Progress Daily

According to a new report from a UN commission, 2 in every 3 people (some 4 billion in total) are “excluded from the rule of law.” Around 40% of the developing world’s five-year-old children are not registered as even existing. Later, people will find that the home they live in, the land they farm, or the business that they start, is not protected by legally enforceable property rights. Even in the rare cases when they can afford to go to court, the service is poor. India, for example, has only 11 judges for every 1m people.

Because they are outside the rule of law, the vast majority of poor people are obliged to work (if they work at all) in the informal economy, which is less productive than the formal, legal part of the economy. According to the report, this is one of the main reasons why so much of humanity remains mired in poverty.

“The law poor,” The Economist

Ray Kurzweil predicts that if you can live another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then you can be around for the Singularity (when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software) a few decades later.

In 1976, when Kurzweil pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine. Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. Kurzweil debuted his cellphone-sized reader this year.

In the late 1980s, Kurzweil predicted the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998 (a year late, it turned out).

Kurzweil makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns. More than a century ago, machines’ computing power doubled about every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years; now it takes only about a year.

During the past century there has been exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education, etc.

Exponential progress has recently begun in nanotechnology, the ease of gene sequencing, and the resolution of brain scans.

Kurzweil says that if his predictions seem overly optimistic that’s because exponential upward curves appear deceptively gradual at first.

“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace. They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1% of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1% and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100% in just seven years.”

“The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least,” by John Tierney

A new study by Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, et al. (”Culture, Gender, and Math“), took data from the 2003 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (in which some 280K 15-year-olds from 40 countries took the same math and reading tests) and compared the results, by country, with each-other and with various measures of social sexual equality (such as the World Economic Forum’s gender-gap index).

On average, girls’ maths scores were lower than those of boys. The gap was largest in countries (such as Turkey) with the least equality between the sexes, & vanished in countries with the most equality — except for geometry scores, which had no relation to sexual equality. The researchers did some additional statistical checks to ensure the correlation was material, and not generated by another, third variable that is correlated with sexual equality, such as GDP per person.

The gap in reading scores not only remained, but got bigger as the sexes became more equal. Average reading scores were higher for girls than for boys in all countries. But in more equal societies, not only were the girls as good at math as the boys, their advantage in reading had increased.

This may explain why, despite girls’ rise to mathematical equality in some countries, women in those countries have not invaded math-heavy professions, such as engineering. Economic optimization is about comparative advantage. The rise in female reading scores alongside their math scores suggests that female comparative advantage in this area has not changed.

“Vital statistics,” The Economist

According to a new report by Marilyn A. Brown, et al., (”Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America“) each resident of the 100 largest US metropolitan areas is responsible on average for about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide in energy consumption each year, 14% below the 2.9 ton national average.

Those 100 cities (where two thirds of the people in the US live) still account for 56% of the nation’s carbon dioxide pollution. But their greater use of mass transit and population density reduce the per-person average.

Emissions of carbon dioxide are highest in the eastern US, where people rely heavily on coal for electricity. They are lower in the West, where weather is more favorable and where electricity and motor fuel prices have been higher.

“City dwellers dubbed ‘green’,” by H. Josef Hebert

Women constitute only about 1/5 of US engineers, 1/3 of chemists, and 1/4 of computer and math professionals.

Joshua Rosenbloom surveyed hundreds of professionals in information technology, a career in which women are significantly underrepresented (”Why are there so few women in Information Technology?”; pdf file here). He also surveyed hundreds in comparable careers more evenly balanced between men and women.

The lower numbers of women in IT careers weren’t explained by work-family pressures, since computer careers made no greater time demands than those in the control group. Ability wasn’t the reason, since the women in both groups had substantial math backgrounds.

Using a standard personality-inventory test, Rosenbloom found that men and women who enjoyed the manipulation of tools or machines were more likely to choose IT careers - and it was mostly men who scored high in this area. Meanwhile, people who enjoyed working with others were less likely to choose IT careers. And, on this, women scored higher, on average.

The researchers calculated that preference accounted for about two-thirds of the gender imbalance in the IT field.

According to Susan Pinker  (in The Sexual Paradox), the countries that offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. For example, in countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, the number of women in physics is about 30%, versus 5% in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

“The freedom to say ‘no’,” by Elaine McArdle

If you take Wikipedia as a unit — every page, edit, talk page, & line of code, in every language — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought (according to Clay Shirkyon & Martin Wattenberg).

Television-watching represents about two hundred billion hours, in the US alone, every year. That’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year. Americans spend 100 million hours every weekend just watching the ads.

Imagine that people replace only 1% of the their TV time with the production & sharing of online content. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

“Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” by Clay Shirkyon

Globalization has accounted for only a small share of job creation and destruction over the past few decades. According to Pankaj Ghemawat, 90% of fixed investment around the world is domestic. Companies open plants overseas, but that’s mainly so their production facilities can be close to local markets.

According to Thomas Duesterberg, the US’s share of global manufacturing output has actually increased slightly since 1980.

The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change (hastened by competition with other companies, foreign and domestic). Manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers. According to William Overholt, between 1994 and 2004 the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs, 10 times more than the US.

“The Cognitive Age,” by David Brooks

 

Using selective breeding, researchers can make rats, bees and flies a lot better at learning. Animals that are better learners should over time come to dominate a population. Yet improved learning ability does not get selected amongst these animals in the wild. Tadeusz Kawecki may have discovered why.

Kawecki gave flies two different fruits as egg laying sites. One of these was laced with a bitter additive that could be detected only on contact. The flies were then given the same fruit but without an additive. Flies that avoided the fruit which had been bitter were deemed to have learned from their experience. Their offspring were reared and the experiment was run again.

After repeating the experiment for 30 generations, the offspring of the learned flies were compared with normal flies. Learning ability was bred into the flies, but it shortened their lives by 15%. And when flies were bread to live abnormally long lives, they learned less well than even average flies.

“Critical thinking,” The Economist

Lant Pritchett and Michael Clemens have devised a new measure of wealth: “income per natural” (.pdf file here). Rather than measuring the income of people who are now residents of a country, they estimate the income earned by people who were born in that country.

For poor countries there is a significant difference. The Liberian-born make 50% more than Liberian residents. The income of the Samoa- & Guyana-born is about twice the income of the residents of Samoa & Guyana (respectively).

“Two of every five living Mexicans who have escaped poverty did so by leaving Mexico; for Haitians it is four out of five.”

Traditional measures of income tend to mask the fact that migration has made a lot of migrants richer. Imagine a man who moves from earning €10,000 in Poland (an above-average wage) to £15,000 in the UK (a below-average wage). Simple arithmetic says that he has reduced the average income of both countries.

“Of income and incomers,” by Tim Harford

Reading the 3bn “base pairs” in human DNA — akin to letters, encoding a total of between 20,000 and 30,000 genes that are the “words” of genetics — is getting faster as companies find quicker ways to “read” entire stretches of DNA at a time, like reading a sentence in chunks rather than letter by letter.

The cost of sequencing an individual genome is thus falling exponentially — just as the cost of hard disk space or transistors on a chip did when computing took off.

The rapidly falling cost and time needed to map your DNA:

2003
$440M
13 years to map

2007
$10M
4 years

2008
$100K
4 weeks

2012
$100*
2 days

*Forecast

“Mapping the individual - cheaply,” by Charles Arthur