Whenever Norway’s extensive social welfare system and high standard of living is discussed, conservatives like to say that they can only afford it because they are sitting on so much oil.
If that’s the case, then why does Sweden have a nearly identical system and standard of living, without much oil at all?
(click to enlarge; via axinomancy)
Bundanoon. It was here it all started. In a little rural community in New South Wales, Australia, with approximately 2,500 inhabitants. Bundanoon. Today they will all gather and by show of hands decide to ban bottled water from the town. All shop owners has agreed, despite the fact that they lose over a thousand bucks a years, each. They say it’s a moral question. I say it’s fucking brilliant.
It all started when a big bottled water company wanted to buy land from the town for drilling wells. Visitors and tourists will be encuraged to use tap water by being provided with empty bottles and public water fountains along the main street. Bottled water is a $500 million business in Australia and the townspeople are hoping that their initiative will catch on and spread. Lets all hope so. (via onepointofview)
July 08, 2009, 7:29pm
Despite appearances regarding Canada’s 1st place spot, it is interesting to note that:
I don’t have data on hand, but it would be interesting to compare with Germany — which is sitting just below the OECD average, and also with Sweden and Australia against Canadian or American figures and factors.
“If people were as captivated by public affairs as they are by erotic ones, the economy would be very strong.”
— magdalena; reader’s comment left at the NYT
Europe’s democracy deficit from The Economist
“Britain and the Netherlands kicked off the four-day process of electing members for the European Parliament on Thursday June 4th. It is one of the biggest democratic exercises in the world, with over 375m voters in 27 countries. But some voters lack enthusiasm. As the European Union has expanded, turnout has dwindled: from 62% at the first election in 1979 to 45% in 2004. Some blame a general decline in democratic engagement but, aside from countries with compulsory voting such as Belgium, the difference in turnout for national and European parliaments is substantial. And worryingly for Europhiles, turnout is worst in many of the newest members of the club, in eastern Europe.”
The government debt of the ten richest countries attending the G20 summits will hit 114% of GDP by 2014, up from 78% in 2007, according to a new IMF study. To measure how much fiscal pain would be required to bring gross debt ratios to a sustainable level, the IMF looked at demographic pressures and assumed that long-term interest rates exceed economic growth rates by a percentage point (the long-term pre-crisis average) and then calculated by how much primary budget balances would have to improve. The economists define this level as 60% or, for Japan, half of today’s figure (ie, 85%). Their results suggest that Ireland and Japan have most to do. Both would need to boost their primary balances by more than 12% of GDP, compared with what is forecast for 2014. Britain would need an improvement of close to 6%. The gap in America is 3.5% and in Germany just under 2%. (The Economist via sabine)
In study after study of men and women who get paid more and promoted faster, the quality of “action orientation” stands out as the most observable and consistent behavior they demonstrate. They launch directly into their major tasks and then discipline themselves to work steadily and single-mindedly until those tasks are complete.
You can actually develop a “positive addiction” to endorphins and to the feeling of enhanced clarity, confidence and competence that they trigger. When you develop this “addiction,” almost without thinking you begin to organize your life in such a way that you are continually starting and completing ever more important tasks and projects. You actually become addicted to success and contribution.
You must think constantly about the rewards and benefits of being an action-oriented, fast-moving, focused person. See yourself as the kind of person who gets important jobs done quickly and on a consistent basis.
- Eat That Frog (via spaceships)
May 30, 2009, 11:35am
Catherine Rampell over at the NYT Economix blog, created this graph of the average time spent eating in various countries, measured against the country’s obesity rate. She noticed originally that the French seemed to have a low obesity rate, despite the fact that they spent a lot of time eating. I’ve always been a horrendously slow eater, but I actually think, for whatever reason, it’s been good for my health. Something about eating slow limits the amount of food you eat, and makes you savor what you do eat.
(via ninakix)
Americans can't answer rudimentary science questions
A national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test. (via:science)
Going Dutch - How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State
“I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist?
A short stroll from my apartment suggests the outlines of an answer. In about six minutes you reach the Dam, the wide plaza that is the Times Square of Amsterdam… The Dam is therefore a reminder not only of the country’s past but also of its ceaseless battle with water. And that battle turns out to be the key to understanding the Netherlands’ blend of free market and social welfare. The Low Countries never developed a fully feudal system of aristocratic landowners and serfs. Rather, sailors, merchants and farmers bought shares in trading ships and in cooperatives to protect the land from the sea, a development that led to the creation of one of the world’s first stock markets and helped fuel the Dutch golden age. Today the country remains among the most free-market-oriented in Europe.
At the same time, water also played a part in the development of the welfare system. To get an authoritative primer on the Dutch social-welfare state, I sat down with Geert Mak, perhaps the country’s pre-eminent author, to whose books the Dutch themselves turn to understand their history. The Dutch call their collectivist mentality and way of politics-by-consensus the “polder model,” after the areas of low land systematically reclaimed from the sea. “People think of the polder model as a romantic idea” and assume its origins are more myth than fact, Mak told me. “But if you look at records of the Middle Ages, you see it was a real thing. Everyone had to deal with water. With a polder, the big problem is pumping the water. But in most cases your land lies in the middle of the country, so where are you going to pump it? To someone else’s land. And then they have to do the same thing, and their neighbor does, too. So what you see in the records are these extraordinarily complicated deals. All of this had to be done together.”
…The nation today embodies a centuries-old inclination toward collectivism, which one writer characterized as “the democracy of dry feet.””
(Russell Shorto for the NYT Magazine, 20090429)
Reporting & Essays/ The New Yorker
Every era has its defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for our efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture.
“A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.
Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label”…
But it’s not the mind-expanding sixties anymore. Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.
Read the complete article on The New Yorker (via roamin)
