The world's richest 85 people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population

Oxfam has released a report on inequality titled Working for the few: Political capture and economic inequality. In the report they point out the following:

• Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.

• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion.That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.

• The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.

• Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.

• The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.

• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

They also have the following graph:

Australia's housing unaffordability caused by restrictive land use policies

In Unrealised fringe benefits in the housing market Leith van Onselen looks at the 10th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey which again "ranks Australia as having one of the most expensive housing markets out of the countries surveyed".

At the national level, Hong Kong has by far the most unaffordable housing, with a median multiple of 14.9. Australia and New Zealand are tied for second most unaffordable market out of the nations surveyed (both 5.5), followed by Singapore (5.1), United Kingdom (4.9), Japan (4.0), Canada (3.9), United States (3.4), and Ireland (2.8).

All of Australia's 39 markets captured in the survey are ranked as either "Seriously Unaffordable" (14) or "Severely Unaffordable" (25). Australia currently has no housing markets ranked as "Affordable" or "Moderately Unaffordable". The result represents a slight improvement on last year's survey, where 30 markets were ranked as "Severely Unaffordable".

Looking at the major metropolitan areas only - i.e., those with more than 1 million inhabitants - Australia ranks as third most expensive after Hong Kong and New Zealand (Auckland).

Overall, Australia has moved down the league tables, registering 5 out of the 20 most expensive housing markets identified in the Survey, versus eight in last year's survey.

So why are Australian house prices so expensive. The report puts it down to high land prices, which in turn is due to Australia's restrictive land use policies. It's no surprise that locations with more liberal land use regimes have lower prices:

By contrast, affordable housing markets, like Texas and Georgia in the United States, utilise open market-based land use structures whereby plentiful new housing supply is able to be built quickly and cheaply on the urban fringe, thereby preventing rapid house price escalation.

The report claims that less restrictive land use policies also have other benefits:

In addition to lower costly housing costs relative to incomes, lower population densities in liberal markets are associated with less intense traffic congestion and shorter average work trip journey times.

Leith van Onselen concludes with:

So under an open market-based model (provided there are not also substantial physical barriers to housing supply), increased demand, such as from reduced lending standards and easier availability of credit, quickly leads to the building of additional low priced housing on the urban fringe, which helps keep house prices in check and reduces the likelihood of speculative housing bubbles developing. Further, highly leveraged speculators are less likely to be encouraged into open land markets, since there is little prospect of achieving strong capital gains. Investing in open land markets is, instead, more about rental yield.

I will add that restrictive urban planning structures should not be viewed as a one-way bet for house prices, with unresponsive land supply also more likely to result in higher levels of house price volatility and boom/bust price cycles - a fact also acknowledged by Demographia. Why? Because strict land-use policies (planning) steepens the supply curve, which makes house prices more sensitive to changes in demand, increasing the likelihood of the housing market experiencing boom/bust price cycles as demand rises/falls.

Why global warming is causing cold weather

In Why the Arctic Is Drunk Right Now Chris Mooney explains how the warming of the Arctic is impacting on the jet stream. This in turn is bringing spells of extreme hot and cold weather to parts of the northern hemisphere.

In other words, we're experiencing record-breaking cold temperatures because a wavy and elongated jet stream has allowed frigid Arctic air to travel much farther south than usual.

The article has an embedded  flash video by Jennifer Francis explaining the issue. The article also has a link to A Rough Guide to the Jet Stream: what it is, how it works and how it is responding to enhanced Arctic warming by James Mason.

Maybe Japan's ageing population isn't such a problem after all

Fred Pearce writes that Japan's ageing population could actually be good news.

America's inefficient health care system

In The Myth of Health Care's Free Market David Cay Johnston looks at the US health care system and makes some interesting points.

• The health care system in the US has all the hallmarks of an inefficient market.
• It's the most expensive in the developed world.
• Medicare, the US Government run single payer system for the elderly is much cheaper and more efficient than the system for those under 65. To quote the article: "If everyone in the U.S. was on Medicare, the savings would move the federal budget from deficit to surplus."
• The US spends 17.6% of its economy on health care compared to 11.5% in Canada, France and Germany.
• 48 million Americans had no health insurance in 2012. Another 30 million were only covered for part of the year.

