Archive for the ‘wealth’ Category
How Australia is faring on global indices
park yourself here?
Many Australians were greatly relieved at the change of Federal government from May 21 2022. Australia hadn’t been faring well on the international stage, especially with respect to the global warming crisis, but also regarding political governance and other issues. Of course the Labor government has only been in office for three months, so I don’t expect judgements to have turned around significantly at this point. The purpose of this piece is to describe Australia’s position on a number of international surveys, and then to return to those surveys in about twelve months’ time to see if and how the view of Australia internationally has changed.
I was motivated to write this by a passage in David Brophy’s book China Panic, in which he mentioned two such international surveys, the CIVICUS monitor, which apparently measures democratic credentials, and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. I’d never heard of these surveys, which is hardly surprising for a dilettantish autodidact. Three surveys I have monitored are the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the OECD’s Better Life Index and the UN’s Human Development Index. So now we have five, and counting. What follows is my attempt to summarise their most current findings.
The CIVICUS monitor. CIVICUS is, as far as I can tell, not an acronym. Based in Johannesburg, the organisation describes itself as:
a global alliance of civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world…. Our definition of civil society is broad and covers non-governmental organisations, activists, civil society coalitions and networks, protest and social movements, voluntary bodies, campaigning organisations, charities, faith-based groups, trade unions and philanthropic foundations. Our membership is diverse, spanning a wide range of issues, sizes and organisation types.
According to Brophy, the CIVICUS monitor downgraded Australia’a democratic status (in the broad sense described above) from ‘open’ to ‘narrowed’ in 2019. The latest findings, from 2021, are unchanged. To explain, the monitor divides the world’s nations into 5 levels, which, top to bottom, are open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed. On further inspection, I’ve found that there’s a ‘live rating’, last updated for Australia on 25/5/22, a few days after the election. Hopefully things will have improved by 2023. To compare a few other countries – New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Uruguay, Suriname, Taiwan, Portugal and most Northern European countries are classed as ‘open’. Other ‘narrowed’ countries include Namibia, Italy, France, the UK, Japan and Bulgaria. Obstructed countries include the USA, Brazil, South Africa, Ukraine, Poland, Indonesia and Morocco. A colour-coded map provides an at-a-glance reference to any country of interest. The repressed and closed countries can generally be guessed at. China, Vietnam and most Middle Eastern counties are classed as ‘closed’.
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The CPI is a product of Transparency International, which advertises itself thus:
Transparency International is a global movement working in over 100 countries to end the injustice of corruption. We focus on issues with the greatest impact on people’s lives and hold the powerful to account for the common good. Through our advocacy, campaigning and research, we work to expose the systems and networks that enable corruption to thrive, demanding greater transparency and integrity in all areas of public life.
First set up in 1993 by an ex-World Bank official, Peter Eigen and like-minded associates, first-hand witnesses of global corruption, the organisation was established in then recently re-unified Berlin.
An article in The Conversation, posted in late January 2022, points out that in 2012 Australia ranked level with Norway in 7th position as to ‘cleanness’. The 2021 index, to which The Conversation refers, sees Australia as having slipped to 18th while Norway has risen to 4th, out of 180 countries. Much of what Brophy writes in China Panic is an account of why the country I happen to have ended up in has fallen so far so fast. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which publishes the Democracy Index, is one of the sources for this index, along with Freedom House and the World Justice Project. The three equal top countries on this index are New Zealand, Denmark and Finland, and the bottom three are Somalia, Syria and South Sudan. Anyway, re Australia, this one will be worth watching over the next few years.
The Democracy Index. I’ve written about the Democracy Index, inter alia, in a previous piece. It’s produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, associated with The Economist magazine in the UK. Here’s their raison d’être blurb:
The EIU Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of world democracy for 165 independent states and two territories. The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. Based on their scores on 60 indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime or authoritarian regime
Australia ranks a fairly creditable 9th on the Democracy Index list for 2021, well below NewZealand (2nd) but also well above the country we’ve been showing so much allegiance to in recent decades, the USA, which ranks 26th and is considered a flawed democracy. According to the index’s ratings, the world is inching towards hell in a hand basket – 70% of the world’s nations have become less democratic in the last twelve months, and this downward trend has prevailed for some years. Australia, though, has been faring worse than most. I don’t have access to the previous rankings, but each nation is given an annual score out of ten. Australia’s 2021 score is 8.90, compared to 8.96 in 2020. The score has regularly dropped from a high of 9.22 in the years 2010-2012, the period of the Rudd-Gillard Labor Prime Ministerships.
