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In a world already on fire from Global Warming and dying of Covid-19, the news of a looming debt crisis is as welcome as a plague of locusts in a memorial garden. Yet such is the eminence of Joseph Stiglitz (Professor, Columbia; Nobel Memorial Prize; Chief Economist World Bank) that we just have to take him seriously. And how we wish we didn’t!

In an article penned with Hamid Rashid for the Guardian he describes a threat to world capital markets posed by a looming debt crisis. * Many of the world’s poorest nations are going to default on their loans quite soon, with all the implications that has for their economies. We leave the details to the good Professor, linked below, as he seems to know a lot about it.

The trouble with economic collapse is that people flee from it, looking to escape to better lives. However heartless it sounds, we at LSS think that people are like charged ions, moving from negative to positive along economic fields, towards money. That is what drives immigration. Many people are calling for ” reduced aid budgets, and for spending our money at home.” We can understand that. In our acquaintance, they are the same people who call most loudly for reduced immigration. So we ask them-wouldn’t spending a little to improve things in the poorest countries turn out to be a good long term investment?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/03/global-debt-crisis-relief-coronavirus-pandemic

#stiglitz #debtcrisis #capitalmarkets #restructuring #immigration #migration #refugee #aidbudget

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Old Hands on LSS will recall our concern for the good Old High Street, that parade of shops in the middle of our town where so much shopping and other social life used to be done. And now on the same topic along comes John Harris of the Guardian, a man beside whom our own efforts are puny indeed.

John has done some of the most refreshing journalism of the last ten years in the UK. In his series Anywhere but Westminster, he and John Domotkos roamed the depressed and fading post industrial landscape of Britain, and recording the voices of its despairing inhabitants. In effect, they saw Brexit(and many other things) coming; try to catch the podcasts if you can still find them. Their very achievement depended on a High Street to interview people in. Now the very existence of the vox pop is in question. And for Harris, the Villain is Jeff Bezos and his mighty Amazon organisation.

I will not spoil the piece* for you, except to point out that Amazon is now worth $1.49 trillion. E- commerce now accounts for 44% of all shopping in the US and 30% in the UK. Harris waxes lyrical on the efforts of those who criticise Amazon, and want to break it up. There is even a link to a blogpost by a disgruntled former employee*

But….the essence of Harris is to always give both sides, just as he did in the Brexit debate. And so he quotes from Bezos himself

The only real constant in retail is customers’ desire for lower prices, better selection, and convenience,” Bezos told his questioners on Capitol Hill. Herein lies what is propelling us into the future, from Seattle to post-industrial Scotland: supply meeting demand.

In other words, Amazon is growing big because most of us want it to. Like Microsoft before it. And ESSO before that. And Ford before that. We want other people to shop in the High Street,so we have somewhere to buy coffee, but we are damned if we do it. And one other thing. We at LSS consider the Amazon Kindle and the library in our pocket thereby afforded, as one of the finest aids to civilisation yet devised.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/02/decline-high-street-amazon-power-tech-giant

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon

#johnharris #guardian #amazon #jeffbezos #Highstreet

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We at LSS welcome UK Government initiative on the national obesity crisis. Partly their action is due to worries about coronavirus and the Prime Minister’s own terrifying experiences. And partly it addresses a national shame which has been growing since at least the nineteen-eighties of the last century. There’s to be a whole range of new ideas from encouraging cycling to reducing adverts on unhealthy foods, and our link for your jump-off today comes from the Guardian*, although all the outlets covered well. So-three hearty cheers?

“Not quite, my Lord” as the character Baldric put it in the old historical drama series Blackadder II. Weight policies are like a three legged kitchen stool. Leg one: more exercise. (Hooray) Leg two-less junk food. (Hooray) Leg three: less inequality. Not much in the package about that. What happens to kitchen stools with only two legs?

