising Income Inequality

What will be the biggest challenge to capitalism in the next two decades—and what should be done about it?

DOMINIC BARTON: Rising and persistent income inequality. In 2012, the top 1% of earners in the U.S. collected 19.3% of the country’s total household income–an all-time high, according to work by Emmanuel Saez at the University of California at Berkeley. The disparity is growing rapidly as well. Incomes of the top 1% grew by 31.4% from 2009 to 2012, compared to just 0.4% for the remaining 99%. There is still considerable debate among economists on the impact of income inequality on economic growth and the short-term recovery from the recession. However, few would disagree that unchecked increases in inequality will be costly for capitalism in the long-run–due to the divisions that it creates within society and the strain that it puts on social safety nets.

I believe that the most important and sustainable way of tackling this issue is through thoughtful education reform and investment. While changes to the tax code and other forms of redistribution are helpful to alleviate the symptoms of inequality, they do little to address the root cause. Income inequality is self-reinforcing–as inequality gets worse, upward mobility decreases and contributes to more inequality.

Education, particularly programs geared toward vocational training, can help combat this problem–and is an area where the private sector can also play a role. For example, IBM helped develop the P-TECH school in Brooklyn, N.Y., which offers a six-year program integrating high-school and college curricula to train its graduates for careers in the technology industry. Similar schools are being developed across the country with other corporate partners.

Dominic Barton is the global managing director at McKinsey & Co.

 Read the latest Leadership Report.

About Half of Kids With Single Moms Live in Poverty

Article link:http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-21678

Children raised in single-parent households in the U.S. are far more likely to live in poverty than children with both parents present, according to Census figures released Monday. As a result, far more black and Hispanic children are raised in poverty than white kids.

Bloomberg News

Among all children living only with their mother, nearly half — or 45% — live below the poverty line, the Census Bureau said. For those living with just the father, about 21% lived in poverty. By comparison, only about 13% of children with both parents present in the household live below the poverty line.

The latest data, offering a broad snapshot of America’s households, is the latest to show that children of single parents often have a rougher time financially than those with both parents, a scenario encountered far more by blacks and Hispanics than by whites. About 55% of black children and 31% of Hispanic children live with one parent, compared to 20% of white children and 13% of Asian children.

Other new data released in the report:

– One in four women raising children are doing it on their own. Women are far more likely to be single parents than men, the figures show. Two-thirds, or 67%, of mothers living with their children have a spouse present, compared with 86% of fathers living with their children. One in four mothers with a child under age 18 has no partner present, compared with 6% of fathers.

– The share of so-called family households — in which at least two occupants are related by blood, marriage or adoption — has fallen sharply in recent decades. This year, roughly two-thirds, or 66%, of households were family households, down from 81% in 1970.

–The share of households that are married couples with children has declined by about half, to 19% this year versus 40% in 1970.

– Households also are becoming smaller. On average, 2.5 people share a household currently, compared to 3.1 people in 1970. That’s in part because families are having fewer children. Average children per family fell to 0.9 from 1.3 during that period.

CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report — United States, 2013

November 22, 2013 / Vol. 62 / Supplement / No. 3 / Pg. 1 - 187 

Article link: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/ind2013_su.html?mobile=nocontent 

CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report — United States, 2013

• Foreword
• Introduction: CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report — United States, 2013
• Education and Income — United States, 2009 and 2011
• Access to Healthier Food Retailers — United States, 2011
• Unemployment — United States, 2006 and 2010
• Nonfatal Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses — United States, 2010
• Fatal Work-Related Injuries — United States, 2005–2009
• Residential Proximity to Major Highways — United States, 2010
• Colorectal Cancer Incidence and Screening — United States, 2008 and 2010
• Health Insurance Coverage — United States, 2008 and 2010
• Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Coverage — United States, 2009–10 and 2010–11
• Pregnancy and Childbirth Among Females Aged 10–19 Years — United States, 2007–2010
• Binge Drinking — United States, 2011
• Cigarette Smoking — United States, 2006-2008 and 2009-2010
• Expected Years of Life Free of Chronic Condition–Induced Activity Limitations — United States, 1999–2008
• Asthma Attacks Among Persons with Current Asthma — United States, 2001–2010
• Diabetes — United States, 2006 and 2010
• Health-Related Quality of Life — United States, 2006 and 2010
• HIV Infection — United States, 2008 and 2010
• Obesity — United States, 1999–2010
• Periodontitis Among Adults Aged ≥30 Years — United States, 2009–2010
• Preterm Births — United States, 2006 and 2010
• Potentially Preventable Hospitalizations — United States, 2001–2009
• Prevalence of Hypertension and Controlled Hypertension — United States, 2007–2010
• Tuberculosis — United States, 1993–2010
• Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke Deaths — United States, 2009
• Drug-Induced Deaths — United States, 1999–2010
• Homicides — United States, 2007 and 2009
• Infant Deaths — United States, 2005–2008
• Motor Vehicle–Related Deaths — United States, 2005 and 2009
• Suicides — United States, 2005–2009
• Conclusion and Future Directions: CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report — United States, 2013
  Download .pdf document of this issue 

