Rachel's Democracy & Health News #970
Thursday, July 31, 2008

From: The Independent (London, U.K.) ......................[This story printer-friendly]
May 16, 2008

AN EPIDEMIC OF EXTINCTIONS: DECIMATION OF LIFE ON EARTH

[Rachel's introduction: Species are dying out at a rate not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs, according to a report published in May -- and human behaviour is to blame.]

By Emily Dugan

The world's species are declining at a rate "unprecedented since the extinction of the dinosaurs," a census of the animal kingdom has revealed. The Living Planet Index out today [May 16, 2008] shows the devastating impact of humanity as biodiversity has plummeted by almost a third in the 35 years to 2005.

The report, produced by WWF, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network, says land species have declined by 25 per cent, marine life by 28 per cent, and freshwater species by 29 per cent.

Jonathan Loh, editor of the report, said that such a sharp fall was "completely unprecedented in terms of human history". "You'd have to go back to the extinction of the dinosaurs to see a decline as rapid as this," he added. "In terms of human lifespan we may be seeing things change relatively slowly, but in terms of the world's history this is very rapid."

And "rapid" is putting it mildly. Scientists say the current extinction rate is now up to 10,000 times faster than what has historically been recorded as normal.

As nations meet for the Convention on Biological Diversity in Bonn, these alarming figures will cast a shadow over government pledges to make a "significant" reduction in biodiversity loss by 2010. In fact, the report's authors say that global inaction has already made such a goal totally unattainable.

"It's very damning for the governments that are party to the convention that they are not able to meet the target they set for themselves," said Mr Loh. "The talk doesn't get translated into action. We are failing, and the consequences will be devastating."

Tracking nearly 4,000 species between 1970 and 2005, the team has not only revealed the destruction of the Earth's wildlife, but also pointed the finger at the perpetrators of this devastation.

Ben Collen, extinctions researcher at ZSL, said: "Between 1960 and 2000, the human population of the world has doubled. Yet during the same period, the animal populations have declined by 30 per cent. It's beyond doubt that this decline has been caused by humans."

The study picked out five reasons for species decline, all of which can be traced back to human behaviour: climate change, pollution, the destruction of animals' natural habitat, the spread of invasive species, and the overexploitation of species. At a time when America has finally added the polar bear to the endangered species list, it is emerging that the scale of species destruction reaches far beyond the headline animals. But as in the case of the polar bear, mankind's behaviour needs to be radically changed in order to stop this pillaging of the Earth's biodiversity.

The Yangtze river dolphin is a case in point. Scientists believe it is extinct, as successive searches for the freshwater mammal have proved fruitless. There are many reasons for its rapid path to extinction: collisions with boats, habitat loss and pollution. These factors all point back to one perpetrator: mankind.

Aside from tackling global emissions, the report recommended two ways that species decline could be combated -- by avoiding the destruction of animals' natural habitat by overdevelopment or cultivation; and in avoiding the over-farming or fishing of individual species.

The implications of such drastic reductions in biodiversity are already having an impact on human life. "Reduced biodiversity means millions of people face a future where food supplies are more vulnerable to pests and disease and where water is in irregular or short supply," said James Leape, director general of WWF.

"No one can escape the impact of biodiversity loss because reduced global diversity translates quite clearly into fewer new medicines, greater vulnerability to natural disasters and greater effects from global warming. The industrialised world needs to be supporting the global effort to achieve these targets, not just in their own territories where a lot of biodiversity has already been lost, but also globally."

Copyright independent.co.uk

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From: New Scientist (pg. 32) .............................[This story printer-friendly]
June 25, 2008

OIL: THE FINAL WARNING

[Rachel's introduction: "There is a growing realisation that we are teetering on the edge of an economic catastrophe which could be triggered next time there is a glitch in the world's oil supply. A number of converging forces are making such an event more likely than ever before."]

By Ian Sample

Howls of protest have been echoing round the globe as the price of oil punches through record highs with every passing week. In the UK, last month, hundreds of truckers descended on London to demand that planned fuel tax rises be scrapped. In continental Europe, where police clashed violently with truckers, two people died during the protests. Fishermen and farmers blockaded ports and depots in protest against the rocketing cost of diesel. Similar scenes played out across South America and Asia.

In the US, the world's thirstiest oil consumer, gasoline reached an all-time high of $4 per gallon, forcing the administration to lean on domestic producers and consider suing foreign oil exporters for allegedly rigging the market. When President Bush implored Saudi Arabia, which controls the lion's share of the world's proven reserves, to pump more from its wells, the Saudis came up with only a token increase.

The situation is not about to improve. Bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have both suggested that the crude oil price could rise from the high of $139 a barrel (as New Scientist went to press) to $200 or more, while the financial speculator George Soros predicts that rising oil prices could send the US economy into recession.

Expensive fuel at the pumps is just the start. These battles over the price of oil could be the harbinger of something even scarier. There is a growing realisation that we are teetering on the edge of an economic catastrophe which could be triggered next time there is a glitch in the world's oil supply.

A number of converging forces are making such an event more likely than ever before. First, there is the spectacular rise in global oil consumption, which, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) now stands at 87 million barrels of crude (about 10 billion litres) a day. Most geologists now accept we have reached, or will imminently reach, peak oil. Some fields in the US and the North Sea have been pumped dry and production is becoming increasingly concentrated within fewer countries. Add a boost from speculators betting that things will get even worse, chicanery by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel which over the past two years has added Angola and Ecuador to its ranks to mask the decline in production of its existing members, and it's not hard to see why prices have been forced ever upwards. But price conceals the much more complex mess we're in.

In the past, it has usually been possible to ride out any disruption to world oil flows -- whether from accidents or hostile acts -- by pumping more oil from the ground. That spare capacity has now all but vanished, as oil producers cash in on soaring prices by extracting as much of the stuff as they can. "There is absolutely no slack in the system any more," says Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington DC-based think tank specialising in energy security. It is this lack of wriggle-room that has brought us to the brink.

In the days when oil producers had more leeway, they could make up for a disruption somewhere in the system by quickly raising production by around 3 million barrels a day, says Nick Butler, head of the Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies, part of the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School. That crucial reserve capacity has now fallen below the daily output of some producers -- meaning that if the taps were turned off in any one of a number of unstable oil- supplying nations, such as Nigeria, Iraq, Iran or Angola, the impact would be felt almost immediately.

This has left the oil market so fragile that a few well-placed explosives, an energy-sapping cold winter or an unusually intense hurricane season could send shock waves across the globe. The potential consequences are so serious that governments are drawing up emergency plans to cope should the worst happen. According to one analyst who took part in a simulation of just such a crisis, the situation most experts fear is what they call a "psychological avalanche".

Here's what happens. A small, distant country one day finds it can no longer import enough oil because of a spike in prices or problems with local supply. The news media whip this up into a story suggesting an oil shock is on the way, and the resulting panic buying by the public degenerates into a global grab for oil.

Most industrialised countries keep an emergency reserve as a first line of defence, but in the face of worldwide panic buying this may not be enough. Countries in which the oil runs out face transport meltdown, wreaking havoc with international trade and domestic necessities such as food distribution, emergency services and daily commerce. Without oil everything stops.

