The share of air pollution that comes from road vehicles in urban areas. Road vehicles are a significant source of air pollution which can adversely affect human health
The South Africa v. Mexico match drew quite a crowd this morning in IFC's cafeteria. But if just watching the games is not enough for you, here are some economic arguments pro and con for South Africa hosting the event, and here is a reading list chock-a-block full of resources on the World Cup and development.
The premise of the game relies on individuals being part of a covert network of people around the world that band together and collaborate in order to solve world problems presented through a series of videos, comic strip narratives, and quests that require action in the real world.
It's this online to offline transition that really makes the Evoke game worth looking out for. As the number of people on social networks reaches over half a billion people, one of the interesting challenges of our time will be figuring out how to harness this online force to solve offline problems.
Have you been playing EVOKE? What do you think of it so far?
For those of you that haven't seen Jane McGonigal's TED Talk, Gaming Can Make A Better World, the video is embedded below. Take a few minutes and watch it, it's a great look at the power of gaming for social change.
"Are markets simply casinos for betting?" Asli recently asked this question on the All About Finance blog. She argues that financial markets do a lot more than that, and I agree. But there are some markets that come very close to being casinos. Surprisingly, in the wake of the financial crisis, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commision has given permission for one such market—a futures exchange based on the box office revenues of Hollywood movies. Basically, anyone will be able to bet on whether a movie will be a flop or become a runaway success. The NYT has the details.
Many were quick to ridicule the idea. Mother Jones screeched that Subprime Goes Hollywood, and compares a futures exchange for Hollywood films to subprime mortgage-backed securities. A blogger on the Davian Letter also astutely points out that (1) Hollywood insiders have a massive informational advantage over the guy on the street (making it a bad idea for most people to bet), and (2) these contracts create the potential for moral hazard by studios that realize they could do better off by causing a movie to tank (although the NYT's article gives vague reassurances that this will be limited because the size of positions will be too small to create that kind of incentive).
Some readers have complained in the past that they have gotten error messages when trying to submit comments to the blog. We've put in a request with our software provider to look into the problem, but in the meantime, please send an email to rru@worldbank.org if you encounter a problem. We'll be happy to post the comment for you (and we'd also like to know how frequently the problem is cropping up).
Perhaps the title is a rhetorical question, but I felt obliged to ask it after seeing the latest parody of a World Bank initiative. If you've been ignoring CNN, you may have missed the news that the World Bank Institute recently launched a massively multiplayer game called Evoke designed to get people around the world to work collaboratively on pressing problems like food security, human rights, etc. Evoke builds a storyline based around a comic book (eh hem, sorry, graphic novel) to lay out a quest each week. The initiative is still very new, so it is hard to judge its value, but in general I see great potential in "serious games" like this.
The first day of this year's Financial and Private Sector Development Forum is about to wind down. I had the opportunity to attend several fascinating discussions, including:
A workshop on catastrophic risk insurance in the Caribbean
A discussion on building venture capital opportunities in developing countries
A look at Africa's industrial future
An inspirational talk by Ingrid Munro on how she built Kenya's largest microfinance institution with a team of beggars
For those unable to attend this year's forum, we have an active Twitter feed, where every attendee can share his or her thoughts on what they've seen. Check it out.
Tomorrow Niall Ferguson will discuss whether developing countries have learned from the history of money, or if they're simply doomed to repeat it.
Did any of our readers attend today's events? Feel free to use the comments section to discuss your reactions to the Forum thus far.
Does Haiti (or Chile) need a Marshall Plan to help recover from the ruins of natural disasters? How has the War on Poverty progressed in the United States? What about the Gates Foundation's War on Malaria?
Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim has a simple suggestion to each of these questions: It's time for a new analogy. Social policy doesn't need new wars and Marshall Plans:
In fact, no imitation of the Marshall Plan has ever worked, and no war on a big social problem has ever ended in defeat for the enemy (save, perhaps, cigarettes). But the allure of these spurious comparisons remains as strong as ever. Without any apparent effect, Marshall Plans have been proposed to help Africa, the Middle East, New Orleans, Iraq, and even Wallonia, Belgium's least prosperous region. Bill Gates wants a Marshall Plan to broaden access to technology, French President Nicolas Sarkozy urges one for his country's poor suburbs, and the AFL-CIO thinks the U.S. auto industry deserves its own Marshall Plan.
Why do some still insist on "declaring war" on political, economic and social challenges? It comes down to money and support:
There are many good reasons why declaring war on a social problem or launching a Marshall Plan to help a country or region are such attractive metaphors for politicians. Wars unite countries and stifle internal dissent. Wag the Dog is not just the title of a movie in which a war is manufactured to rally support for a government, but also an age-old political tactic. The war metaphor is also attractive because real wars — those between nation-states as opposed to those against concepts or bad socioeconomic trends — are finite.