So-what has inequality got to do with it? Astute readers will recall the ground breaking work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level .* It was a major study of income inequality and how it relates to poor social outcomes across the thirty richest countries in the world. Not even its enemies could deny its rigour and scope. They found that a slew of major social evils came back again and again to the level of relative income inequality, including teenage pregnancy, stress, social mobility, mental illness, life expectancy-and of course obesity.

Since roughly 1985, the poor have been getting fatter and the rich thinner in high inequality societies like the UK and the USA. They found that absolute levels of fat increase too. In the USA 30% of the population were obese, but in more equal Japan, it was only 2.4%. Sumo fans take note. The causes are multifarious; among them we find that stressed people lay down more fat. Comfort eating, especially tasty foods like take-aways, seems to be a consolation for long hours on low pay. In some areas, guzzling on things like pizzas and fizzy drinks shows you have a spare income-it’s a perverse status symbol. But look for yourselves gentle readers; one thing about these two, they do write an easy reader.

And so we say: two cheers to the Prime Minister for the new initiative. But unless something is done about inequality, we fear that the policy could be doomed to failure.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/11/no-10-plans-weight-loss-drive-to-ready-uk-for-expected-covid-19

Wilkinson, R and Pickett, K: The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone Penguin 2010 pp 89 et seq

#borisjohnson #obesity #wilkinsonandpickett #ukgovernment #inequality

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It’s quite clear to rational people that the ultimate solution of the Covid-19 pandemic will only come when there is a safe vaccine. And the research and testing stage looks good at the time of writing. But a vaccine is only going to be really effective if it can leap the following hurdles.

Firstly, everyone must get a dose. Populations with low levels of inoculation are still vulnerable to diseases like measles. They stay endemic.

Secondly, the vaccine must stay high quality all the way from the production point to the patient. How are they going to be affected by temperature, humidity-or just a good old bashing in a truck along a dirt road?

Thirdly, anything you put in the vaccine to preserve it can’t hurt humans. Certain types of person will be hovering, ready to jump on any mistake we have made, so they can take us all back to their beloved Middle Ages.

So-has anyone ever made 7.7 billion of anything to a high standard, and distributed it effectively? What follows is pure fantasy, but some thoughts spring to mind.

Coca-cola and Pepsi have made and distributed colossal numbers of high quality products to their customers across the whole world for many years. A quick glance at the figures suggests 1.9 billion cokes going out every day. We suspect many other food products enjoy these sorts of production runs. It is a colossal achievement of quality and organisation, so yes, it can be done.

Even more encouraging are the results of the IT industry by which we mean phones and tablets. No disrespect to Coke and Pepsi, which we love, but a smartphone is of a different level of complexity to a can of fizzy drink. To send out millions of identical units of this complexity, and in a way that everyone is happy that they will work, is competence indeed. We think the distribution teams at people like Microsoft, Apple and Samsung have a lot to teach the world.

And finally, closer to home……pharmaceuticals. We couldn’t get too much on numbers of pills and doses. But the Fierce Pharma website* has a a flavour of the sheer scale of pharmaceutical mass production and distribution. And basically with drugs, you just can’t make mistakes, there’s too many hungry lawyers for one thing.

With the right finance, production engineers and trainers, this thing can be done. You can put out a high quality medicine in repeated to doses again and again until you reach the billions, and be sure that it works every time. A booster programme will be easy. The thing is-are people going to obstruct it, and how?

https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-report/top-20-generic-molecules-worldwide

#covid-19 #sars-cov#2 #coronavirus #vaccine vaccineproduction #vaccinedistribution

we thank Mrs Margaret Foster of Dorset for the inspiration for this piece

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The justification for Brexit, according to its thoughtful supporters, was that it would force the UK to confront the deep structural issues which had led to its continuing decline. Membership of the EU, they argued, had “featherbedded” areas like London and the Southeast, which sold financial services to the EU, while the old industrial regions rotted in neglect. It is a view held by leftwingers such as Larry Elliott and rightwingers such as Dominic Cummings.