The roots of our oil addiction can be traced back to the end of the 19th century, when petroleum began to be pumped from wells across America. It wasn't long before it become obvious what a great transport fuel it could provide. Oil-based fuels paved the way for intensive farming and extensive road networks; they drove the influx of populations into cities, drove growth in shipping and eventually made mass air travel possible. "Oil has shaped our civilisation. Without crude oil you'd have no cars, no shipping, no planes," says Gideon Samid, head of the Innovation Appraisal Group (IAG) at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

And it's not just about fuels. A giant chemical industry relies on oil as its feedstock, and without it many of the products we now take for granted would vanish. "You'd see no plastics, no bags, no toys, no cases on TVs, computers or radios. It's absolutely everywhere," says Samid.

"Much of the economic expansion and growth of the human population in the 20th century is directly tied to the availability of large amounts of cheap oil," says Cutler Cleveland, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. "There isn't a single good or service consumed on the planet, except in rural economies, that doesn't have oil embedded in it. Oil is the lifeblood of the global economy."

The secret of oil's success is its portability and extraordinarily high energy density. One barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 46 US gallons of gasoline; burn it and it will release more than 6 billion joules of heat energy, equivalent to the amount of energy expended by five agricultural labourers working 12-hour days non-stop for a year.

The vast majority of oil is consumed by transport. In the US, that sector accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the 20.7 million barrels the country gets through each day. The chemical industry turns half of the rest into plastics, solvents and pharmaceuticals.

More than half of the world's oil comes from seven countries, the leading supplier being Saudi Arabia, which produces more than 10 million barrels a day. Then come Russia, the US, Iran, China, Mexico and Canada. Twenty years ago, there were 15 oilfields able to supply 1 million barrels a day. Now, there are only four. The largest is the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia.

The IEA, which advises 27 countries on oil emergencies, requires its members to hold at least 90 days' worth of fuel, which can be pooled and released onto the market if a crisis looms. The system last swung into action in 2005 when hurricane Katrina caused the shutdown of more than 23 per cent of the US's oil production capacity. A few days after Katrina struck, the IEA ordered the release of 2 million barrels a day from reserve stocks for a month, the first time reserves had been released since the Gulf war in 1991.

About half the world's oil is distributed by tankers mainly plying a handful of key routes across the oceans. The rest goes through an extensive network of pipelines that can carry different grades of crude and synthetic compounds, such as lubricants. The bewildering complex of pipelines -- extending 90,000 kilometres in the US alone - crosses continents and dips under oceans.

The pipelines are often above ground and vulnerable to accidental damage or attacks by saboteurs. When working, however, they provide an extremely efficient way of transporting oil. A pipeline that pumps a relatively modest 150,000 barrels per day delivers the equivalent of 750 oil tanker truck loads or one delivery every 2 minutes, day and night. Even if a pipeline is damaged, it can usually be quickly repaired. Valves at intervals along the pipe can isolate the leak while the damaged section is replaced.

Disruption can still be costly. A report in 2005 by a US House of Representatives subcommittee on terrorism reported that sabotage to oil pipelines in Iraq had cost the country more than $10 billion in lost revenues, even though protection had been a high priority for the coalition troops since they invaded two years before. The report suggested that groups hostile to the US and its allies were becoming increasingly expert at mounting these attacks.

Choke points

Even outside a conflict zone, accidents can cause serious disruption. Last year, the IEA was on standby to release reserves after an explosion in Minnesota shut down part of the 5000-kilometre Enbridge pipeline, which pumps 1.9 million barrels of crude a day from Canada to the US Midwest. This single incident halted one-fifth of US oil imports for days.

Oil deliveries by sea are vulnerable too. A fleet of 4000 tankers plying six main routes delivers more than 43 million barrels of oil every day. Many of these routes pass through narrow "choke points", and if any of these were to become impassable, even temporarily, the effect on oil supplies could be dramatic.

For instance, more than 16 million barrels of oil a day are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, taking oil from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the US, western Europe and Asia. At its narrowest point, the strait is only 33 kilometres wide. If necessary, some of Saudi Arabia's exports could be diverted through the 1200-kilometre East- West pipeline to the Red Sea, but its maximum capacity is only 5 million barrels a day, half of which is already taken up.

Between 1984 and 1987, during the Iran-Iraq war, both countries attacked tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, causing shipping to drop by 25 per cent. In 2003, the Bush administration claimed it had prevented further attacks on shipping in the strait.

Another pinch point occurs in the Strait of Malacca, which narrows to just 2.7 kilometres between Sumatra and Singapore. Tankers from the Persian Gulf and west Africa transport some 15 million barrels a day through the strait en route to Japan, China and other Pacific destinations. A report by Luft claims that some tankers have been hijacked here by would-be terrorists whose initial aim has been simply to learn how to operate them. In 2003 a small chemical tanker called Dewi Madrim was taken over by 10 armed men, who sailed it through the strait before leaving with equipment and technical documents.

One scenario being suggested is that hijackers might commandeer a liquid natural gas tanker plying one of these shipping routes, load it with explosives and use it to ram an oil tanker. If this floating bomb produced a burning oil slick, it could render the passage impassable for months, tipping the global economy into crisis as alternative routes would fail to make up the lost supplies.

Another key element in the global oil infrastructure is Abqaiq, an enormous processing facility in Saudi Arabia, which removes sulphur from two-thirds of the country's crude. The CIA estimates that seven months after a large-scale attack, output would still be only 40 per cent of its full capacity.

More than half the oil from Abqaiq is pumped to the largest offshore oil terminal in the world, Ras Tanura on the Persian Gulf, which handles one-tenth of the world's oil. This makes it a prime target for attack, and the site is as heavily defended as a military base. "If you have a facility like this and a plane crashed into it, or terrorists get in and somehow succeed in blowing it up, then you have a very, very significant disruption on your hands. That is what analysts see as a doomsday scenario," Lufts says. Reuters reported that one planned attack on the terminal was thwarted in 2006. Saudi oil production is particularly vulnerable because it is concentrated in a few massive production and distribution sites. "If one or two of these facilities goes down, then the entire system goes down," says Luft.

So what would the impact be if oil supplies choked? In 2005, a group of current and former US government and national security officials were asked to address this in a live role-play exercise. Playing the part of the national security adviser was Robert Gates, who the following year became Secretary of Defense. The scenarios that unfolded were developed with officials from the Shell oil company in the Netherlands, a former US presidential counter-terrorism adviser and industry analysts.

The simulation kicked off with an upsurge of political violence in Nigeria, the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the US. In the ensuing turmoil 600,000 barrels of oil production a day were lost from the Niger delta. The violence coincided with the start of a cold winter in the northern hemisphere, which increased demand by 700,000 barrels a day. Together, these events boosted the price of a barrel of oil from $58 to $82; a proportional rise today would push the price beyond $195.

Events began to gather pace when, a month later, the simulation threw in an attack on the Haradh natural-gas processing plant in Saudi Arabia, which forced the country to cut 250,000 barrels per day from its exports -- equivalent to the oil consumed every day in Switzerland - to meet domestic needs. Next, news arrived of an attempt to ram a hijacked supertanker into another vessel moored at a jetty at Ras Tanura. This was closely followed by a similar attack at the oil port of Valdez in Alaska, as well as a ground attack which set fuel depots alight. With the world oil shortfall now at 3.4 million barrels per day, the price per barrel had shot up to $123. Against the recent peak price of $139, that rise would take the cost per barrel to $295.