University of Notre Dame scholar Daniel Lindley has found that the average length of a war is 308 days when the country that starts it wins and 660 days when initiators lose. No surprise, then, that the war metaphor keeps getting deployed: It boosts expectations that in a few years a major scourge — cancer, terrorism, poverty — will be eliminated. "War" also holds the seductive promise of an open checkbook for the politicians who so liberally apply the term; after all, budgetary constraints tend to disappear during war along with all those pesky rules. Wars are for heroes, not for accountants who limit the resources needed for victory.
Moises Naim will be speaking tomorrow at the World Bank's Financial and Private Sector Development Forum. The theme of this year's forum is crisis recovery. Naim will address the topic, "Is the new normal the old normal?" His presentation will be available online later this week.
The World Bank's new chief economist for Financial and Private Sector Development, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, has entered the blogosphere with the new All About Finance blog. In her first post, Asli considers whether the financial crisis ought to make us consider turning bureaucrats into bankers. She responds with a resounding "no"!
Research is seldom conclusive, but in the area of state ownership of banking the evidence is as overwhelming as it gets. When it comes to lending, it appears that the state banks are the best at lending to cronies. Government officials face conflicts of interest that go against efficient allocation of resources – such as securing their political bases and rewarding supporters. Overall, greater state ownership of banking is associated with less financial sector development, lower growth, lower productivity and even less stability – and it is more damaging at lower per capita income levels where there are typically fewer checks and balances. So it is no wonder that many countries embarked on privatization programs and ought to continue with them. Surely this is a difficult process – but there is again plenty of evidence that well-designed privatization can significantly increase bank performance.
A few months ago, at the Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Pincus from Zynga talked about some of the ways that online gaming, by connecting people to ideas, could be used for social change. While there weren't many concrete suggestions on how to do that, the idea that online gaming was an area where its full potential was yet to be discovered.
Last week, game designer Jane McGonigal took the stage at the TED Conference to talk about social gaming, and in particular, her new project, EVOKE, launching next week.
(Disclaimer: EVOKE is a project sponsored by the World Bank Institute, so it's particularly relevant in this context. But even if it wasn't, the intersection between international development and social gaming is one that is worth exploring.)
I don't have the video or transcript of Jane's TED talk just yet, but I'll be sure to share them as soon as I get my hands on them. For now, a quick description of EVOKE from Jane's blog:
EVOKE is an online game designed to teach collaboration, creativity, knowledge networking, entrepreneurship, courage, resourcefulness, sustainability, and vision.
Our goal: to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start tackling the world’s toughest problems: poverty, hunger, sustainable energy, water security, conflict, disaster relief, health care, education, human rights.
Despite stereotypes of antisocial gamers who prefer to consume rather than create, most video-gamers are in fact engaged in a highly collaborative effort to exhaustively understand their favorite games. The video-gaming community is, quite simply, engaged in intense and highly successful "collective intelligence."
The term "collective intelligence" was coined by French philosopher Pierre Levy in 1994. He argued that, because the Internet allows a rapid, open, and global exchange of data and ideas, the network should "mobilize and coordinate the intelligence, experience, skills, wisdom, and imagination of humanity" in new and unexpected ways.
Thanks to the unique nature of digital gaming, gamers may be the world's most literate and practiced community when it comes to developing these new, real-world skills of collaboration and collective intelligence.
I'll admit, this whole idea of social gaming for social change is a bit new to me, but I'm extremely interested and want to learn more.
Do you have any background, experience, or expertise on online social gaming? Do you agree that games could be used to change the world? Let me know, I'm looking to learn more.
And if you're interested, check out EVOKE and let me know what you think of it. I'll be playing along as well.
The recession is taking away opportunity for the young to gain employment experience, and many who are employed are working below their abilities in jobs they are likely to get stuck in for many years, if not forever.
The recession is wiping out the accumulated assets of the unemployed as they try to bridge the gap until jobs return, and since many of these are older workers, this will have a large detrimental effect that lasts throughout their retirement years. Recessions cause skills to depreciate, there are psychological costs, there are costs to family members, the loss of a job generally means loss of health care, the costs to working class households go on and on.
It is worth repeating that many of the externalities of the financial crisis are likely to become perpetual, as middle-aged workers are forced to retire and young workers are unable to develop the skills that they might otherwise have gained, leaving them permanently handicapped in the future job market. The gravity of this situation is so strong that has produced a temporary respite from America's partisan sclerosis, as lawmakers push for a government solution.
Roughly one in ten Americans is officially unemployed, with the effects of unemployment becoming more dire, yet America's GDP managed to grow at 5.7 percent last quarter. What explains this juxtaposition?
Thoma blames taxpayer-funded financial bailouts, calling for more support at the bottom of the income pyramid:
The fact that many of the costs were concentrated among those least able to pay them stands in contrast to the fact that the bailout benefits were concentrated among those at the opposite end of the income distribution.
Government transfers to compensate low income groups for the costs they were forced to pay but had no hand in causing, transfers that are financed by those who received the benefits during the bubble years and the bailout money when the bubble popped, seem more than justified.