The OECD Better Life Index. This measures the ‘life experience’ of an ‘elite’ group of about 40 of the world’s wealthiest countries, members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to eleven different criteria, including education, environment, safety and health. When I first accessed the index, about 6 or 7 years ago, Australia was ranked number 2 across all criteria, behind the ever-triumphant Norway, and well ahead of the US in around 12th spot. Currently Australia is ranked 7th, and the USA 8th. Norway still ranks first.
On looking into Australia’s ranking for each criterion (the 11 criteria are housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance) I can’t help but scratch my head at some of the results. Australia ranks 1st for ‘civic engagement’, but 20th for ‘community’ (!!??). I would have thought that one entails the other. Also, Australia ranks 2nd for housing (but city rental has become unaffordable for most young people), and 2nd for education, which again surprises me from a general persecutive, though our post-grad sector definitely punches above its weight. At the other end of the spectrum, Australia ranks 30th for safety, another surprise. The OECD claims that the average homicide rate for member countries is 2.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia’s homicide rate for 2019-20 was 1.02 per 100,000, the highest in nearly ten years, but clearly well below the OECD average. Of course, homicide is only one measure, but I’ve not heard of Australia having a high crime rate in general. Strange. But the worst ranking is 33rd for work-life balance!? But having rarely worked a day in my life, I couldn’t possibly comment.
The UN Human Development Index (HDI). Here’s the blurb about this one:
The Human Development Index, or HDI, is a metric compiled by the United Nations and used to quantify a country’s “average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living.” Human Development Index value is determined by combining a country’s scores in a vast and wide-ranging assortment of indicators including life expectancy, literacy rate, rural populations’ access to electricity, GDP per capita, exports and imports, homicide rate, multidimensional poverty index, income inequality, internet availability, and many more.
The HDI website only provides information from 2019 and places Australia in a tie with The Netherlands at 8th in the world, with a score of .944 on a scale from 0 to 1. Norway again gets top spot, just ahead of Ireland and Switzerland. Interestingly, Australia ranks higher than four countries it likes to compare itself with, the UK, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, but little explanation is given for the ranking, which appears to be have been stable for a few years.
So, to summarise, I don’t know what to make of all these indices, which I suspect subtly influence each other in their ratings. We appear to always make the top ten, but rarely the top 5. If we could take advantage of our climate and resources to be be a greater power in renewables, instead of lagging (except in domestic rooftop solar) as we have done over the last decade, we could really make the world pay more attention to us, for better or worse.
References
David Brophy, China Panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hdi-by-country
A bonobo world 35: what the world needs now
If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman
Margaret Thatcher
surplus to requirements
The latest piece of macho thuggery (on a massive, international-newsworthy scale) has been the military coup in Myanmar. Before that it was the standover tactics around Hong Kong. Not much mentioned these days is the macho threat building around the eastern borders of Ukraine. And few in our faraway country are even aware of the Turkish offensive into north-east Syria, caused by Trump’s abandonment of the region. Then of course there’s the ongoing brutality in the West Bank and Gaza, the thuggery in Xinjiang, the slaughter in Syria and Yemen, and the largely political executions in China, Saudi Arabia…
It’s a man’s world. Well, not quite. According to Worldometer, Taiwan – always on tenterhooks due to the thugs looming beyond its western shores – wins the gold medal for its handling of the devastating Covid19 pandemic. It has so far recorded 11 deaths from the virus, out of a population of 24 million. Australia, with a similar population, has suffered 909 deaths,and is trumpeted as a success story.