Education Is Getting a Re-boot - Scientific American

The Silicon Valley start-up culture is causing a long-overdue disruption in universities

By Richard DeMillo

Article link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=education-is-getting-a-reboot

This is a special series of SA Forum essays produced with the World Economic Forum and to run during the Summit on the Global Agenda, held in Abu Dhabi from November 18 to November 20.

Much of the academic world still turns to the American higher education system for leadership, with a few stellar institutions dominating annual rankings. There is a growing consensus, though, that the country took the wrong path a generation ago, and that its reputation for excellence cannot be sustained.
The brand name of American higher education relies heavily on a relatively small number of institutions that together enroll only a tiny fraction of all college students – “islands of excellence,” in the words of US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Unlike their elite cousins, most American institutions of higher education languish in a system that is anything but excellent.
Here are but a few of the symptoms of a system that is heading for trouble. First, it’s in financial disarray. Soaring debt and rising costs have pushed prices –$32,000 per year on average– far beyond the reach of average Americans. Second, it has performed poorly: many students graduate from college with grade-inflated degrees that are difficult to market, and many more fail to graduate at all. Half of graduates are unemployed or underemployed, while the dropout rate is 44 percent. Finally, public confidence in higher education is declining. The end result is a downward spiral in which institutions lose funding and then cut quality rather than jettisoning non-core activities, which leads to even poorer performance and further financial woes. For the majority of students, the system does not work very well.
Despite these shortcomings, a global homogenization of the world’s universities is under way that rewards organizations that simply imitate the American model. Many universities around the world are abandoning their local stakeholders in costly efforts to become more like highly ranked research universities. It is a strategy that draws resources away from the classroom to play in a global arena. Without disruption, the end result will be a global social divide between the few who can attend prestigious universities and those who receive inadequate instruction in inferior facilities. We need disruption.
Fortunately, innovators in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are already using technology to redefine the very idea of a university education. The not-for-profit Khan Academy offering classroom lectures in short, accessible videos, MIT’s decision to make its classroom content freely available, and last year’s explosion of Stanford-inspired Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) onto the higher education scene all pointed to a profound transformation in the nature of education.
A start-up culture has taken hold in higher education and it is leading to the kind of disruption that is overdue. MOOCs started a global conversation about the nature and value of universities. Although I was one of the first to work with start-ups to roll out online courses, I was unprepared for the scale of the national and international interest in the phenomenon. MOOCs have been embraced by millions of new learners around the world. Publishers’ restrictive intellectual property regimes are crumbling, as the high costs of textbooks and journals clash with the open mentality of the movement. Hardly a day goes by without major media coverage of disruption in higher education.
In May, my university, Georgia Tech, announced a MOOC-based version of its popular MS in computer science. Its $7,000 tuition is a quarter of the normal cost and is expected to enroll upwards of 10,000 students. If successful, the degree will structurally alter the economics of graduate education.
Some critics have characterized the forces underlying these events as a (false) choice between traditional universities and an impersonal, corporate-sponsored, inferior approach to education. Many more have taken a more objective view of the developments.
Rather than forcing all institutions into a single mould, the so-called year of the MOOC has actually been an occasion for an accelerated pace of experimentation with what it means to be a university in the 21st century. New groups of learners are finding each other online and converging around courses and professors, bypassing traditional institutions that had become accustomed to their gatekeeper role. Accreditors find themselves adrift in a world where students can assemble their own curricula and employers accept do-it-yourself credentials. The past few months alone have seen new start-ups that tap into artificial intelligence to create personalized education, use social networks to create communities of mentors, and data mine the billions of keystrokes and mouse clicks of new online students to discover better ways of teaching and learning. Higher education has suddenly begun to innovate at an amazing pace. This is just the beginning of a process that will encourage much-needed diversity, not conformity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Richard DeMillo is Distinguished Professor of Computing and Management, and Director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Universities.