The turmoil leads to an aggressive crackdown on anti-western groups and their sympathisers, which temporarily quells further attacks. Then, six months into the simulation, a terrorist campaign is launched against foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, killing 200 and wounding 250 within 48 hours. Evacuation of foreign workers follows.

Though oil production continues unchecked, this loss of expertise leaves Saudi Arabia unable to meet future demand and with no spare capacity. Fears that this could lead to shortages in the future bring speculators into the market, and the price per barrel rises to $161. At the end of the simulation, global production has fallen by 3.5 million barrels a day, or 4 per cent of world oil supplies. One of the participants, Jim Woolsey, a former head of the CIA, described the scenarios as "relatively mild compared to what is possible", yet this proved enough to almost triple the price of a barrel of crude.

The key conclusion being drawn from this scenario is how reliant the global oil market is on Saudi Arabia's ability to ramp up production on demand. If this extra oil is not available, the price rockets. Saudi Arabia's recent reluctance to increase production and the ensuing price rises in today's real-life oil market amply bear out this prediction.

So where does this leave us at a time when global oil production is approaching the point when it stops growing and starts to decline? Most industry experts, including geoscientists and economists, who were polled by Samid in 2007 said that peak production will occur by 2010. This contrasted with a similar survey conducted two years earlier, in which respondents were split, with many of the economists opting for a later date. "Now, a real consensus is emerging," says Samid.

This tells us that we will have to start making serious attempts to wean ourselves off oil, and fast. It will be no easy task. "It's hardly conceivable that the world could function without oil," says Didier Houssin, director of oil markets and emergency preparedness at the IEA.

"It is hardly conceivable that the world could function without oil"Finding a replacement fuel for transport is the biggest challenge. So far all the alternatives have hit the skids. For example, hydrogen, which could potentially replace oil as a green fuel if made using renewable sources of energy, has storage and distribution problems. While biofuels, which could be an easier replacement for fossil fuels, require feedstocks that compete with food crops for water and agricultural land. "To get these alternatives close to what oil can do, you have to invest a lot of money," says Cleveland, something most governments and energy companies have done reluctantly, and at pathetically low levels. "These aren't insurmountable problems, but they suggest the transition has some formidable challenges," he adds. One way or another oil will become more scarce, even more costly and will always have the disadvantage of generating carbon dioxide when it's burned. However hard it may be, the sooner we make the break, the better.

Ian Sample is science correspondent for The Guardian newspaper in London

Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

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From: Chemical & Engineering News ....................[This story printer-friendly]
June 30, 2008

HANSEN RENEWS PLEA FOR ACTION

[Rachel's introduction: The director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies warns (again) that "disastrous climate changes will spiral dynamically out of humanity's control" if we don't take preventive action soon. And he urges that fossil energy company CEOs be tried for "high crimes against humanity and nature."]

By Jeff Johnson

Twenty years ago, James Hansen brought his concern about global warming to the U.S. Senate, testifying that Earth had entered a long- term warming trend and man-made greenhouse gases were almost certainly the cause. Among his predictions, he said global warming would hit both extremes in the water cycle -- severe droughts and forest fires, with heavy rains and floods likely. His testimony was like lightning, igniting all sides of a growing climate-change debate.

Last week, on the anniversary of his June 23, 1988, testimony, Hansen, now the director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, returned to Capitol Hill with similar charges but with a greater sense of urgency. Although climate change is much better understood today and fewer doubters remain, Hansen said, little has been accomplished to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and time is running out.

In congressional testimony, interviews, and speeches, Hansen urged a "transformational change" in Washington to restrict carbon emissions. Otherwise, he said, it will become impractical to constrain CO2 to levels that prevent climate systems from passing a "tipping point" at which disastrous climate changes will spiral dynamically out of humanity's control.

According to Hansen, a safe level of atmospheric CO2 is 350 ppm, but today's levels are slightly higher than that and rising. He laid out several approaches that could make a small, near-term difference, such as reforestation and new agricultural practices, but said bigger changes are necessary.

Focusing on coal, Hansen urged a phaseout of its use, except where carbon is captured and sequestered underground, a technology in its infancy. And he would block construction of new coal-fired power plants.

Particularly critical of lobbyists and special interest groups, Hansen said that they had blocked transition to renewable energy sources. He urged that fossil energy company CEOs be tried for "high crimes against humanity and nature."

Hansen supports a carbon tax or what he calls a "tax and dividend" system that taxes oil, coal, and gas at the point of sale or port of entry. Income from the tax would be returned to the public as a dividend, with equal amounts going to each adult and half-shares to each child, he said.

But when it comes to climate-change politics, contradictions abound. As Hansen spoke, members of Congress debated legislation to increase oil production and availability to help industry and consumers avoid the pain of high oil and gasoline prices. However, that pain has resulted in a decline in U.S. gasoline consumption for the first time in 17 years, says a June 19 study by Cambridge Energy Research Associates. The Cambridge researchers predicted the drop may be permanent because consumers are turning to more efficient vehicles.

Petroleum is the largest source of U.S. CO2 emissions, and coal is a close second. Together they make up about 80% of energy-related CO2 emissions.

Copyright 2008 American Chemical Society

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From: The New York Times (pg. F5) ........................[This story printer-friendly]
April 22, 2008

LIFE EXPECTANCY IS DECLINING IN SOME POCKETS OF THE COUNTRY

[Rachel's introduction: "In the U.S., there has always been a view, stated or unstated, that we can live with some inequality if everyone is getting better. This is the first sign that not everyone is getting better."]

By Nicholas Bakalar

Life expectancy has long been growing steadily for most Americans. But it has not for a significant minority, according to a new study, which finds a growing disparity in mortality depending on race, income and geography.

The study, published Monday in the online journal PLoS, analyzed life expectancy in all 3,141 counties in the United States from 1961 to 1999, the latest year for which complete data have been released by the National Center for Health Statistics. Although life span has generally increased since 1961, the authors reported, it began to level off or even decline in the 1980s for 4 percent of men and 19 percent of women.

"It's very troubling that there are parts of the wealthiest country in the world, with the highest health spending in the world, where health is getting worse," said Majid Ezzati, the lead author and an associate professor of international health at Harvard. It is a phenomenon, he added, "unheard of in any other developed country."

Counties with significant declines were concentrated in Appalachia, the Southeast, Texas, the southern Midwest and along the Mississippi River. Life expectancy increases were mainly in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast.

The researchers also compared the 2.5 percent of counties with the lowest life expectancies and the 2.5 percent with the highest. The disparity between those two groups rose to 11 years for men in 1999, from 9 years in 1983, and to 7.5 years from 6.7 in women.

The study found that from 1961 to 1983, there was little difference in average income for the counties where life expectancy rose at rates above and below the mean. But after 1983, life span rose with wealth. Race may also be a factor. In counties where life expectancy declined, the proportion of African-Americans was higher.

From 1961 to 1983, no county had a statistically significant decline in life expectancy, and reductions in cardiovascular disease led to a generally increasing length of life for both sexes. But after 1983, life expectancy declined an average of 1.3 years in 11 counties for men, and in 180 counties for women.

This lack of progress among the worst off was caused by a slowing or halt of reductions in cardiovascular disease, combined with increases in lung cancer and diabetes for women and in H.I.V. infection and homicide for men.