One of the deepest problems that has afflicted the UK for centuries is its comparative lack of entrepreneurs and industrialists, and its development of a rich rentier class. Historians (many with impeccably rightwing credentials) have traced the consequences of this distortion. Think Corelli Barnett‘s Collapse of British Power * or Martin Wiener.* Their thesis is well known. As a powerful rentier class emerged from the profits of the industrial revolution, its values and mores crowded out those of the industrial engineer. The political and strategic consequences are well summarised by Simon Heffer in The Age of Decadence.* A report in today’s Guardian maps the current picture, which you can read for yourselves *. We point to one chilling fact: one in ten adults will inherit half as much wealth as the average person earns in a life time. The effect on such virtues as enterprise, thrift and hard work are obvious. As Piketty warns-how you marry will have far more effect on your outcomes than how hard you work.

Two Prime Ministers made attempts to tackle this. Margaret Thatcher hoped that her reforms would unleash wave of industrialists and makers. The capture of her party by financial interests, and perhaps the wave of oil money ensured the initiative would be still-born. Harold Wilson had flickering hopes for a wealth tax . But the combination of social, financial and media power meant that he was never able to introduce it. There are profound cultural and historical reasons to suspect that a government which bears a Labour badge will never be allowed to do so.

History shows that rentier societies are decadent. Think seventeenth century Castile or France before 1789. Healthy societies do two things that are quite different . They recruit the best talents from all ranks. And they make things, not money. Keynes called for the abolition of the rentiers so that the intelligence, skill and determination of the entrepreneur can be harnessed to the service of the community on reasonable terms of reward. The current Conservative government has a large majority, a friendly media, and deep cultural support from the mass of its subjects. Can it find the will to do the patriotic thing?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/the-guardian-view-on-a-wealth-tax-necessary-but-not-sufficient

Simon Heffer The Age of Decadence Britain 1880-1914 Random House 2017

Corelli Barnett The Collapse of British Power Alan Sutton 1984. The work is the first in his Pride and Fall series

Martin Wiener English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit Cambridge 1981

Thomas Piketty Capital in the 21st Century Harvard 2014

#wealthtax #rentier #inequality #keynes #brexit #conservativeparty

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another instalment of our weekly round-up things we, and others think you ought to know about

AI and medicines- Regular readers will recall our enthusiasm for using AI to solve the puzzles encountered in developing new pharmaceuticals. They ‘re even helping with new antibiotics. Here that superb Spanish journal Investigaccion y Ciencia summarises work in progress. Warning; translators at the ready!

https://www.investigacionyciencia.es/revistas/investigacion-y-ciencia/una-nueva-visin-de-la-va-lctea-805/intelige

Blood group and Covid– Staying with the medical theme, that indefatigable scourer of the media, Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire offers this intriguing New Scientist piece. Does your blood group (in the ABO system) make it more likely you’ll go down with Covid- 19? Important, isn’t it?. And what about rhesus and the other markers so beloved of forensic scientists of yesteryear?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2249854-does-your-blood-type-influence-how-susceptible-you-are-to-covid-19/

Vaccine progress- When we finally get out of this mess, it’ll be thanks to vaccines. Nature briefings has its usual cool and discerning summary of progress to date. We strongly urge you to subscribe to them in general, don’t just wait for us to pick out the best bits. And Spanish readers, you should be doing el mismo with Investigaccion y Sciencia! Our guess is that vaccines are like buses. You see none for a long time and then three come along at once.

Three new vaccines produce an immune response to the new coronavirus. Two of the vaccines — one from China’s CanSino Biologics and the other from a collaboration between Oxford University and Astrazeneca — use an altered adenovirus that mimics the coronavirus and, when injected in humans, triggers the creation of antibodies against it. The third, from Pfizer and German biotech BioNTech, relies on messenger RNA (mRNA) that synthesizes a crucial part of the coronavirus called the receptor-binding domain. They join US biotechnology company Moderna, which last week published evidence that its mRNA-based vaccine provoked immune responses in its early-stage trial. Next comes the all-important large phase III trials that will show whether these vaccines actually protect people from the new coronavirus. “What this means is that each of these vaccines is worth taking all the way through to a phase III study,” said vaccine researcher Peter Jay Hotez. “That is it. All it means is ‘worth pursuing’.”
New York Times | 6 min read
Reference: The Lancet paper 1, The Lancet paper 2 & medRxiv preprint (not yet peer reviewed)