But perhaps the most useful comparison to make is deaths per million. Australia has suffered 35 deaths per million, a low figure by world standards. New Zealand, though, has suffered only 5 per million. Taiwan has suffered only 0.5. New Zealand and Taiwan, let me whisper, have female political leaders. Now, I should mention that Tanzania, according to Worldometer’s figures, has done better than any highly populated country, with only 0.3 deaths per million. But wait – a few minutes’ research tells me that Tanzania’s leader, one John Magafuli, a fanatical Christian, Covid-19 denier and mask refusenik, died last month, purportedly of Covid-19. Tanzania hasn’t provided any data about the virus to outsiders for almost a year. Fortunately for Tanzania, Magafuli’s successor Samia Suluhu Hassan is a woman, and apparently a very capable one. She also happens to be the only female political leader in the whole of Africa at present, which is less fortunate, but unsurprising. Hopefully we’ll get real figures from Tanzania soon – or eventually.
These Worldometer figures tell a revealing tale about female leadership, though of course there are many political and other factors determining a nation’s effectiveness in dealing with the pandemic. What is surely even more revealing, however, is the impact of male ‘I know best’ leadership. Brazil is arguably the most tragic example, and it’s very much ongoing. A million or so new cases have been identified in the last fortnight or so, just as other nations are seeing reductions, and the death-rate is at an all-time high. Altogether, Brazil has suffered the second-highest number of Covid-19 fatalities, behind the USA, but again the deaths per million is most revealing. Brazil currently has a death per million figure of 1661, fractionally behind the USA, but that figure is rising more rapidly and will soon push ahead of the USA’s. It should be noted that such prominent Western European nations as Italy and the UK have even higher death per million figures, and worse still are a number of Eastern European nations, such as Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Only Slovakia has female political leadership, but the problems in these and other countries cannot of course be sheeted home to gender. For example, Belgium has become an increasingly balkanised nation in recent times, and this lack of centralised co-ordination appears to have cost them dearly. Nevertheless, Germany is doing considerably better than its neighbours, and the lengthy leadership of Angela Merkel, as well as the German people’s famous/notorious capacity for organisation, is surely a major factor. Doesn’t this attest to women’s capacity for organisation and co-operation in general, especially in times of health and welfare crises? I firmly believe so.
Of course I’m talking in general, or statistical terms. The general tendency of women to be more co-operative and collaborative is one of the arguments driving the push towards more women in the military, as the military becomes, in western nations, a less offensive and more defensive, peace-keeping force. Young women today are advised to go out nightclubbing or partying in groups, and to me this connects with bonobos having evolved to form female bonds to control male sexuality, and to more freely express their own. The next step is for females to dominate the space, not only for sexual encounters, but for a host of other transactions, political, economic and technological. Women today are more dominant in the arena of human or community services – though I notice, having worked in the area, that senior management tends still to be male-heavy. On the one hand I recognise the slow pace of change – and remember that only a century ago women couldn’t attend university – but on the other hand, as we try to recover from a pandemic, male pig-headedness and in-the-wayness has highlighted our need for more rapid sociopolitical transformation, to a bonobo world with human benefits.
There are many aspects to this transformation. One is financial. It’s often noted that wealth is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. It’s less often noted that those hands are almost all male. I remember, many years ago, hearing a talk in which the speaker used the mantra ‘money is energy’. I recall thinking at first that this was a bit crass, but then, reflecting on my own life, its pits of poverty and bumps of relative richesse, I recognised that there was enough truth in the phrase to adopt it as my own mantra for a few weeks. It didn’t make me any richer however.
According to the Statista website, 11.9% of the world’s billionaires – the superenergised – are women (as of 2019). None are in the top ten. According to Forbes, the world’s richest woman is L’Oreal’s ‘Francoise Bettencourt Meyers & family’, surely a revealing description. She’s described on Wikipedia as ‘an heiress’, and a strict Catholic known for her bible commentaries. Not exactly my idea of a go-getting role model.
Of course, counting individual billionaires doesn’t tell us how much of the world’s wealth – a disputable term, but for now I’m thinking in terms of filthy lucre – is in the hands of women. That would be difficult to calculate, but it would surely be far less than 11.9%. But maybe, I’m being overly pessimistic. The Boston Consulting Group website claims that 32% of global wealth is owned by women, but how they come by that figure is a mystery. In any case, female wealth ownership is surely greater now, percentage-wise, than it has ever been before, while being nowhere near enough.