This rise in mortality for chronic diseases runs counter to trends in other developed countries, and the geographical differences are consistent with regional trends in smoking, high blood pressure and obesity. Dr. Ezzati speculates that data after 1999 will show more decreases in life span for the worst-off women. He expects to see a slight increase for men, with improved treatment for H.I.V. and AIDS.

"What's driving the disparity is the worsening of the worst off," Dr. Ezzati said. "In the U.S., there has always been a view, stated or unstated, that we can live with some inequality if everyone is getting better. This is the first sign that not everyone is getting better."

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From: Harvard Magazine ....................................[This story printer-friendly]
July 1, 2008

UNEQUAL AMERICA

[Rachel's introduction: Causes and consequences of the wide-and growing-gap between rich and poor]

By Elizabeth Gudrais, Harvard Magazine

When Majid Ezzati thinks about declining life expectancy, he says, "I think of an epidemic like HIV, or I think of the collapse of a social system, like in the former Soviet Union." But such a decline is happening right now in some parts of the United States. Between 1983 and 1999, men's life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties, according to a recent study by Ezzati, associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues. For women, the news was even worse: life expectancy decreased in more than 900 counties-more than a quarter of the total. This means 4 percent of American men and 19 percent of American women can expect their lives to be shorter than or, at best, the same length as those of people in their home counties two decades ago.

The United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world's longest life expectancy. It doesn't even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Ezzati's finding is unsettling on its face, but scholars find further cause for concern in the pattern of health disparities. Poor health is not distributed evenly across the population, but concentrated among the disadvantaged.

Disparities in health tend to fall along income lines everywhere: the poor generally get sicker and die sooner than the rich. But in the United States, the gap between the rich and the poor is far wider than in most other developed democracies, and it is getting wider. That is true both before and after taxes: the United States also does less than most other rich democracies to redistribute income from the rich to the poor.

Americans, on average, have a higher tolerance for income inequality than their European counterparts. American attitudes focus on equality of opportunity, while Europeans tend to see fairness in equal outcomes. Among Americans, differences of opinion about inequality can easily degenerate into partisan disputes over whether poor people deserve help and sympathy or should instead pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The study of inequality attempts to test inequality's effects on society, and it is delivering findings that command both sides' attention.

Ezzati's results are one example. There is also evidence that living in a society with wide disparities-in health, in wealth, in education- is worse for all the society's members, even the well off. Life- expectancy statistics hint at this. People at the top of the U.S. income spectrum "live a very long time," says Cabot professor of public policy and epidemiology Lisa Berkman, "but people at the top in some other countries live a lot longer."

Much is still unknown in this dynamic field, where Harvard is home to pioneers who first recognized income inequality as worthy of study and younger scholars at the forefront of its study today. The variety of disciplines featured in presentations of the University's Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy-economics, sociology, political science, public policy, health, medicine, education, law, and business-highlights the field's broad importance.

Because of the subject's complexity and the scarcity of consistent data that would allow comparison between countries and across wide timespans, research findings are often highly specific or framed in the language of interesting coincidences, rather than as definitive conclusions. Even when discernable patterns exist, there tend to be counter-examples; for instance, the United States, with high inequality, has low life expectancy compared to Denmark and Finland, with very low inequality-but in Spain and Italy, with inequality somewhere in between, life expectancy is even longer.

But the coincidences are intriguing indeed. **Research indicates that high inequality reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less racial harmony, and less civic and political participation.** Tax policy and social-welfare programs, then, take on importance far beyond determining how much income people hold onto. The level of inequality we allow represents our answer to "a very important question," says Nancy Krieger, professor of society, human development, and health at HSPH: "What kind of society do we want to live in?"

Keeping Up With the Joneses

The United States is becoming even more unequal as income becomes more concentrated among the most affluent Americans. Income inequality has been rising since the late 1970s, and now rests at a level not seen since the Gilded Age-roughly 1870 to 1900, a period in U.S. history defined by the contrast between the excesses of the super-rich and the squalor of the poor.

Early in the twentieth century, the share of total national income drawn by the top 1 percent of U.S. earners hovered around 18 percent. That share hit an all-time high in 1928-when top earners took home 21.1 percent of all income, including capital gains-then dropped steadily through the next three decades. Amid the post-World War II boom in higher education, and overall economic growth, the American middle class swelled and prospered, and the top 1 percent of earners took home less than 10 percent of all income through the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, the topmost 1 percent have seen their share rise again: it shot past 15 percent in 1996 and crested at 20.3 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which numbers are available.

To describe the distribution of income inequality in the United States, Allison professor of economics Lawrence F. Katz likes to use the analogy of an apartment building. "Over the last 25 years," he says, "the penthouse has gotten really, really nice. All sorts of new gadgets have been put in. The units just below the penthouse have also improved a lot. The units in the middle have stayed about the same. The basement apartment used to be OK, but now it's gotten infested with cockroaches and it's been flooding." (See graph, page 26.)

The argument that none of this matters as long as the overall economy is growing-that a rising tide lifts all boats, as President John F. Kennedy famously said-is the subject of vigorous academic review, with mixed results, but it may not be the most important question. Picture a buoyant luxury cruise ship surrounded by dilapidated dinghies, full of holes and on the verge of sinking. The fact that the tide has lifted them does not mean they are doing well.

This is a concept social scientists call relative deprivation. The idea is that, even when we have enough money to cover basic needs, it may harm us psychologically to see that other people have more. When British economist Peter Townsend developed his relative deprivation index in 1979, the concept was not new. Seneca wrote that to be poor in the midst of riches is the worst of poverties; Karl Marx wrote, "A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut."

Investigating whether relative deprivation and the negative emotions it engenders help explain why the poor have worse health than the rich in most societies began with epidemiologist Michael Marmot's study of British civil servants in the 1960s and 1970s. Marmot found that the lower-ranking bureaucrats had elevated levels of stress hormones compared to their high-status coworkers, even though the low-ranking workers still had job security, a living wage, decent hours, and benefits.

Others have found similar links. Examining health outcomes for identical twins raised together-pairs that shared genes and environment-Nancy Krieger found that when the twins became adults, if one was working class and the other professional, the working-class twin's health was, on average, worse.

There is little question that it is bad for one's health to be poor. Americans at the 95th income percentile or higher can expect to live nine years longer than those at the 10th percentile or lower. The poor are more likely to develop illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer, and there is evidence that relative deprivation and the stress it engenders are involved. When high inequality and rising top incomes shift society's accepted standards of living upward, it seems that people experience deprivation even when they have adequate food, clothing, and shelter. The official U.S. poverty rate-12.3 percent in 2006-is relatively low, but scholars agree that number is essentially meaningless.

The poverty threshold was developed in 1965 based on the cost of a grocery budget "for temporary or emergency use when funds are low," multiplied by three. It was "arbitrary," says Wiener professor of social policy Christopher Jencks, "but once it was adopted, it was politically impossible to change it." That threshold has been adjusted for inflation, but does not take into account the fact that housing prices, energy prices, and certain other costs have grown faster than the consumer price index (CPI). "Going to movies, eating out at restaurants, going on occasional vacations, having Internet access and a cell phone-none of these things are in the federal poverty level," says Ichiro Kawachi, professor of social epidemiology at HSPH and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). "What matters for functioning in society is what the average person is able to do." During the same period, the Gallup Poll definition of the poverty line-based on asking people how much income they need not to feel deprived-has risen much more steeply than the CPI.