Vaccinate your kids for their sake

Amy Parker in Growing Up Unvaccinated discusses all the childhood illnesses she suffered through because she was not vaccinated by her parents. She makes some great points:

Anecdotal evidence is nothing to base decisions on. But when facts and evidence-based science aren’t good enough to sway someone’s opinion, then this is where I come from. After all, anecdotes are the anti-vaccine supporter’s way. Well, this is my personal experience. And my personal experience prompts me to vaccinate my children and myself. I got the flu vaccine recently, and I am getting the whooping cough booster to protect my unborn baby. My natural immunity from having whooping cough at age 5 will not protect him once he’s born.

I understand, to a point, where the anti-vaccine parents are coming from. Back in the 90s when I was a concerned, 19-year-old mother, frightened by the world I was bringing my child into, I was studying homeopathy, herbalism and aromatherapy; I believed in angels, witchcraft, clairvoyants, crop circles, aliens at Nazca, giant ginger mariners spreading their knowledge to the Aztecs, the Incas and the Egyptians and that I was somehow personally blessed by the Holy Spirit with healing abilities. I was having my aura read at a hefty price and filtering the fluoride out of my water. I was choosing to have past life regressions instead of taking anti-depressants. I was taking my daily advice from tarot cards. I grew all my own veg and made my own herbal remedies. I was so freaking crunchy that I literally crumbled. It was only when I took control of those paranoid thoughts and fears about the world around me and became an objective critical thinker that I got well. It was when I stopped taking sugar pills for everything and started seeing medical professionals that I began to thrive physically and mentally.

If you think your child’s immune system is strong enough to fight off vaccine-preventable diseases, then it’s strong enough to fight off the tiny amounts of dead or weakened pathogens present in any of the vaccines.

Australia's fiscal deficit has been a long time coming

Ross Gittins in Blame for budget woe widely shared makes the point that our structural deficit is the result of policies of the Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Abbott Governments:

With Hockey busily shifting all the blame for this daunting outlook onto Labor, it's worth examining its political antecedents. Since we've known we had a long-term ''fiscal gap'' problem at least since the first intergenerational report of 2002, the blame for making things worse must be shared not just by the former Labor government, but also by the Howard government and even the Abbott government.

The Howard government probably did most to add to the existing problem by the way it frittered away the proceeds of the first phase of the resources boom, which it treated as a permanent rather than temporary boost in tax collections.

Pick 2 out of 3: Cheap housing, low density housing, no urban sprawl

In When you buy a house, you shouldn't buy the neighbourhood with it Matt Cowgill looks at the rising cost of housing and makes the point:

I think we've tipped the scales too far in favour of those who want to restrict development. The consequence of this is that housing is more expensive than it otherwise would be. That's fine for people who already own their own home, but it hurts the young and the poor.

There's a trade-off at play here, one that can't be wished away or ignored. With a growing population, you can't restrict rising density in established suburbs, prevent sprawl on the urban fringes, and prevent housing from being unaffordable. Pick two out of the three. The urge to preserve historic neighbourhoods, the desire the conserve all the green bits around our cities, and the wish to maintain affordable housing are all noble impulses with which I sympathise. But, again, we can't have them all.

If you stop density from rising in the inner city, you push people further out to the fringes. If you try and stop this sprawl, prices will soar. People will spend longer living at home or in share houses than they’d like, and we'll suffer through more of those tiresome pieces in newspaper lifestyle supplements speculating about the deep cultural cause of this allegedly dysfunctional generation's protracted adolescence.

Could higher unemployment be helping corporate profits?

Paul Krugman in The Fear Economy writes:

The economic recovery has, as I said, been weak and inadequate, but all the burden of that weakness is being borne by workers. Corporate profits plunged during the financial crisis, but quickly bounced back, and they continued to soar. Indeed, at this point, after-tax profits are more than 60 percent higher than they were in 2007, before the recession began. We don’t know how much of this profit surge can be explained by the fear factor — the ability to squeeze workers who know that they have no place to go. But it must be at least part of the explanation. In fact, it’s possible (although by no means certain) that corporate interests are actually doing better in a somewhat depressed economy than they would if we had full employment.

What’s more, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that this reality helps explain why our political system has turned its backs on the unemployed. No, I don’t believe that there’s a secret cabal of C.E.O.’s plotting to keep the economy weak. But I do think that a major reason why reducing unemployment isn’t a political priority is that the economy may be lousy for workers, but corporate America is doing just fine. 