Calculations of these kinds are fraught, of course. Women tend to spread wealth – and power, and love – around, so the more they gain in these frangible assets, the better it will be for us all.
References
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56437852
https://www.statista.com/topics/2229/billionaires-around-the-world/
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#5f3fa3c23d78
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Françoise_Bettencourt_Meyers
https://www.bcg.com/en-au/publications/2020/managing-next-decade-women-wealth
a bonobo world? 8 – hunter-gatherers, the agricultural revolution, capitalism and science
We can see that human society, various though it is, has much in common with chimp society. Throughout human history, males have dominated females to an overwhelming degree, and large groups of males have fought to the death over territory, or over which dominant male should vanquish and control the territory of the other. Edward Gibbon’s monumental Decline and fall of the Roman Empire is a tale of 500 years of political intrigue, betrayal and murder in a system where succession was never based on inheritance but only on political power and skill, with the military always prominent.
It’s generally accepted that the ancestors of modern human apes engaged in a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle from at least 2 million years ago. This very successful lifestyle was dominant until the development of agriculture a mere 12,000 years ago. While there’s much debate on the structure of hunter-gatherer societies, the dominant view is that they were more egalitarian than post-agricultural societies, and also chimp societies. Recent research also suggests that the success of the hunter-gatherer system, with its sexual division of labour, enabled Homo sapiens to outcompete Homo neanderthalensis as they spread across the globe. However, it’s unlikely that this lifestyle and social system was invariant across regions or time, and evidence found about one group will not stand for all. Technologies varied, as did diet and climatic conditions. In some of these societies, women joined the hunt, or hunted with other women, depending on the type of quarry being hunted and how the hunt was carried out. Kinship relationships in these early societies tended to be matrilineal, that is, descent through the female line is generally acknowledged, though this had little effect on inheritance among hunter-gatherers, as there is virtually nothing to inherit, except, perhaps, reputation. However, the gradual transition to a settled, agricultural lifestyle created a more routinised existence of digging, sowing, reaping, building and defending territory. Research has found that, in women as well as men, bones became bigger and harder during the early agricultural period. It could in many ways be described as a disastrous change in the short term, as workloads increased and diets became less varied. It certainly spelt long-term danger to other species, with deforestation, land degradation and the diversion of natural water-courses becoming increasingly widespread. The reliability of seasonal rains and sunshine became a focus, which led to the growth of religious rites and ceremonies, and to a class of religious intermediaries. As to gender roles, with the development of fixed dwellings, the males tended to do more of the field-work and the women became more home-bound, engaged in child-rearing, cereal processing and other food preparation. And naturally, with land itself becoming increasingly central, territorial conflicts and ownership hierarchies developed. The domestication of animals, together with the cultivation of fields, made these hierarchies more visible. If you laid claim to more land, you could produce more food, making others in the village more dependent upon you. We think today of wealthy people with more capital to invest or otherwise utilise, and interestingly, the word capital comes from the same Indo-European root as cattle, the first animals to be domesticated in large numbers. You might make this increase in your capital more tangible with a bigger dwelling and perhaps more ‘wives’ and dependents under your keeping.
It certainly seems likely that the development of a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle created a more patriarchal, and unequal, human society. Women spent more time ‘at home’ than they did in hunter-gathering times, and had more children. Recent research has also found that the regions which have had the longest history of an agricultural lifestyle have the most deep-rooted patriarchal attitudes.
In modern capitalist counties, inequality is obviously increasing, especially if you judge by that most capitalist of nations, the USA, which currently has the greatest income inequality in its history, and the greatest income inequality of all the G7 nations. The gap between the super-rich and the merely rich in the USA has widened spectacularly over the past twenty-five years, and If we examine US wealth from a gender perspective we find that women own 32c for every dollar owned by men. Whether or not the gap between women and men’s wealth increases, I cannot envisage anything but an increasing gap between rich and poor in the US, as it is far more wedded to libertarian mythology than any other nation.