Kawachi, who grew up in Japan, believes a predominant consumption culture in the United States exacerbates relative deprivation. "The Japanese have a very strong culture against conspicuous displays of affluence," he says. "When I was a child growing up in suburban Tokyo, it was very difficult to distinguish, by dress or anything else, rich kids from poor kids-whereas in America, bring it on!"

As further evidence of a correlation between inequality and consumption culture, he points to national spending on advertising as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). The top-ranked countries on this measure, according to United Nations (UN) data, are Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela-countries with inequality levels among the highest in the world-but also Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (U.K.), and the United States, countries with higher inequality than similarly prosperous peers.

Japan comes second only to Denmark in terms of equal-income distribution among its inhabitants, according to United Nations data. And life expectancy at birth for the Japanese is 82.3 years, compared to Americans' 77.9 years, even though per-capita GDP in the United States is about $10,000 more than in Japan. "It's pretty clear that an egalitarian ethos runs along with the idea of having strong safety nets and protecting the health of the most vulnerable," says Kawachi, who also directs HSPH's Center for Society and Health. "And that's reflected in national health statistics."

The United States ranks twenty-first among the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in terms of life expectancy, and twenty-fifth in terms of infant mortality. Kawachi and others have found that the U.S. counties with the most income inequality stack up poorly on health measures, and as mortality rates have fallen nationwide, they have fallen most slowly in states where income inequality increased the most-a cause for concern, whatever the explanation.

American Exception?

One widely used measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, named for Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who first articulated the concept in 1912. The coefficient measures income distribution on a scale from zero (where income is perfectly equally distributed among all members of a society) to one (where a single person possesses all the income). For the United States, the Gini coefficient has risen from .35 in 1965 to .44 today. **On the per-capita GDP scale, our neighbors are Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.; on the Gini scale, our neighbors include Sri Lanka, Mali, and Russia.** (Even with this basic measure of inequality, it is difficult to get comparable data for all countries, and some other sources find a much wider gap between the United States and Russia. For instance, the Luxembourg Income Study ranks Russia at .43 and the United States at .37, and does not even list Sri Lanka and Mali.)

The recent increase in inequality reflects a migration of money upward as salaries have ballooned at the top. In 1965, the average salary for a CEO of a major U.S. company was 25 times the salary of the average worker. Today, the average CEO's pay is more than 250 times the average worker's. At the same time, the government is doing less to redistribute income than it has at times in the past. The current top marginal tax rate-35 percent-is not the lowest it's been-there was no federal income tax at all until 1913-but it is far lower than the 91- percent tax levied on top earners from 1951 to 1963. Meanwhile, forces such as immigration and trade policy have put pressure on wages at the bottom.

Tax policies and employer-pay practices affect income distribution directly. But what governs these pay practices, and why have American voters and politicians chosen the tax policies they have? One answer lies in Americans' unique attitudes toward inequality. Asked by the International Social Survey Programme whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement that income differences in their home country are "too large," 62 percent of Americans agreed; the median response for all 43 countries surveyed-some with a much lower degree of inequality- was 85 percent.

Americans and Europeans also tend to disagree about the causes of poverty. In a different survey-the World Values Survey, including 40 countries-American respondents were much more likely than European respondents (71 percent versus 40 percent) to agree with the statement that the poor could escape poverty if they worked hard enough. Conversely, 54 percent of European respondents, but only 30 percent of American respondents, agreed with the statement that luck determines income.

It makes intuitive sense that those who view poverty as a personal failing don't feel compelled to redistribute money from the rich to the poor. Indeed, Ropes professor of political economy Alberto Alesina and Glimp professor of economics Edward L. Glaeser find a strong link between beliefs and tax policy: they find that a 10-percent increase in the share of the population that believes luck determines income is associated with a 3.5-percent increase in the share of GDP a given nation's government spends on redistribution (see "Down and Out in Paris and Boston," January-February 2005, page 14).

These attitudes, in turn, are rooted in U.S. history, says Christopher Jencks, whose 1973 book Inequality examined social mobility in the United States. Jencks has been studying inequality and social class since the 1960s, and has written dozens of journal articles, essays, and book chapters, as well as four more books, on the subject. He looks back to the Constitution's framers, who enshrined property rights as sacred and checked the government's ability to control the national economy. "The founding fathers didn't want the government to do that much," he says.

The Constitution is structured in such a way that it is harder to change than the constitutions of Europe's welfare states, where left- leaning groups have succeeded at writing in change. By and large, Alesina and Glaeser write, the U.S. Constitution "is still the same document approved by a minority of wealthy white men in 1776." And the "vestiges of feudalism" in European society make leftist arguments appealing there, whereas American politicians' rhetoric has emphasized individual agency since the time of George Washington (who wrote in 1783 that if citizens "should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be intirely their own"). The authors cite a 1980s history curriculum for public schools in California ("hardly the most right- wing of states," they note) that instructed, "A course should assess the role of optimism and opportunity in a land of work: the belief that energy, initiative, and inventiveness will continue to provide a promising future."

An alternative, and possibly complementary, explanation points to the United States's particular place in geography and history. Jencks also finds this persuasive. "The highest levels of inequality are found in the New World and not the Old, for reasons we don't understand," he says (see chart above). Societies with higher inequality also tend to have higher crime rates, although it's not clear which way the causal arrow runs, or if it exists. "These are societies built on conquest, many of them on slavery," Jencks adds. "A lot of the inequality may just be the legacy of those things."

Former colonies such as Haiti and Namibia inhabit the top end of the Gini scale, with coefficients of .59 and .74, respectively. But there are exceptions to the pattern: the low end of the scale includes transitional economies that are far from rich (Belarus and Moldova, with coefficients of .30 and .33), and former colonies (Ethiopia and Laos, with coefficients of .30 and .35). For all the scholarly study, consensus on whether the Gini coefficient can, in and of itself, say something good or something bad about a country is still lacking. Still, scholars are using what evidence does exist to ask, and test, whether the United States has things in common with Sri Lanka, Mali, and Russia, as it undoubtedly does with Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.

The excesses of the Gilded Age led, in the decades that followed, to a backlash in the form of the minimum wage and other labor laws to protect workers, business and financial-market regulation to protect consumers, social safety-net programs-Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid-and infrastructure investment to benefit all. But as the United States moves from a period of relatively balanced income distribution back into higher inequality, it remains to be seen whether these twentieth-century developments will enable the country to escape the problems that often accompany high inequality.

Left Out at the Bottom

An argument commonly made in inequality's defense is that it serves to motivate. Here, Kawachi cites evidence from the sports world. A 1990 study of golfers found that they performed best in professional tournaments, where the spread in the size of the prize money is widest. Similarly, a study of professional auto racers found that performance improved as the spread in the size of the various prizes widened.

So inequality may act on the human psyche to elicit hard work and high achievement-but it also may make us more individualistic. In a study of baseball players, teams with wider pay dispersion performed more poorly-and so did individual players within those teams. "In a world in which each individual is looking out for themselves, players will tend to concentrate on improving their own performance to the exclusion of team goals, since their own performance is what matters for moving up the pay scale," Kawachi and Bruce P. Kennedy (a former HSPH professor who passed away this year) wrote in The Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health. "Concentrating on trying to hit more home runs or improving one's own hitting average are not necessarily the tactics that lift team performance-as opposed to, say, practicing great defense."

