sbrobert
By Robert Bernstein
Dave Flattery is a board member of the Humanist Society of Santa Barbara (HSSB) and is also the spouse of HSSB President Judy Flattery. Dave is a statistics nerd, which I can relate to.
He spoke for almost two hours to the Humanist Society about the state of the world in numbers. He kindly shared his slides, which I have posted here.
Before I begin to summarize his talk, I need to give some background that I found essential.
The State of the World Scorecard has been prepared each year since 2006 for the Conference for Global Transformation. The conference has been held each May since 2000 and is sponsored by Landmark Worldwide, formerly Landmark Education.
Landmark offers personal development programs based in part on Werner Erhard’s est (Erhard Seminar Training) programs from the 1970s. The Flatterys did est training back in the 1980s and found it valuable.
The Landmark programs allow people to understand themselves more clearly. When they do, they are encouraged to go out in the world to improve the world. Graduates of Landmark have created a number of organizations over the years with that goal in mind. One that I had heard of is “The Hunger Project”, which was chartered in 1977 with a goal of ending hunger in 25 years. That goal wasn’t achieved but the organization is still going and continuing to lead community-based development programs in 13 countries facing issues with hunger.
To support the Conference for Global transformation, a team of Landmark graduates prepares the Scorecard for presentation at the conference. They do not do research themselves, but they do collect research from reputable sources in order to measure progress on a variety of social and environmental indicators.
I hope this back story helps to understand what Dave presented.
Dave started his talk showing how the Scorecard measures align with Humanist principles. This slide explains it well.
The Scorecard Measures align well with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but there are differences.
Overall, Dave noted trends in four domains. Each domain contained sub-measurements. The results over the past 22 years:
Economic: 3/3 measures improved
Environmental: 4 down, 1 neutral, 1 up
Social: 5 up, 1 down
Political: 4 down, 2 up
In other words, Economic and Social measures are solidly improving. Environmental and Political measures are solidly declining.
Dave repeatedly emphasized that a lot is lost in this aggregated information and it is important to look at the details.
Measuring poverty is challenging. Both the percent of the global population and total population living in extreme poverty (threshold of $3.65/day) has declined steadily over the last 40 years. For higher poverty thresholds ($6.85/day), percentages are declining but the total population below these thresholds is increasing because the population is rising. Dave noted that it takes less resources to get out of poverty in a poor country than in a rich country.
The US has a low poverty rate when measured on a global threshold of $3.65 per day. But that threshold makes little sense in the US. And Dave noted that the poverty rate in the US is fairly flat.
Overall, South Asia is improving with poverty more quickly than Sub Saharan Africa. Two billion people in the world live below the $3.65/day poverty level.
The Scorecard only recently included the Gini Coefficient, a measure of inequality. It ranges from 0 for full equality to 1 for full inequality. Note that wealth inequality is generally considered a bigger problem than income inequality. The latter is transient, but wealth accumulates over time and across generations. A small income inequality can grow to a large wealth inequality. It is also harder to redistribute wealth than income.
Dave continued to the environmental scorecard. We have dug ourselves in a hole with carbon emissions that are warming the planet. US emissions are starting to decline after decades of increase. But, China and India emissions are rising. The hole keeps getting deeper at a faster rate!
Good news: Renewable energy production is increasing at 5.4% per year globally. But China is still building new coal power plants.
Forest loss is still rising at the rate of 3% per year. The US ecological footprint per person is going down, but it is still unsustainable. If everyone consumed resources like the US it would take about five earths to support the total population.
The Environmental Performance Index is a composite of 29 measures, including emissions and biodiversity. The measure is a bit erratic but has been declining significantly since 2016.
Dave offered a way to look at where we may be heading: “Measuring Conversation” using Google ngram viewer. This looks at the prevalence of English words and phrases going back over 100 years. This indicates the creation of new ideas, practices and priorities. Including a shift to online learning, which can help developing countries leapfrog to better education. There is a growing emphasis on “sustainability,” at least in words.
The Human Development Index (HDI) includes income, life expectancy and educational attainment. It has been rising steadily for over 30 years but declined over the last two years, likely due to COVID. With the projected recovery time this represents a setback of about 5 years of progress.
World Happiness is fairly flat or declining slightly. But the Giving Index is rising at 3.4% globally. Meaning that people are helping each other directly with contributions of time and/or money.