Woodson Says Caring for Veterans is Our Nation’s Moral Obligation

Dr. Jonathan Woodson | Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs

November 08, 2013

Dr. Jonathan Woodson, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, issued the following statement in commemoration of Veterans Day.

 

As we head into the Veterans Day weekend, I know that we all work every single day of the year in an organization that honors and serves those in uniform and those who have previously served our nation.  This coming Monday, the nation will take time to also acknowledge the service and sacrifices of our veterans. 

 

There are over 22 million veterans in our country, and regardless of when, where or for how long they served, we are grateful that these men and women raised their right hand to protect and defend the Constitution.  There will be plenty of speeches and ceremonies this weekend to express thanks. I just want to add my own small thank you to every veteran -- to include those still serving -- within the Military Health System.

 

And I also want to ask all of you in the organization to continue to strive for how we can even better honor and assist veterans in the coming year. In 2014, the size of our veteran population will increase as combat operations in Afghanistan draw to an end and the overall size of our active military force begins to get smaller. 

 

In the coming weeks and months, we need to reflect on what these changes in our force structure and size will demand from us. We need to continue to break new ground in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs and in partnership with our civilian colleagues in ways that facilitate care transitions and in ways that best use our collective capabilities to both train our workforce and treat our shared population in a more integrated way.

 

Caring and serving our veterans is a profound responsibility and moral obligation. I remain grateful for the professional excellence and personal compassion that you bring to this mission every day.

 

Happy Veterans Day.

The Insanity of Our Food Policy - NY Times

The Great Divideis a series about inequality.

TAGS:

FARM BILL (US), FOOD STAMPS, REPUBLICAN PARTY,UNITED STATES

THE GREAT DIVIDE November 16, 2013, 2:30 pm 

The Insanity of Our Food Policy

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day.

So it’s almost too absurd to believe that House Republicans are asking for a farm bill that would make all of these problems worse. For the putative purpose of balancing the country’s books, the measures that the House Republican caucus is pushing for in negotiations with the Senate, as Congress attempts to pass a long-stalled extension of the farm bill, would cut back the meager aid to our country’s most vulnerable and use the proceeds to continue fattening up a small number of wealthy American farmers.

The House has proposed cutting food stamp benefits by $40 billion over 10 years — that’s on top of $5 billion in cuts that already came into effect this month with the expiration of increases to the food stamp program that were included in the 2009 stimulus law. Meanwhile, House Republicans appear satisfied to allow farm subsidies, which totaled some $14.9 billion last year, to continue apace. Republican proposals would shift government assistance from direct payments — paid at a set rate to farmers every year to encourage them to keep growing particular crops, regardless of market fluctuations — to crop insurance premium subsidies. But this is unlikely to be any cheaper. Worse, unlike direct payments, the insurance premium subsidies carry no income limit for the farmers who would receive this form of largess.

The proposal is a perfect example of how growing inequality has been fed by what economists call rent-seeking. As small numbers of Americans have grown extremely wealthy, their political power has also ballooned to a disproportionate size. Small, powerful interests — in this case, wealthy commercial farmers — help create market-skewing public policies that benefit only themselves, appropriating a larger slice of the nation’s economic pie. Their larger slice means everyone else gets a smaller one — the pie doesn’t get any bigger — though the rent-seekers are usually adept at taking little enough from individual Americans that they are hardly aware of the loss. While the money that they’ve picked from each individual American’s pocket is small, the aggregate is huge for the rent-seeker. And this in turn deepens inequality.

Javier Jaén

The nonsensical arrangement being proposed in the House Republicans’ farm bill is an especially egregious version of this process. It takes real money, money that is necessary for bare survival, from the poorest Americans, and gives it to a small group of the undeserving rich, in return for their campaign contributions and political support. There is no economic justification: The bill actually distorts our economy by promoting the kind of production we don’t need and shrinking the consumption of those with the smallest incomes. There is no moral justification either: It actually increases misery and precariousness of daily life for millions of Americans.