This gets at the ways inequality may affect the fabric of society. Perhaps motivated by inequality and the prospect of getting ahead, Americans work longer hours than their European counterparts-about 200 more hours per year, on average, than the British, and 400 more hours per year than the Swedes. Again, there are counter-examples (the Japanese work almost as much as Americans do, just 50 hours less a year), but in any case, time spent at work is time not spent with friends or family, and this has its own implications for health.

As an outreach worker in San Francisco in the 1970s, Lisa Berkman noticed that her clients in the North Beach and Chinatown neighborhoods-poor or working-class, but with the strong social connections typical of immigrant communities-had far better health than her clients in the gritty Tenderloin district, who were much more socially isolated and disconnected from one another. The link between social integration and mortality risk became the subject of Berkman's dissertation at Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1977. At the time, the idea that social ties could protect health was radical. Now it is accepted wisdom-and a factor that, Berkman believes, helps to explain the extraordinarily high life expectancy in Spain and Italy.

But the danger of disconnectedness may go beyond being less happy or even less healthy. Kawachi and Kennedy cited a wealth of evidence that increasing income inequality goes hand in hand with a decrease in "social capital," a concept akin to community involvement that incorporates, among other things, social relationships, trust, reciprocity among friends and neighbors, and civic engagement. (Malkin professor of public policy Robert Putnam made a similar argument in his seminal 2000 book Bowling Alone.) Letting social capital atrophy means a less cohesive populace that, at the extreme, leaves entire classes of people disadvantaged and excluded. "The big worry," says Lawrence Katz, "is creating something like a caste society."

As American neighborhoods have become more integrated along racial lines, they have become more segregated along income lines and, some research indicates, with regard to all manner of other factors, including political and religious beliefs. (The Big Sort, a new book by journalist Bill Bishop, examines this evidence.) What's more, even along racial lines, American society is still far from integrated. Sociologist David R. Williams, Norman professor of public health and professor of African and African American studies, has examined racial discrimination and health in the United States and elsewhere, including South Africa, where in 1991, under apartheid, the "segregation index" was 90, meaning that 90 percent of blacks would have had to move to make the distribution even. "In the year 2000," says Williams, "in most of America's larger cities-New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee-the segregation index was over 80." Only slightly lower, that is, than under legally sanctioned apartheid.

When a society is starkly divided along racial or ethnic lines, the affluent are less likely to take care of the poor, Glaeser and Alesina have found. Internationally, welfare systems are least generous in countries that are the most ethnically heterogeneous. Those U.S. states with the largest black populations have the least generous welfare systems. And in a nationwide study of people's preferences for redistribution, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), found strong evidence for racial loyalty: people who lived near poor people of the same race were likely to support redistribution, and people who lived near poor people of a different race were less likely to do so. Differences in skin color seem to encourage the wealthy to view the poor as fundamentally different, serving as a visual cue against thinking, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Alesina's work investigates this cognitive process as an explanation for the high crime rates in less equal societies. Rather than following the common-sense explanation that the poor see what the rich have and covet it, leading to burglary and violent crime, Alesina argues that as the incomes of the rich and poor diverge, so do their interests. Members of a relatively equal society find it relatively easy to reach agreement about what the purpose and priorities of a legal system should be. But if the rich favor protecting property, while the poor care more about preventing and punishing interpersonal violent crime, the lack of consensus will produce a weak system that fails to meet the desires of either group. In one essay, his colleague Glaeser offers this apocalyptic prediction: "Great gaps between rich and poor may...hurt democracy and rule of law if elites prefer dictators who will protect their interests, or if the disadvantaged turn to a dictator who promises to ignore property rights."

This doesn't seem possible in a democracy such as the United States, where each citizen's vote carries the same weight regardless of income (the electoral-college system notwithstanding). In fact, given the shape of the income distribution, it seems that Americans would elect leaders whose policies favor the poor and middle class. Mean household income in 2004 was $60,528, but median household income was only $43,389. More than half of households make less money than average, so, broadly speaking, more than half of voters should favor policies that redistribute income from the top down. Instead, though, nations- and individual states-with high inequality levels tend to favor policies that allow the affluent to hang onto their money.

Filipe R. Campante, an assistant professor of public policy at HKS and a former student of Alesina's, thinks he's discovered why. After investigating what drives candidates' platforms and policy decisions, Campante has concluded that donations are at least as influential a mode of political participation as votes are.

Previous research has shown that voter turnout is low, particularly at the low end of the income spectrum, in societies with high inequality. Again, this is counterintuitive: in unequal places, poor people unhappy with government policies might be expected to turn out en masse to vote, but instead they stay home. Campaign contributions may provide the missing link.

Candidates, naturally, target voters with money because they need funds for their campaigns. And since the poor gravitate toward parties that favor redistribution and the wealthy align themselves with parties that do not, campaign contributions end up benefiting primarily parties and candidates whose platforms do not include redistribution. By the time the election comes around, the only candidates left in the race are those who've shaped their platforms to maximize fundraising; poor voters, says Campante, have already been left out. In a study of campaign contributions in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, he found that higher income inequality at the county level was associated with fewer people contributing to campaigns, but contributing a larger amount on average-so the haves participated, and the have-nots did not.

The solution, he says, is not to scrap the system altogether in favor of full public financing, but to enact contribution limits strict enough to level the playing field. He views contributions not as bribery or buying policy, but as a legitimate form of civic engagement. "The ideal system," he says, "would be a system where you have a really broad base of contributors that are contributing relatively small amounts....You want parties to be responsive to voters. Donations are a way in which parties are made responsive to voters."

Buffers Against Inequality

The effects of relative deprivation can come in a form more tangible than stress or low self-esteem. Krieger uses the example of a job interview. In a society where the average person has a cell phone, it can hurt one's job chances not to have one. Wearing old clothes to a job interview might be interpreted as a sign of not taking the interview seriously, when in fact the problem is inability to afford a new outfit. Bad teeth, which require money to fix, can trigger disgust in prospective employers and even hold people back from making friends. "Your income," Krieger says, "can decline to a point where you're no longer able to participate meaningfully in society."

Stress can also make people behave in ways they otherwise wouldn't. David Williams believes that the "hierarchy of needs" framework helps explain why, the poorer people are, the less likely they are to take care of their health. The framework, developed in 1943 by psychologist Abraham Maslow, defines the needs that motivate human behavior and the priority people assign to those needs. Physiological needs (eating, sleeping, breathing) form the foundation; not until those needs are met can people pursue needs in the higher categories (in succession: safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization). "If people are worried about their basic needs of survival and security and food and shelter," says Williams, "they cannot worry about the fact that a cigarette, which is providing relief from stress now, is going to cause lung cancer 20 years from now. If you can address the basic needs so people are no longer worried about them, you free them to consider those larger, higher-level needs that have long-term consequences for their well-being."

Lisa Berkman's latest project aims to let low-wage workers focus on such higher-order needs. In a study of nursing-home employees, Berkman found that nursing assistants, janitors, and kitchen workers had far less flexibility than higher-status workers in terms of being able to leave work if a family member fell ill, and that this lack of flexibility was related to increased risk of heart disease and chronic sleep problems. Now she is following nursing homes and retail establishments to see what happens when they implement more flexible policies. If workers in high-demand, low-wage jobs can spend more time with their families and stop worrying about getting fired if they need to handle an emergency, she says, "workplace policies may have a profound effect on health."

