poverty

The Poor Side of Town

Aaron M. Renn — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 11:34:09 -0400

The city of Indianapolis is building a new jail and criminal justice center on the southeast side of the city. This means many of the current users of the City-County Building, namely the courts, will be vacating the property. There’s a lot of discussion locally about the future of that building and whether it should be redeveloped. The Indianapolis Business Journal asked me to contribute my thoughts, and I revisited my old idea to demolish the building entirely and redevelop the site.

Monday I was in Washington to participate in a book discussion of Howard Husock’s new work The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It. Obviously we talk about the intersection of zoning and housing affordability, but the conversation ranges well beyond that. Here’s a replay of the event:

Read the rest of this piece at Heartland Intelligence.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America’s cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Ask the Experts: Revitalizing California's Business Climate

New Geography — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 12:01:35 -0500

Chapman University’s Vice President of Research Thomas Piechota hosted this month's event, moderated by Dean Thomas Turk of the Argyros School of Business and Economics. Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University joined the discussion.

If you missed the event, a video of the virtual town hall is below:

German Renewable Power: Making Sustainability Unsustainable?

Wendell Cox — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:52:23 -0400

Der Speigel reports that Germany's rushed program to convert to renewable energy is already imposing an economic burden. Part of the problem is the inherent instability of power produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar:

The problem is that wind and solar farms just don't deliver the same amount of continuous electricity compared with nuclear and gas-fired power plants. To match traditional energy sources, grid operators must be able to exactly predict how strong the wind will blow or the sun will shine.

A national energy expert said:

"In the long run, if we can't guarantee a stable grid, companies will leave (Germany). "As a center of industry, we can't afford that."

An important principle of the international impetus to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is that there be little or no economic loss. Certainly, an industrial powerhouse like Germany cannot subject itself to such risks.

At the same time, other locations would be similarly threatened by implementation of renewable power mandates whose "time has not yet come." Not only is there the potential to inflict economic harm on industry (and consumers through higher prices), but higher electricity prices would reduce discretionary incomes and could lead to greater poverty rates. The eradication of poverty has recently been declared to be a virtual prerequisite to sustainability at the Rio conference.

eradicating poverty should be given the highest priority, overriding all other concerns to achieve sustainable development.

Environmental sustainability requires economic sustainability. A litany of failures could do serious damage to GHG emission reduction efforts.

Rio-20: Eradicating Poverty Takes Precedence Over "Green Economy"

Wendell Cox — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:49:36 -0400

The world's largest English language newspaper, The Times of India reports that the Rio 20 Summit has agreed with India that "eradicating poverty should be given the highest priority, overriding all other concerns to achieve sustainable development."

The Times continued: "After a bitter fight with the developed countries, who wanted the objective of poverty eradication be made subservient to creating a 'green economy', India's demand to put the goal of removing poverty above all other objectives in the final Rio+20 declaration — called "The Future We Want" — was agreed to..."

The "G77" group of developing nations sought to ensure that economic and social sustainable developed goals were not secondary to "more green themes — such as renewable energy targets." The United States is reported to have supported the G77 position.

Last of the Bohemians

Lou Siegel — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 21:46:41 -0400

When I moved to Los Angeles 30 years ago, Ocean Front Walk in Venice Beach looked like a hippie parody. It had a counter-cultural veneer, but didn’t rate as an authentic bohemian hot spot.

Contrast, for example, with New York’s East Village with its revolutionaries, junkies, artists and various iconoclasts living side-by-side.

The weekend spectacle at Venice – vendors, performers and “street people” showing off to crowds of tourists – struck me as self-conscious and phony. Plus, I could never call Ocean Front Walk a “board walk” because (unlike Brighton Beach and Coney Island) there was No Board.

Since then, of course, New York has been “cleaned up.” Now Tompkins Square is family-friendly and the old walk-ups are inhabited by urban professionals worried about layoffs and declining property values.

Times have changed. The gulf between haves and have-nots is widening. Living on the edge is not just a life-style choice. “Drop-outs” need somewhere to go.

These days I see Ocean Front Walk in Venice as more a refuge than a counter-cultural carnival. With overnighters climbing out of their sleeping bags each morning, it’s a pretty good location for people without money.

Where else should they live?

I understand why local residents are advocating that something be done to make Ocean Front Walk safer and more sanitary. With some calling for a police “crack down.”

But now that the “tune-in, turn-on, drop-out” sub-culture is a history text book sidebar, I’m glad there is, at least, someplace warm for the dispossessed to hang out.