FARM subsidies were much more sensible when they began eight decades ago, in 1933, at a time when more than 40 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Farm incomes had fallen by about a half in the first three years of the Great Depression. In that context, the subsidies were an anti-poverty program.

Now, though, the farm subsidies serve a quite different purpose. From 1995 to 2012, 1 percent of farms received about $1.5 million each, which is more than a quarter of all subsidies, according to the Environmental Working Group. Some three-quarters of the subsidies went to just 10 percent of farms. These farms received an average of more than $30,000 a year — about 20 times the amount received by the average individual beneficiary last year from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program, or SNAP, commonly called food stamps.

Today, food stamps are one of the main support beams in our anti-poverty efforts. More than 80 percent of the 45 million or so Americans who participated in SNAP in 2011, the last year for which there is comprehensive data from the United States Department of Agriculture, had gross household incomes below the poverty level. (Since then, the total number of participants has expanded to nearly 48 million.) Even with that support, many of them experience food insecurity, that is, they had trouble putting food on the table at some point during the year.

Historically, food stamp programs and agricultural subsidies have been tied together. The two may seem strange bedfellows, but there is a rationale: There is a need to address both sides of the economics of food — production and consumption. Having a bounteous supply within a country does not ensure that the citizens of that country are well fed. The radical imbalance between farm subsidies to the wealthy and nutritional assistance to the neediest — an imbalance that the farm bill proposals would directly promote — is a painful testament to this established economic fact.

The Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has reminded us that even famines are not necessarily caused by a lack of supply, but by a failure to get the food that exists to the people who need it. This was true in the Bengal famine of 1943 and in the Irish potato famine a century earlier: Ireland, controlled by its British masters, was exporting food even as its citizens died of starvation.

A similar dynamic is playing out in the United States. American farmers are heralded as among the most efficient in the world. Our country is the largest producer and exporter of corn and soybeans, to name just two of its biggest crops. And yet millions of Americans still suffer from hunger, and millions more would, were it not for the vital programs that government provides to prevent hunger and malnutrition — the programs that the Republicans are now seeking to cut back.

Taking from the poor to subsidize the rich.

And there is an extra layer of irony to America’s food policies: While they encourage overproduction, they pay little attention to the quality and diversity of foods our farms produce. The heavy subsidization of corn, for instance, means that many unhealthful foods are relatively cheap. So grocery shopping on a tight budget often means choosing foods that are not nutritious. This is part of the reason that Americans face the paradox of hunger out of proportion to their wealth, along with some of the world’s highest obesity rates, and a high incidence of Type 2 diabetes. Poor Americans are especially at risk for obesity.

A few years ago, I was in India, a country of 1.2 billion, in which tens of millions face hunger on a daily basis, when a front-page headline blared that one in seven Americans faced food insecurity because they couldn’t afford the basic necessities of life. Indian friends I met that day and in the following week were puzzled by this news: How could it be that in the richest country of the world there was still hunger?

Their puzzlement was understandable: Hunger in this rich land is unnecessary. What my Indian friends didn’t understand is that 15 percent of Americans — and 22 percent of America’s children — live in poverty. Someone working full time (2,080 hours a year) at the minimum wage of $7.25 would earn about $15,000 a year, far less than the poverty threshold for a family of four ($23,492 in 2012), and even less than the poverty level of a family of three.

This grim picture is a result of political decisions made in Washington that have helped create an economic system in which the undereducated must work exceptionally hard simply to remain in poverty.

This is not how America is supposed to work. In his famous 1941 “four freedoms” speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt enunciated the principle that all Americans should have certain basic economic rights, including “freedom from want.” These ideas were later embraced by the international community in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which also enshrined the right to adequate food. But while the United States was instrumental in advocating for these basic economic human rights on the international scene — and getting them adopted — America’s performance back home has been disappointing.

It is, of course, no surprise that with the high level of poverty millions of Americans have had to turn to the government to meet the basic necessities of life. And those numbers increased drastically with the onset of the Great Recession. The number of Americans on food stamps went up by more than 80 percent between 2007 and 2013.