Population falls Earlier this week we discussed the implications of a falling world population, which should start to kick in by the sixties or seventies. Here Michael Safi of the Guardian presents an excellent summary. We at LSS are glad to say that we were on the right lines!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/25/all-the-people-what-happens-if-humanitys-ranks-start-to-shrink

And finally...The Mail has a diverting, if not very scientific summary of the way in which our feline friends like to pass their hours of repose. We wish we had time for such leisure.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8553087/From-lying-end-end-dozing-face-face-strange-positions-cats-sleep

#cats #vaccine #covid19 #coronavirus #bloodgroup #artificialintelligence #medicinesresearch

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Older readers will recall the heady days of the soi disant Arab Spring in 2011. For a few heady weeks-or was it just days?-it really looked as though the courage and hopes of ordinary people might bring genuine advances where repression, particularly of women, was the norm. It takes colossal levels of courage and energy to revolt against a police state. If you are going to do it, it had better be worth it. Sadly it wasn’t in the case of Egypt, as the linked report by Wael Eskander of Open Democracy makes clear.

By the standards of some countries, Egypt is relatively enlightened. But in Egypt: no country for all women, Mael tells a tale of wildly differing standards of justice depending on class. And how the deep patriarchal attitudes of so many Middle Eastern lands still pervade Egyptian society like a cancer. No liberation will be as important as the liberation of women, both to their own societies and to the long term future of the world. Sadly the position of women in Egypt seems as dire as it was before the days of hope.

Before we dismiss the report as ” a far away country of which we know nothing” to quote Neville Chamberlain, remember how small the world is now. Oppression in one part of the world can easily be exported to another.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/egypt-no-country-all-women/

#oppressionwomen #egypt #middleeast #patriarchy

Long-suffering readers of LSS will recall our little blog of April 20 2020, wherein we drew attention to the terrible risks of what might happen if the Earth’s magnetic poles suddenly “flipped” and north became south. Using access to the best sources, we adduced that it would start gradually. that there would be a period of instability lasting for years and decades, but that eventually all would settle down again. But with a few less humans! Because that during that time all of our satellites, IT systems, power generation and navigational systems would go “down”, as they say in the computer industry. Remember- or were you too busy with your Easter eggs?

The last flip was over 780 000 years ago, so statistically one is due any time now. One of the key signs would be a gradual, but noticeable weakening in the field. Now researchers at Liverpool University have found evidence that this may be happening in a large area of the Southern Hemisphere called the South Atlantic Anomaly. According to researchers Yael Annemiek Engbers and Andrew Biggin, the field down there is now so weak that it is noticeably affecting the behaviour of overflying satellites. There seems to be a key patch of the inner earth, about 2889 km down that has completely de-aligned from the main contours of our magnetic field. Worryingly, it has now been growing for over 250 years.

As befits good scientists, the researches point out that there is a chance that the phenomenon may be caused by long developing processes in that particular region of the earth’s core. There is always a null hypothesis, gentle readers! We at LSS respect that, but point out that complacency never got anyone anywhere. Keep topping up those supplies of tinned food!

we post links from science direct and of course PNAS

https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-poles-south-atlantic-anomaly.html

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/14/2001217117

#polarmagneticreversal #disaster #catastrophe #magnetism

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The next in our series of light-hearted looks at the disasters that could produce a catastrophic (and painful) end to us all

The Sun, as every schoolchild knows, is about 151.98 million km away. That’s just about far enough to keep us all warm, and not to get too sunburned, provided you use lots of that funny factor cream, or whatever they call it. And so it ticks away, warming our houses, helping us grow things like potatoes, and giving lazy people the excuse to lie around for an hour instead of working or looking to morally improve themselves. As it has been doing this for many years, what could possible go wrong?