Improving living conditions in poor neighborhoods is another way to alleviate poverty's ill effects even in the absence of income redistribution, says Williams. The poor are more likely to smoke, to eat poorly, and to lead sedentary lives. These are personal choices- but every choice is made in context, and one's surroundings affect the choices one makes. "When people live in areas where there aren't supermarkets that sell fresh fruits and vegetables, their intake of fresh fruits and vegetables is dramatically lower," he says. "If people live in areas where there aren't sidewalks, where there aren't safe bike paths and places to walk and playgrounds, or where the rate of crime is so high that it's not safe to go outside, then their level of exercise is much lower and their rates of obesity are higher." Building parks and sidewalks and bringing farmers' markets to poor neighborhoods, then, makes it easier for residents to make healthy choices.

Another category of initiatives aims at improving living conditions for poor people by giving them vouchers to move to better neighborhoods, but the details are important, says Dolores Acevedo- Garcia, an HSPH associate professor of society, human development, and health. She is helping design the public-health component of one such program. Stemming from a landmark 2005 desegregation court case, it has already enabled about 1,300 former tenants of Baltimore public housing to move to suburban communities. "What people are expecting," she says, "is that if people move to a new neighborhood, they're automatically going to do better. Well, in fact, a lot of this is about connecting people to resources": for example, helping them find landlords who will rent to them-not the easiest thing in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

The aid doesn't stop there. Many doctors in affluent communities don't accept Medicaid; Acevedo-Garcia's proposal would have case workers help clients find doctors who do, and in some cases persuade doctors to start. "People may be used to doing their shopping at a convenience store or a liquor store," she says; case workers will tell them which grocery store has good produce at low prices, and where to catch the bus that will take them there. Something as simple as taking the new residents to a park can make a difference, she says: "They may not be used to the idea of exercising outside if they came from a neighborhood that was not safe."

Unequal Chances

"Adults' economic status is positively correlated with their parents' economic status in every society for which we have data," write Christopher Jencks and Laura Tach, a doctoral student in sociology and social policy, "but no democratic society is entirely comfortable with this fact." The prospect of upward mobility forms the very bedrock of the American dream, but analyses indicate that intergenerational mobility is no higher in the United States than in other developed democracies. In fact, a recent Brookings Institution report cites findings that intergenerational mobility is actually significantly higher in Norway, Finland, and Denmark-low-inequality countries where birth should be destiny if inequality, as some argue, fuels mobility.

In the United States, the correlation between parents' income and children's income is higher than chance: 42 percent of children born to parents in the bottom income quintile were still in the bottom quintile as adults, and 39 percent of children born to parents in the top quintile remained in the top quintile as adults, according to the Brookings analysis. But it is difficult to see whether mobility is increasing or decreasing, because it would require comparing specific individuals' incomes to their parents' incomes, against the wider backdrop of income distribution across society at that time. Because data with that level of detail do not exist for earlier periods, scholars can't say with certainty whether the results represent an increase or a decrease in mobility from other periods in American history.

Americans' steadfast belief in mobility probably stems from increases in absolute, rather than relative, mobility. As the overall economy mushroomed throughout the nation's history, the majority of people exceeded their parents' income. Recall Katz's apartment building analogy; rather than tenants moving from one floor to another, the entire building was shifting ever higher on a hill. But "if anything," Alesina and Glaeser write, "the American poor seem to be much more 'trapped' than their European counterparts," in the sense that fewer people who start life in the bottom quintile ever make it out.

This is puzzling given American society's emphasis on fairness and openness. Lee professor of economics Claudia Goldin and Katz detect an explanation in the increasing cost of college tuition. In 1950, the average tuition price at a private college was roughly 14 percent of the U.S. median family income; public college tuition was even lower (only 4 percent). Percentages for both types of institutions fell further in the ensuing decades, bottoming out around 1980, but then rising steeply ever since. In 2005, the cost of attending the average public college was 11 percent of median family income; for private colleges, the average was 45 percent. There is financial aid, but not enough, and the system "can be harder to crack than Fort Knox," Katz and Goldin write in their new book, The Race between Education and Technology.

For most of the twentieth century, the average American exceeded his parents' education level by a significant margin: between 1900 and 1975, the average American's educational attainment grew by 6.2 years, or about 10 months per decade. Then, between 1975 and 1990, the authors find that there was "almost no increase at all"; from 1990 to 2000, there was a gain of just six months. Although college graduation rates for women are still rising steadily, for men they have barely increased since the days of the Vietnam draft.

At the same time, the "college wage premium" has also increased. In 1975, the average college graduate's hourly wage was 24 percent higher than the average high-school graduate's. By 2002, that number had risen to 43 percent. Katz and Goldin say this increase indicates higher demand for workers with college degrees, even as computers have eliminated the type of jobs a high-school-diploma recipient or mediocre college graduate would have done 25 years ago: clerical work, basic accounting, middle management. Technology has exerted downward pressure on those workers' pay, explaining stagnating wages at the middle and bottom of the income distribution.

The United States once led the world in the rate at which its citizens finished college; it now falls in the middle of the OECD pack. It could lead again if Americans made a decision to fund higher education the way they chose to fund universal public high-school education early in the last century. "If you had made people borrow money to go to high school in the early twentieth century," says Katz, "you wouldn't have seen the same sort of expansion." But as technology continues to advance, if Americans do not break down barriers to higher education, the authors foresee an even more acute shortage of highly trained workers-and, other things being equal, a further increase in inequality.

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Elizabeth Gudrais '01 is associate editor of Harvard magazine.

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From: Environment News Service ............................[This story printer-friendly]
July 25, 2008

TOO YOUNG FOR A CELL PHONE

[Rachel's introduction: The brains of young children absorb twice as much as radio frequency energy from a cell phone as those of adults.]

By Louis Slesin

The brains of young children absorb twice as much as radio frequency energy from a cell phone as those of adults, according to a set of new calculations carried out by Joe Wiart's research group at France Telecom in the suburbs of Paris.

"[Our] analysis confirms that peripheral brain tissues of children seem to be higher exposed than the peripheral brain tissue of adults," Wiart concludes in a paper that appears in the July 7 issue of the journal "Physics in Medicine and Biology."

"Children are not simply small adults," Wiart explained in an interview with "Microwave News."

"Their skin and their skulls are thinner than those of adults, and their ears are smaller too," he said. "Given these differences, the higher SAR for children is not surprising."

SAR stands for specific absorption rate, a measure of the rate at which radio frequency energy is absorbed by the body.

These new findings apply to children who are eight years old or younger. Above the age of eight, the SARs in children are much like those of adults, according to Wiart.

"I agree with Joe," said Niels Kuster, the director of the ITIS Foundation in Zurich. A team led by Kuster and Andreas Christ recently completed a project for the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection, which like Wiart, found that regions of the brains of young children can have exposures that are twice those of adults -- or even higher.

Even more striking, Kuster and Christ concluded that the "exposure of the bone marrow of children can exceed that of adults by about a factor of ten."

They also report that children's eyes are more highly exposed that those of adults.

Whether or not children are at a greater health risk than adults has been debated since at least the year 2000, when a UK panel chaired by Sir William Stewart advised that parents limit their children's use of mobile phones.

Since then, other government groups, especially those in France and Germany, have issued similar precautionary recommendations.