To say that most of these Americans are technically poor only begins to get at the depth of their need. In 2012, for example, two in five SNAP recipients had gross incomes that were less than half of the poverty line. The amount they get from the program is very small — $4.39 a day per recipient. This is hardly enough to survive on, but it makes an enormous difference in the lives of those who get it: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that SNAP lifted four million Americans out of poverty in 2010.

Given the inadequacies of the existing programs to combat hunger and poor nutrition, and given the magnitude of poverty in the aftermath of the Great Recession, one might have thought that the natural response of our political leaders would be to expand programs enhancing food security. But the members of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives see things differently. They seem to want to blame the victims — the poor who have been provided an inadequate public education and so lack marketable skills, and those who earnestly seek work, but can’t find any, because of an economic system that has stalled, with almost one out of seven Americans who would like to find full-time employment still unable to obtain it. Far from alleviating the impacts of these problems, the Republicans’ proposal would reinforce privation and inequalities.

And the calamitous effects of the Republicans’ proposal will reach even beyond our borders.

Viewed from a larger perspective, the farming subsidies, combined with the cutbacks in food stamps, increase global poverty and hunger. This is because, with American consumption diminished from what it otherwise would be and production increased, food exports will inevitably increase. Greater exports drive down global prices, hurting poor farmers around the world. Agriculture is the main source of livelihood for the 70 percent of the world’s poor living in rural areas, who overwhelmingly reside in developing countries.

The adoption of the House Republicans’ plan will reverberate in our economy through several channels. One is simply that poor families with diminished resources will tamp down growth. More pernicious is that the Republicans’ farm bill would deepen inequality — and not just through the immediate giveaways to wealthy farmers and corresponding cuts to the poor. Children with poor nutrition — whether they are hungry or ill because of bad diets — do not learn as well as those who are better fed.

By cutting back on food stamps, we are ensuring the perpetuation of inequality, and at that, one of its worst manifestations: the inequality of opportunity. When it comes to opportunity, America is doing an alarmingly bad job, as I’ve written before in this series. We are endangering our future because there will be a large coterie of people at the bottom who will not live up to their potential, who will not be able to make the contribution that they could have made, to the prosperity of the country as a whole.

All of this exposes the Republicans’ argument in favor of these food policies — a concern for our future, particularly the impact of the national debt on our children — as a dishonest and deeply cynical pretense. Not only has the intellectual undergirding of debt fetishism been knocked out (with the debunking of work by the Harvard economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff that tied slowed growth to debt-to-G.D.P. ratios above 90 percent). The Republicans’ farm bill also clearly harms both America’s children and the world’s in a variety of ways.

For these proposals to become law would be a moral and economic failure for the country.

IBM hopes its Watson will become doctor's sidekick - MPR News

by Elizabeth Stawicki, Minnesota Public Radio
                                       

June 13, 2012

ST. PAUL, Minn.

— Remember Watson, the IBM supercomputer which made headlines last year by trouncing the top two contestants on the TV game show, Jeopardy?
Watson's million-dollar prize went to charity and now Big Blue is seeking gainful employment for Watson other than as a professional game show contestant.
Today, IBM's chief medical scientist visited a Minneapolis hospital to talk about how Watson's artificial intelligence could help doctors wade through loads of research data and apply that knowledge to treating patients.
Bulking up on a steady diet of the latest medical research, journals and textbooks, IBM's Watson training to be a doctor's assistant — an assistant who understands natural language and can provide a physician with a list of possible diagnoses and rank potential treatments.
At this stage, Watson is far from being able to do that job in a clinical setting, but that is the hope.
Named after IBM's founder, Thomas J. Watson, a team of IBM scientists created the supercomputer to analyze human language, process huge amounts of information and return answers in less than three seconds.
IBM Chief Medical Scientist Dr. Martin Kohn told a group of health care workers at Abbott-Northwestern hospital that Watson would not make decisions for them; the goal is to help them make better decisions. Kohn said there is no way that physicians can keep current on all the latest medical breakthroughs, but Watson could.