And

Weak labor markets are a main reason workers are losing ground, and the excessive power of corporations and the wealthy is a main reason we aren’t doing anything about jobs.

Too many Americans currently live in a climate of economic fear. There are many steps that we can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to put jobs back on the agenda.

Solving homelessness might be cheaper than doing nothing

Jenny Shank in Utah Is on Track to End Homelessness by 2015 With This One Simple Idea writes:

Utah has reduced its rate of chronic homelessness by 78 percent over the past eight years, moving 2000 people off the street and putting the state on track to eradicate homelessness altogether by 2015. How’d they do it? The state is giving away apartments, no strings attached. In 2005, Utah calculated the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail stays for an average homeless person was $16,670, while the cost of providing an apartment and social worker would be $11,000. Each participant works with a caseworker to become self-sufficient, but if they fail, they still get to keep their apartment.

Solve congestion with more roads, rather than more public transport?

Brian Lee Crowley in Sick of congestion? Build roads, not transit notes that cities that invest in roads rather than public transport have less congestion and lower travel times.

This relationship between density and travel times is another counterintuitive puzzler for those who believe cars and roads are the problem, rather than the solution to transit woes. How easy it is to assume that travel times must be shorter where cities are dense and people therefore have shorter distances to travel to work.

What the real world shows us, though, is that when urban population density is lower, and jobs widely dispersed rather than concentrated in a city centre, commuter traffic is more widely scattered on the road network, lowering commuting times. This is a real challenge for the advocates of heavy investment in subways and light rail, which are reliant on commuting patterns focused on a hub-and-spoke model bringing workers downtown along densely developed transit corridors.

I think things are more complicated than that. There are also environmental and social costs associated with greater urban sprawl. Lower population densities lower the economic efficiency of public transport, while higher population densities will by itself increase congestion. It's also much easier to build or expand a new road in environments were there's little or no urban development - imagine trying to build a six lane freeway in the middle of Manhatten.

Higher tax paying companies appear to create more jobs

Laura Clawson in Lower corporate taxes don't mean more jobs has this interesting graph:

It appears that companies, at least in the USA, that pay higher taxes are also more likely to create more jobs. Some might argue this might be because large companies pay more taxes and employ more people than smaller companies. However looking at the graph, the "tax-shirking job-shedders" had larger profits.

Clawson makes the point:

If corporations paid 35 percent of their $1.8 trillion in 2012 profits as taxes, that would have accounted for $630 billion in revenue. Instead, large corporations paid less than 13 percent in taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office, and total corporate taxes came to just $242 billion. If even half of that gap was filled, the American economic picture would look a lot brighter.

Australia's future isn't looking so rosy

David Llewellyn-Smith writes in Australian entitlement is in for a great shock that the Australian economy is bloated and uncompetitive and we have a reckoning on the way.

We have, in short, done absolutely nothing to prepare for what is coming. We have pretended it's not happening in the hope that something will come along.

None of this is new but I wish to make two points today. First, this week has shown that despite our denial, the adjustment is accelerating. Throughout the last three years, MacroBusiness has argued that we face a long and arduous period of below trend growth because of our multiple adjustments. And so it has proven to be.

Despite a brief spike in growth in 2011/12, the post-GFC period has been the lowest average growth period anyone can remember. We are now growing more slowly than the supposedly broken United States. This week's national accounts illustrated why very clearly. The terms of trade correction which is central to the adjustment is pulling down national income.

RIP Nelson Mandela

Mediocre people seek power through division. Great men like Mandela bring a nation together.

Annabel Crabb posted this wonderful Mandela quote on Twitter this morning:

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

Rest in peace Madiba. The world is a poorer place for your passing.

A week's meals for $17

Jack Monroe, the author of the A Girl Call Jack blog has achieved success developing really cheap meals. Check our her food and recipes archive. Daily Life had an article on her: Feeding your family for $17 a week.

Why you need to tip in America

Chelsea Welch on why you should leave a tip in American restaurants -Tips are not optional, they are how waiters get paid in America:

We make $3.50 an hour. Most of my paychecks are less than pocket change because I have to pay taxes on the tips I make.

After sharing my tips with hosts, bussers, and bartenders, I make less than $9 an hour on average, before taxes. I am expected to skip bathroom breaks if we are busy. I go hungry all day if I have several busy tables to work. I am expected to work until 1:30am and then come in again at 10:30am to open the restaurant.