Well quite a lot, actually. Every so often, magnetic disturbances throw out solar flares, enormous surges of highly charged magnetic particles, some of which reach earth. Normally they are harmless, simply producing agreeable atmospheric displays called the aurora borealis. But once in a while there is a much bigger one. The destructive potential of one of these could be colossal. No, it won’t burn you to death. But the enormous input of charged particles will knock out our entire rim of communications satellites, leading to a collapse of world communications. Power generation facilities, especially transformers, will be overwhelmed. As the power goes down, the vast stores of refrigerated foods we store in supermarkets and depots will rot to poison in days. Vaccines and other treatments stored at low temperatures will deteriorate. And who will be able to operate a hospital or prison, with all the chilling implications that has for the social order?

Hasn’t been known before, we hear you chortle. Oh yes it has. The first known such was the Carrington event of 1859. That only wrecked the world’s telegraph systems, because that was all they had back then. We’re a bit more vulnerable now, aren’t we? And if you still sit complacently over your bowl of porridge, think of this. Studies of other class G stars like our Sun, suggest that really big flares like this are common. It’s just a matter of waiting until the old roulette wheel comes round with our number on it.

If you want to know more, read this excellent article by Patricia Sanchez-Blazquez and Pablo G Perez from El Pais. It’s in Spanish, so if you live in places like Deportivo la Coruna, Espanyol or Real Sociedad, you’ll need a translator.

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-07-21/podria-una-tormenta-solar-acabar-con-nuestra-civilizacion.html

#solarflare #powernetwork #communicationssatellites #magnetosphere #auroraborealis

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Yesterday, we discussed the amazing findings of demographers who suggest the draw- dropping news that population may be falling, big-time, by the second half of the century. Forewarned is forearmed, we say- but what would such a world feel like?

Scouring our historical databases, the nearest model that we could come up with was the Black Death which hit the whole world from 1347 onwards. We are aware of the differences-this was a sudden terrible mortality, not a slow voluntary decline. Medieval record keeping was appalling, so, yes, it is hard to be sure about the figures. All of these problems are summarised in an excellent article by David Routt in EH Net*. But based on this article, and at this distance in time, it is possible to make a few fairly robust observations.

For the most survivors life got better quickly. Before the plague rents were high, wages were low, and the social hierarchy was pretty rigid. Sounds familiar. As the population fell, suddenly everyone wanted labourers. Wages rose quickly. The old rules which had held people in serfdom faded away. There was much greater mobility of labour, as lords tried to steal workers from each other

There was a resurgence of the slave trade, as another attempt to make up staff shortages. Which makes us wonder- will nations of the future raid each other for workers, if they cannot attract enough immigrants?

The elites grew rather unhappy at the disappearance of the old order. They paid writers to produce texts which moaned about social decay, disorder and general uppishness on the part of the lower orders. In various countries, laws were passed which tried to tie people back to the land, or limit their wages. We will leave it to you to assess how successful these were.

There is some evidence of reforestation, which may even have led to the little Ice Age. Certainly ploughland declined, and sheep pasture spread. So expect considerable changes in types of production from the seventies onwards. Whether that will improve the environment is a moot point.

Settlements shrank or disappeared altogether. If this is repeated, the opportunities for re wilding, and to reduce the appalling urban sprawls of today beckon alluringly.

We think that a lower population world, chosen by ourselves and not as the result of a terrible plague, offers the vision of a cleaner, spacious, more leisured and more prosperous world for the majority of us. However, there is one wild card now which they didn’t have in the Middle Ages. Technology, By which we mean the high technologies of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and robotics. In the next blog, we might start to think about them.

we have double linked again here just in case it doesn’t come out. Otherwise look for David Routt The economic impact of the black death at the EH site

The Economic Impact of the Black Death

The Economic Impact of the Black Death

#blackdeath #populationfalls #immigration #labour shortages