Jeopardy computer contestant

"The Watson that played Jeopardy! was able to read and understand 200 million pages of text in three seconds," Kohn said. "Think of how many journal articles that is."
Health care is increasingly pushing doctors to choose treatments based on the best evidence available about what is effective. IBM is touting Watson as a way to provide that analysis on the spot, but the computer still needs to get up to speed. Watson is getting that training at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, which agreed to collaborate with IBM.
The Cancer Center is providing Watson 1.5 million patient case histories and its specialists are developing systems that will allow Watson to correctly analyze medical questions.
Sloan-Kettering's head of Thoracic Oncology, Mark Kris says Watson will be helpful to cancer doctors because oncology research moves at a rapid pace. He says Watson can provide doctors with an instant consultation.
"The way we doctors work — particularly where we have a case where it's not as straightforward — we ask our colleagues, we ask specialists in the field," Kris said. "In essence, Watson will have that capability."
Watson is not without its limits, however. Despite single-handedly beating the Jeopardy! champions, it also made what IBM concedes were some "spectacular errors." In one of the final rounds, the category was U.S. cities.
For all of Watson's vaunted processing power, the computer came up with an answer that wasn't even in the right country. Watson's human rivals got the answer right.

Watson and health care

Watson's miss received a lot of ink. But IBM's Kohn explains Watson's confidence in that response was very low. But under the game's rules offering no response would have been a guaranteed wrong answer. Kohn says in the clinical setting Watson will provide physicians with its confidence level in a list of diagnoses and treatments.
In March, IBM announced it had formed a Watson Healthcare Advisory Board which includes representatives from leading cancer centers. Mayo Clinic is notably absent.
Dr. Dawn Milliner of Mayo said the world renowned clinic is in discussions with IBM about a potential role.
"We've been talking for some time and we continue to do so because we think this is a promising technology," Milliner said. "But it's a matter of the right timing and the right project for us to collaborate on to move this forward."
IBM and Sloan-Kettering hope to have Watson ready to begin a pilot project analyzing cases by the end of the year.

Article link:http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/06/13/health/ibm-watson-medical-technology

IBM to Announce More Powerful Watson via the Internet - NY Times

By QUENTIN HARDY

Published: November 13, 2013

LAS VEGAS — Welcome to the age of supercomputing for everyone.

On Thursday IBM will announce that Watson, the computing system that beat all the humans on “Jeopardy!” two years ago, will be available in a form more than twice as powerful via the Internet.       

Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans.

IBM’s move to make its marquee technology more widely available is the latest effort among big technology companies to make the world’s most powerful computers as accessible as the Angry Birds video game.

It is also an indication of how quickly the technology industry is changing, from complex systems that cost millions to install to pay-as-you-go deals that provide small companies and even individuals access to technology that just a few years ago only the largest companies could afford.

“The next generation will look back and see 2013 as a year of monumental change,” said Stephen Gold, vice president of the Watson project at IBM.

“This is the start of a shift in the way people interact with computers.”

IBM is wielding Watson in a fight to control the world of cloud computing — huge collections of computer servers connected over the Internet — with other big technology companies like Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft. It is no coincidence that IBM discussed its Watson news the same week Amazon was hosting clients at a conference here to pitch its own computing cloud, called Amazon Web Services or A.W.S.

The competition is still young, but its impact will be significant.

“Companies, governments and people will struggle to figure out what to do with all this,” said Jamie Popkin, an analyst with the research company Gartner. “It means there is going to be a new pace and velocity, making people rethink when humans make decisions, while machines make other decisions.”

Watson, a project on which IBM spent 14 years, is an artificial learning system that digests large volumes of information to find hidden meanings. Initial uses — besides  besting humans on game shows — include  examining medical patients and records to find an unexpected diagnosis, a bit like the genius portrayed in the television show “House.” Other uses include an online personal shopper and a virtual health aide that tailors exercises by asking questions.

IBM is opening Watson to more people in part to see what additional businesses might be created.

Watson is prominent, but similar projects are being run by other companies. On Tuesday, a company appearing at the Amazon conference said it had run in 18 hours a project on Amazon’s cloud of computer servers that would have taken 264 years on a single server.

The project, related to finding better materials for solar panels, cost $33,000, compared with an estimated $68 million to build and run a similar computer just a few years ago. Akin more to conventional supercomputing than Watson’s question-and-answer cognitive computing, the project was the first of several announced at the Amazon conference.

“It’s now $90 an hour to rent 10,000 computers,” the equivalent of a giant machine that would cost $4.4 million, said Jason Stowe, the chief executive of Cycle Computing, the company that did the Amazon supercomputing exercise, and whose clients include The Hartford, Novartis, and Johnson & Johnson. “Soon smart people will be renting a conference room to do some supercomputing.”