Dave continued to the Political Measures. Freedom on the Internet is a new measure and it is getting worse. China is especially bad. Political rights and civil liberties are also getting worse. Corruption perceptions are slightly improving. The US is good, but getting worse.
The slide marked “Another View of Political Rights” was one of the most interesting for me. It shows four domains:
Authoritarian, Hybrid, Flawed Democracy, Full Democracy.
Notably, the US is in the Flawed Democracy category! Along with countries like Mexico and India. Interesting to see that former dictatorships Korea and Taiwan are in the Full Democracy category. Based on this measure, less than half the world population lives in a democracy (full or flawed).
Dave noted that in the US you have to dig deeper than region or even state to see how people are doing. In the tiny District of Columbia (where I grew up), there is more variation in educational attainment over a few miles than across entire regions of the country.
Dave said it is good to look at notable outlier countries to learn what they may be doing especially well or poorly. In general, more development means consuming more resources. But Uruguay is an outlier, with high HDI and low resource consumption.
Conversely, United Arab Emirates (ARE on the graph) was a bad outlier, but they are making faster progress than anywhere else. Perhaps we can learn from them?
Looking for global bright spots across all the measures, the top 10 are in Europe or Oceania. The bottom 10 are all in Africa and Asia.
Population growth rate drives many other metrics. Globally, population is still rising, but the rate of rise is flattening.
Dave noted that there are two curves that match each other well over the last 3,000 years:
1) An aggregate of human development – prosperity, life expectancy, technological capability, democracy
2) Atmospheric concentration of CO₂
His final slide notes that it is difficult to summarize so much complex data. But he would summarize by saying that things are improving for most of humanity. But, in an unsustainable manner.
Dave emphasized that measurements themselves often cause a change in behavior, for example, the Hawthorne Effect. Ideally, this can lead to better future measures. His final slide also included references to follow up on. And he encouraged us all to do so!
For more information about upcoming events with the Humanist Society of Santa Barbara or to become a member, please go to https://www.sbhumanists.org/
I have no idea whether we’re still a democracy or anything else, but I 100% agree that basics like Civics and Economics classes should still be taught in high school.
US a Flawed Democracy. Most interesting part of the story.
VOR, the US was based on the ideals of a democracy. The people’s body was the house of representatives from the onset. It was chosen by popular vote. The other member of the legislature were chosen by representatives of the people elected by popular vote as was the President and VP. Over the years this democracy has grown. Senators are now elected by the people, for example. And every state is governed by popularly chosen agents. All of this is what makes us a democracy and why would anyone want to challenge that? What is the objection? Folks like you simply regurgitate “talking points” without thinking. Do you want a government run by the people or by those that would be masters of the people?
Because the US is not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic. Civic classes really need to be required high school curriculum.
RHS, it’s an important distinction because people erroneously believe we’re pure democracy, where 51% of our countries voters get to determine what happens. This is not the case with the balance of power between the House and Senate, the House being representative of the people and the Senate being representative of the states. The founders knew, and did not want, the large populations of major cities having an outsized impact on what occurs throughout the country. If this weren’t the case, most everything decided would be determined by only handful of high population state/cities, i.e. just New York and California.
RHS – in his defense, he does know everything about every topic and all his opinions are facts 😉
VOR, the reason for the creation of two houses was not to stop the power of the cities which were a small part of t he US population at the time. The bigger issue was assuring the less southern states who wanted to include their enslaved population in their counts (though not letting them vote of course) that without that count they would have way of standing up to the more populous states. Also each colony had the idea that they were independent political entities. “States rights” were included to deal with this. Etc. So the Senate was created to balance the House. The original Senators were chosen by the state legislature (itself elected by popular vote) but, as mentioned, this was changed in the progressive reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The electoral college was devised largely to deal with the problems of communication in the 1700’s. While it did tilt toward small states because each state got two votes for their senators, the balance of the college is allocated by the number of popularly elected members of the House. This was a mimic of the Congress itself. But in the end you persist with the outdated and superceded rationales of the 1700s and 1800’s ignoring the current nature of our system. From sanitary districts to city councils to state governors to US Senators we choose them by popular vote–democracy defined.
Thank you for this and these graphs… and the absence of grinning faces! I look forward to spending more time with them today… and looking into the Humanist Society. And VERY definitely civics needs to be taught in all US schools!
Civics is taught in government class, senior year.