It’s my belief, though, or maybe it’s a mere hope, that less atomistic societies, such as we find in Asia, may ultimately lead us to the way of the bonobo – a society with less internal strife, less rigid hierarchies and inequalities, a greater sense of togetherness and mutual concern, and even more relaxation and play.
Science
Some years ago the philosopher A C Grayling gave a talk in Australia, which I heard on Radio National. He spoke of two visits he made in the region of Geneva, to the headquarters of the United Nations, and to CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider. He was stuck by the contrast between the genial, collaborative atmosphere at CERN, featuring scientists from over 100 nations, and the testy, zero-sum nature of negotiations at the UN.
Science has become more collaborative over time, and far less patriarchal over the last century, though there’s still some way to go. Venki Ramakrishnan, who won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to decoding the structure of the ribosome, made many interesting points about the famous prize in his book Gene Machine. He notes the increasingly collaborative nature of science, and doesn’t subscribe to the heroic narrative of science. Many people and groups in recent years have been given the prize – which is always life-transforming because it brings their name to the generally non-scientific public in one fell swoop – for simply being the first to solve a puzzle or make a discovery that many groups or persons were on the verge of making, within an atmosphere of generally collegial competition. It’s also noteworthy that, while the early Nobel Prizes in the sciences were awarded to individuals, this has become increasingly rare. I rather enjoy the fact that, as the twentieth century progressed, and on into the twenty-first, both the collective nature of science and the female contribution to it have become increasingly recognised. I would like to think that the connection between collectivity and female participation is not coincidental.
Of course, many early breakthroughs in science and technology are anonymous, and as such, seen as collective. Who invented the plow? The Sumerians maybe, or some other Mesopotamian or Indus Valley culture. Writing? Mesopotamia again, or maybe the Indus Valley or China, or separately by different cultures, possibly even in Rapa Nui. But nowadays, we’re keen to give individual recognition for any technological or scientific developments.
References
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44113711?seq=1
on the long hard road to femocracy
Recently, a list of Australia’s 200 richest people was published. It’s been widely reported that of those 200, only 22 were women; just over 10% – a figure that has apparently held good for some years. But while this is a useful first indication of wealth imbalance along gender lines, it would pay to look more closely at the figures, though this is hard to do, given the secrecy surrounding the wealth of some, and the complexities surrounding and conditioning the wealth of others. Quite a few of these wealthy women appear to be heiresses or ‘sleeping partners’ (in a business sense, but who knows?) rather than active business types, and even leaving this aside, I’m pretty sure that if I could do the maths on all these fortunes, the figure for women would amount to considerably less than 10% of the whole.
These are the Australian figures. Would anybody dare to suggest that the figures for female wealth in China, say, would be any better? (information on wealth in China, like just about any other information from China, is virtually impossible to obtain). Or in Russia – currently rated (by New World Wealth) as the nation with the most unequal distribution of wealth in the world? Just as a guess, I’d expect, or at least hope, that the US and some European nations might be ahead of Australia in terms of female wealth, but if so it surely wouldn’t be by much. Ask a group of students who’s the richest man in the world and you’d get a few unsurprising answers, enthusiastically proclaimed. Ask them about the richest woman, and you’d get puzzled looks as they wonder why you asked such a question.
I’m no economist, and wealth per se isn’t an interest of mine, and I’m much more concerned to get women into leadership positions in science and politics, but clearly having 95% or more of the world’s wealth in the hands of the more fucked-up gender is a big problem, and a huge obstacle to the dethronement of patriarchy.
While I’m not pretending this might happen in the near future, it seems to me that the ultimate solution lies in women’s best weapon – collaboration, or ganging up. The pooling of resources – financial, intellectual, practical, even sexual. I’m not talking about war here, but I am talking about a struggle for power, a slow, persevering struggle built of connections and networks, transcendent of nation, culture, class and age. A struggle not against men but against patriarchy. A struggle which, with ultimate success, will leave all of us winners. You may say I’m a dreamer, but why is a world dominated by woman so absurd when a world dominated by men, the fucked-up world we have now, is apparently not?
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/01/russia-is-the-most-unequal-major-country-in-the-world-study.html