While revenues of Amazon’s cloud business are still small enough that the company does not have to disclose them, Amazon officials say Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive, believes A.W.S. could eventually dwarf Amazon’s businesses in books and merchandise, enterprises with $51 billion in revenue. This year, Gartner calculated that A.W.S. had five times the computing power of 14 other cloud computing companies, including IBM, combined.

Since then, IBM has spent an estimated $2 billion to acquire a cloud company called SoftLayer and has reconfigured Watson as a cloud product. It also hired buses that drove around the A.W.S. conference in Las Vegas, sporting ads that said they showed its superiority in cloud computing.

Besides gaining bragging rights and a much bigger customer base, IBM may be accelerating the growth of Watson’s power by putting it in the cloud. Mr. Gold said that Watson would retain learning from each customer interaction, gaining the ability to do things like interacting in different languages or identifying human preferences. IBM has taken steps to keep these improvements for its own benefit, by retaining rights in user agreements that customers are required to sign.

What is not yet clear is IBM’s plan to make money from taking Watson to the computing cloud. The company is experimenting with charging for data storage, or selling computing on a metered basis, like water or electricity. “There is no question the model will change,” Mr. Gold said. “You have to have flexibility to handle the breadth of cases we expect to see.”

It is likely that the competition among advanced computing systems will increase, lowering prices and delivering more capabilities to whatever use companies make of them.

This year, Google and a corporation associated with NASA acquired for study an experimental computer that appears to make use of quantum properties to deliver results sometimes 3,600 times faster than traditional supercomputers. The maker of the quantum computer, D-Wave Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia, counts Mr. Bezos as an investor.

In low-income urban neighborhoods the rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke are much higher

There is more to the cost of living in a food desert than higher prices for the few fruits and vegetables sold nearby, according to a study by an Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis researcher and the Marion County Public Health Department.
The study, discussed during the American Public Health Association's annual meeting in Boston, examined the health impact of developing a grocery store in a low-income urban neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis. Researchers found that residents of the community have much higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke than in other areas of Marion County.
"We looked at those particular diagnoses because they are ones that are influenced by eating a healthy diet and being more physically active," said Cynthia Stone, clinical associate professor in the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI. Stone led the research project.
The neighborhood, which has no full-service grocery store, is on the east side of the Indiana State Fairgrounds, bounded by 38th and 42nd Streets and Fall Creek Parkway and Sherman Drive. The nearest grocery stores are two to five miles away, falling within the U.S. Department of Agriculture's federal designation of a food desert, Stone said. The federal agency defines a food desert as a census tract with a substantial share of residents who live in low-income areas that have low levels of access to a grocery store or healthy, affordable food retail outlet.
The USDA's Economic Research Service estimates that 23.5 million people in the U.S. live in food deserts in urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy and affordable food. This lack of access contributes to a poor diet and can lead to higher levels of obesity and other diet-related illness, such as diabetes and heart disease. In the eastside neighborhood, many residents depend upon public transportation. Traveling to the closest grocery stores takes 30 to 45 minutes each way. Some residents had cars or were able to arrange for a ride in a car to the grocery store.
Stone said interviews were conducted with neighborhood association members and officials, as well as representatives of other agencies working in the community. Residents were given a written survey with questions about food shopping, including a question that asked how their food purchases might change if their community had a grocery store.
Researchers gathered data on the current health of the community, looking at hospital and emergency room data, Stone said. The study also found that the residents have a higher hospitalization rate and more frequent visits to the emergency room, compared to other county residents.
The community has 11 convenience stores. Ten of the stores allowed researchers to come inside and look at the kinds of foods they provided, Stone said. One of the stores sold fresh fruits and vegetables, while another one had a basket with a few apples and oranges, Stone said. Selections of healthier foods were limited, and what was available was more expensive than at a grocery store.
The survey showed neighborhood residents would be very supportive of a grocery store in their neighborhood and would change what foods they purchased if a grocery store were located nearby, Stone said. Residents also indicted a need not only for a grocery store but for nutritional education about healthy food, particularly for men who tended to purchase fewer healthy foods than women.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/268419.php