The mobile phone industry has long disputed the possibility that children are at any greater risk. For instance, earlier this year after the French Ministry of Health reiterated concerns over children's use of cell phones, the MMF, an industry lobby group, issued an advisory stating that cell phones do not present health risks to any users "regardless of age."

The MMF has relied heavily on statements issued by the World Heath Organization's EMF Project in Geneva, and the Health Council of the Netherlands.

For instance, in a paper published in 2004, the Health Council concluded that, "There is no convincing scientific data to assume a difference in the absorption of electromagnetic energy in heads of children and adults."

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Louis Slesin is founding editor of "Microwave News," which for 25 years has covered the nonionizing electromagnetic spectrum, with special emphasis on mobile phones and power lines, as well as radar and broadcast towers.

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008.

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From: Counterpunch .......................................[This story printer-friendly]
July 25, 2008

NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION'S DEVASTATING BLOW TO NUCLEAR POWER

[Rachel's introduction: Despite millions of dollars of high-priced hype, the "new generation" of "standardized design" nuclear power plants actually does not exist.]

By Harvey Wasserman

A devastating blow to the much-hyped revival of atomic power has been delivered by an unlikely source -- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC says the "standardized" designs on which the entire premise of returning nuclear power to center stage is based have massive holes in them, and may not be ready for approval for years to come.

Delivered by one of America's most notoriously docile agencies, the NRC's warning essentially says: that all cost estimates for new nuclear reactors -- and all licensing and construction schedules -- are completely up for grabs, and have no reliable basis in fact. Thus any comparisons between future atomic reactors and renewable technologies are moot at best. And any "hard number" basis for independent financing for future nukes may not be available for years to come, if ever.

These key points have been raised in searing testimony before state regulators by Jim Warren of the North Carolina Waste and Awareness Reduction Network and Tom Clements of the South Carolina Friends of the Earth, and by others now challenging proposed state-based financing for new Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors. The NRC gave conditional "certification" to this "standardized" design in 2004, allowing design work to continue. But as recently as June 27, the NRC has issued written warnings that hundreds of key design components remain without official approval. Indeed, Westinghouse has been forced to actually withdraw numerous key designs, throwing the entire permitting process into chaos.

The catastrophic outcome of similar problems has already become tangible. After two years under construction, the first "new generation" French reactor being built in Finland is already more than two years behind schedule, and more than $2.5 billion over budget. The scenario is reminiscent of the economic disaster that hit scores of "first generation" reactors, which came in massively over budget and, in many cases, decades behind promised completion dates.

In North and South Carolina, public interest groups are demanding the revocation of some $230 million in pre-construction costs already approved by state regulators for two proposed Duke Energy reactors. In both those states, as well as in Florida, Alabama and Georgia, Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors have been presented to regulatory commissions to be financed by ratepayers as they are being built.

This astounding pro-utility scheme forces electric consumers to pay billions of dollars for nuclear plants that may never operate, and whose costs are indeterminate. Sometimes called Construction Work in Progress, it lets utilities raise rates to pay for site clearing, project planning, and down payments on large equipment and heavy reactor components, such as pressure vessels, pumps and generators, that can involve hundreds of millions of dollars, even before the projects get final federal approval. The process in essence gives utilities an incentive to drive up construction costs as much as they can. It allows them to force ratepayers to cover legal fees incurred by the utilities to defend themselves against lawsuits by those very ratepayers. And the public is stuck with the bill for whatever is spent, even if the reactor never opens -- or if it melts down before it recoups its construction costs, as did Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island Unit Two in 1979, which self-destructed after just three months of operation.

According to Warren and Clements, Duke Energy and its cohorts have "filed some 6,500 pages of Westinghouse's technical design documents as the major component of applications" to build new reactors. "Of the 172 interconnected Westinghouse documents," say NCWARN and FOE, "only 21 have been certified." And most of what has been certified, they add, rely on systems that are unapproved, and that are key to the guts of the reactor, including such major components as the "reactor building, control room, cooling system, engineering designs, plant- wide alarm systems, piping and conduit."

In other words, despite millions of dollars of high-priced hype, the "new generation" of "standardized design" power plants actually does not exist. The plans for these reactors have not been finalized by the builders themselves, nor have they been approved by the regulators. There is no operating prototype of a Westinghouse AP-1000 from which to draw actual data about how safely these plants might actually operate, what their environmental impact might be, or what they might cost to build or run.

In fact, as the NRC's June 27 letter notes, Westinghouse has been forced to withdraw key technical documents from the regulatory process. The NRC says this means design approval for the AP-1000 might not come until 2012.

The problem extends to other designs. According to Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, the "Evolutionary Power Reactor" proposed for Calvert Cliffs, Maryland, "is way behind in certification" causing delays in the licensing process. Similar problems have arisen with the "Economic Simplified Boiling War Reactor" design proposed for North Anna, Virginia and Fermi, Michigan. "All of these utilities seem to want standardization for the other guy, not for themselves, so most of them are making changes to the 'standardized' designs, says Mariotte. "Even the ABWR," being planned for a site in south Texas, which has actually been built before, "has design issues" that have caused delays.

The problem, says Mariotte, "is that the NRC is still trying to go ahead and do licensing even with the designs not certified. This is going to lead to a big mess later on."

But in the meantime, Public Service Commissions like the one in Florida, have given preliminary approval to reactor proposals whose projected costs have more than doubled in just one year. Florida Power & Light's two proposed reactors at Turkey Point, on the border of the Everglades National Park, are listed as costing somewhere between $6 billion and $9 billion. FP&L refuses to commit to a firm price, and is demanding south Florida ratepayers foot an unknowable bill for gargantuan projects whose costs are virtually certain to skyrocket long before the NRC approves the actual reactor designs. By contrast, the "huge" preliminary deal just reached between Florida, environmentalists and U.S. Sugar to buy some 180,000 acres of land to save the Everglades is now estimated at less than $2 billion, less than one-sixth the minimum estimated cost of the two reactors proposed for Turkey Point.

In the larger picture, the depth of this scam is staggering. With no finalized design, and no firm price tag, a second generation of nuclear power plants is now being put on the tab of southeastern citizens whose rates have already begun to skyrocket. These reactor projects cannot get private financing, and cannot proceed without either massive federal subsidies and loan guarantees, or a flood of these state-based give-aways. They also cannot get private insurance against future melt-downs, and have no solution for their radioactive waste problem. Current estimates for finishing the proposed Yucca Mountain national waste repository, also yet to be licensed, are soaring toward $100 billion, even though it, too, may never open.

By contrast, firm costs for proposed wind farms, solar panels, increased efficiency and other green sources are proven and reliable. These projects are easily financed by private investors lining up to become involved. Some $6 billion in new wind farms are under construction or on order in the United States alone. They are established and profitable, and can in many cases can be up and running in less than a year.

The high-profile campaign to paint atomic energy as some kind of answer to America's energy problems has hit the iceberg of its economic impossibilities. The atomic "renaissance" has no tangible approved design, and no firm construction or operating costs to present. There are no reliable new reactor construction schedules, except to know that it will be at least ten years before the first one could conceivably come on line, and that its price tag is unknowable.

In short, the "nuclear renaissance" is perched atop a gigantic technical and economic chasm that looms larger every day, and that could soon swallow the entire idea of building more reactors.

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Harvey Wasserman, a co-founder of Musicians United for Safe Energy, is editing the nukefree.org web site. He is the author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 www.solartopia.org. He can be reached at windhw@aol.com

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