A report from Brown Advisory, a Baltimore money management firm, on global water and the business of global water.
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The Internet is My Religion
The personal journey of Jim Gilliam.
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Getting by Without the Middle Class
Perhaps U.S. business is learning to get by just fine, thank you, without middle-class U.S. consumers. And while that may be good news for chief executives and shareholders, it could be the beginning of a new and socially wrenching political logic that leaves the great American middle behind.
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Gurgaon, India…1.5 million people and no public services
An intriguing New York Times Article on the private provision of public goods.
A Worst Case of Cultural Deterioration
The past few months I’ve made a decision to aid and collaborate with two organizations in South Providence, RI. One is the Southside Community Land Trust, a wonderful organization that owns and aids the development of urban gardens. The other is Amos House. Amos House has been around for 35 years, starting as a soup kitchen in a two family house in a very poverty stricken area of South Providence. It now offers an array of social services to folks, many of them in desperate need of aid, food, shelter. Amos House is also a wonderful organization. Both organizations appear to have great staff…..and both organizations fulfill a personal need I didn’t know existed.
Yesterday I was walking around the Amos House campus with Eileen Hayes, their CEO. Part of their operation is across the street from what both of us assume is a significant burial ground. It is perhaps a few acres of hundreds of graves, contains a number of magnificent historical gravestones, and is surrounded by a fancy black iron fence. It is owned by Grace Chruch, a historic church in the center of Providence’s downtown area.
The cemetery is a disaster. Gravestones are all over the place – damaged, falling, fallen. There is no lawn or tree maintenance (we visited right after a major storm so there was some recent tree damage to add to the already unkept property).
It was sad. I cannot imagine how it could happen. I know Providence and Rhode Island are in a terrible economic state, but how could this occur?
Opinion Poll on Politics and the Economy
I just noticed an opinion poll announcement at CNN on Barack Obama. The following quote caught my eye:
Forty-eight percent say that another Great Depression is likely to occur in the next year – the highest that figure has ever reached. The survey also indicates that just under half live in a household where someone has lost a job or are worried that unemployment may hit them in the near future. The poll was conducted starting Friday, when the Labor Department reported that the nation’s jobless rate edged up to 9.1 percent.
Neurodiversity
From an Amazon comment on Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy:
Cowen envelops his economic points in a broader discussion of autism and its cognitive strengths, suggesting that these strengths are particularly important in this model of economy creation, and advocating for more use and acknowledgement of these strengths, particularly ordering and sequencing of specialized information, as well as a bias toward objectivity over emotionalism. Cowen also states the case that autism is not a separate condition out there from which a few suffer, but rather one point on the scale of what he calls neurodiversity, a scale on which all of us obviously must fall, some finding themselves closer to the autism point, others further.
The $147 Million per Year Story
On February 18, Republicans in the House of Representatives defeated an obscure amendment to the House Appropriations bill by a 2-to-1 margin. The Kind Amendment would have eliminated $147 million dollars that the federal government pays every year directly to Brazilian cotton farmers. In an era of nationwide belt tightening, with funding for things like education and the U.S. Farm Bill on the chopping block, defending payments to Brazilian farmers may seem curious.
6 ways mushrooms can save the world
Farmland and Flooding
Three professors from Southern Illinois University have written President Obama asking him to leave the Bird’s Point Levee open for wetlands creation. The article is a reaction from the Delta Farm Press. It is a good example of the problems with agricultural and climate change politics.
Richard Pace 