I have worked 12-hour double shifts without a chance to even sit down. I am expected to portray a canned personality that has been found to be least offensive to the greatest amount of people. And I am expected to do all of this, every day, and receive change, or even nothing, in return. After all that, I can be fired for "embarrassing" someone, who directly insults his or her server on religious grounds.

In this economy, $3.50 an hour doesn't cut it. I can't pay half my bills. Like many, I would love to see a reasonable, non-tip-dependent wage system for service workers like they have in other countries. But the system being flawed is not an excuse for not paying for services rendered.

I need tips to pay my bills. All waiters do. We spend an hour or more of our time befriending you, making you laugh, getting to know you, and making your dining experience the best it can be. We work hard. We care. We deserve to be paid for that.

As an Australian the idea of regularly tipping is quite foreign. The American system stinks. It's something I have never understood when visiting the USA. However, the world is what it is. When visiting the USA we need to remember to tip, people's livelihoods depend on it.

Low carbohydrate diet for those with type 1 diabetes

Dr Norman Swan interviewed Dr Troy Stapleton on the benefits of a Low carbohydrate diet to manage type I diabetes:

This is the personal story of Dr Troy Stapleton, who developed type I diabetes at the age of 41. In the beginning of his disease he followed the standard dietary advice for diabetics to consume up to 250g of carbohydrates per day and then balance this with insulin injections. However, after extensive research he decided to go on a very low carbohydrate diet, which has improved his life quite dramatically.

It's an interesting interview. I would recommend people consult their doctor before acting on any of the information in this interview. I'm certainly not qualified to offer medical advice, or to make any recommendations.

"How 'Skeptics' View Artic Sea Ice Decline"

An interesting interactive graph tweeted by Peter Martin @1petermartin. The original can be found at http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/countyfair/arcticescalator2012.gif

Comments on Antartic sea ice

I found some interesting comments over on The Poll Bludger blog. "PeeBee" wrote the following in comment 310:

If the Southern Ocean is warming, why is sea ice increasing? There are several contributing factors. One is the drop in ozone levels over Antarctica. The hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole has caused cooling in the stratosphere (Gillet 2003). A side-effect is a strengthening of the cyclonic winds that circle the Antarctic continent (Thompson 2002). The wind pushes sea ice around, creating areas of open water known as polynyas. More polynyas leads to increased sea ice production (Turner 2009).

Another contributor is changes in ocean circulation. The Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters, leading to a surface layer less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted (Zhang 2007).

Amazing isn’t it?

"PeeBee" also wrote in comment 317:

There is a trend for sea ice around Antarctica to be increasing in extent, though this is not of the same order of magnitude as what is going on in the Arctic. It certainly doesn’t mean they somehow balance out and everything is fine, we can keep on emitting carbon. Most of the ice in Antarctica is in fact on land, and the volume of that ice is decreasing. If you look at all of the data rather than isolate selective facts, the overall picture is something everyone should be concerned about.

"imacca" wrote in comment 359:

Always amuses me how some among the Grumpy True Disbeliever demographic have issues understanding that the dynamics of sea ice formation may be different between the Arctic and Antarctic.

One has a thin layer of ice over an pretty well contained deep sea. The other has a layer of ice around a large continent surrounded by a circulating ocean that is generally covered in a layer of ice up to 3km thick. But they should both behave the same Wot??

Tow back not working in the US and won't work here

The Coalition have been citing the US practice of "turning back" boats as justification for their turn back policy. In an opinion piece, Abbott's copycat tow-back plan won't stop the boats, Azadeh Dastyari explains that the US policy breaks international law and doesn't work.

Finally, as the Coalition has itself acknowledged, the US practice of trying to stop sea vessels has been going on for more than 30 years. Had the boats stopped as a result of the policy, the US would not need to continue this costly practice. After more than 30 years of ''tow back'', the US is no closer to stopping people from taking to the sea in an attempt to enter the country. Nor has the practice of ''tow back'' prevented thousands of people from reaching the US every year. In other words, the US practice has not achieved what the Coalition hopes to achieve. There is nothing to indicate the Coalition would have any more success at stopping the boats than does the US government.

What the US experience has shown is that there is no quick and easy solution to the problem of asylum seekers who are escaping persecution. A bad copy of a ''tow back'' policy that has not worked and is unlawful in the US context, is not going to be the silver bullet the Coalition is looking for.