Here at Venice Beach, where the continental U.S. ends, could be the last stop for these new bohemians.

Sao Paulo: Upward Mobility through Music

AlexLotz — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:26:19 -0400

In a city notorious for its vast gap between rich and poor and the involvement of children in gang activity and drug trafficking, a music school is providing an opportunity for the young people of the favelas to put their energies to better use in performing for themselves and their communities. The school's band has now toured the world and received visits from heads of state. This documentary tells the story of Sao Paulo's Meninos Do Morumbi and how it has affected the lives of its students.

Ryan Streeter Making Poverty History: A Short History

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:24:26 -0500

Former chief economist of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development David Henderson coined the appellation, “Global Salvationism,” to describe the kind of behavior one witnesses at gatherings such as this past week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. WEF was created in 1971 so that elites from around the world could gather to “map out solutions to global challenges,” according to WEF’s website. This year’s forum is entitled, “Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild.” WEF’s program summary explains the urgency of the task facing those gathered in beautiful eastern Switzerland this way: “Improving the state of the world requires catalyzing global cooperation to address pressing challenges and future risks.” In an effort to compound jargon with alliteration, WEF uses “rethinking” in the titles of 29 conference sessions, “redesign” 16 times, and “rebuild” 9 times, for a total of nearly one-quarter of all the sessions. With all the turmoil created by the global recession and other “pressing challenges” in 2009, the world’s elites came together this week ready to re-do about everything.

Central to WEF’s annual objectives is what to do about life’s inequities and imbalances. Hardly anything warrants “catalyzing global cooperation” more than the ongoing effort to make poverty history, reduce inequality, and correct global imbalances. WEF has announced that global development is taking center stage on the third day of the event.

How ironic, then, that just prior to their gathering, Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin updated findings from their 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” on the economics website VOX. Their findings show precipitous drops in global poverty since 1970—just about the same time WEF began meeting in Davos (Mark Perry wrote about the original paper here).

Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate fell nearly 75 percent. During this period, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day fell from 26.8 to 5.4 percent. The world’s population grew 80 percent during the same period, which makes the poverty reduction all the more astounding. The global Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, fell from 67.6 to 61.2 percent, indicating a drop in inequality as well as poverty. The same trend is found in other measures of inequality besides Gini.

And when one computes a measure of global “welfare” understood in the old-fashioned sense of well-being, we find that life has gotten better faster for a larger share of the world’s population than perhaps any time in history. By deriving a calculation of well-being from GDP and inequality measures, the authors show that between 1970 and 2006, global welfare more than doubled, growing faster than GDP.

The authors also consider the World Bank’s new purchasing power parity (PPP)–adjusted measures of GDP and find that while global poverty increases overall, the rate of poverty actually drops faster since 1970 than it does under more conventional GDP measures. In other words, under the PPP model, the world looks a lot poorer in 1970 than it does using more traditional measures of poverty, but today, the poverty rate is nearly the same regardless of whether one uses the PPP or more traditional measures (see the graph below). Using the World Bank’s adjustment actually has the effect of making it look like we have been doing a better job of reducing poverty over the past three decades, despite how the world looks poorer in any given year.

(Chart available at http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4508.)

Now, just days before Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin published their VOX article, Princeton’s Angus Deaton shot to pieces the idea that one can accurately measure global poverty and inequality across countries in his presidential address to the American Economic Association. Deaton’s argument is persuasive and serves as a good reminder that economic measures across different societies are nearly impossible to establish with perfection and complete accuracy. That said, it is interesting that Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin find the same drops in poverty across the various methodologies they test. Something is going on here.

One might draw the conclusion that the precipitous drop in poverty corresponds with the beginning of the WEF meetings in 1971. Maybe the elite gathering has worked! Or, one might conclude liberalization of states and economies is working. During roughly the same period covered by the authors, the percentage of free countries in the world increased from 29 to 46 percent, according to Freedom House’s annual ratings. Liberalization and economic growth go together. One might also conclude that China’s explosive growth, which has carried Asia as a whole from 19 percent to 28 percent of the global economy during this period, has had a significant impact on poverty reduction, not to mention India’s rapid rise in its share of global GDP.

Instead of rethinking, redesigning, and rebuilding the world, WEF’s best minds might consider devoting a full day to understanding what worked the past forty years and figuring out how to “repeat” it.

This post originally appeared at The Enterprise Blog at The American.

Ryan Streeter is a senior fellow at the London-based Legatum Institute and can be followed on Twitter here.