“They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility… a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade… has monsters half so horrible and dread. Scrooge started back, appalled.”
The reader is appalled too. Nothing in the tedious sentimentality of A Christmas Carol prepares you for Dickens’ sudden, shocking denunciation of child poverty, personified as a boy called Ignorance and girl called Want.
Dickens was writing from personal experience. He went to work in a factory making shoe polish when he was 12, after his father was jailed for debt (the rest of the family joined him, apart from Charles). Here, and later as a reporter, he saw the conditions we sometimes still refer to as “Dickensian”.
What about today? According to UNICEF, an estimated 158 million children aged 5-14 are engaged in child labour – one in six children in the world. Often they are exposed to dangerous chemicals and machinery, and various forms of physical and psychological abuse.
Children in rural areas and girls are the worst off, especially girls working as servants.
Lack of education helps condemn children to poverty. Dickens even saw it as the worse of the two conditions, with the Ghost warning Scrooge “…most of all beware this boy [Ignorance], for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
Erasing that writing is the second of the UN Millennium Goals “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling”.
However, according to the latest UN update (from 2008, before the recession) 58 out of the 86 countries that have not yet reached universal primary education will not achieve it by 2015. And as for child labour, the children most likely to drop out of school or to not attend at all are girls, those from poorer households or children living in rural areas.
Almost all of these children are in developing countries, but UNICEF also looks at the well-being of children in 21 OECD countries (not enough comparable data is available to include the others).
The countries are ranked according to six dimensions: material well-being; health and safety; education; peer and family relationships; behaviours and risks; and young people’s own subjective sense of well-being, giving a total of 40 separate indicators.
The Netherlands heads the table of overall child wellbeing, ranking in the top 10 for all dimensions. However, no country features in the top third of the rankings for all six dimensions (though the Netherlands and Sweden come close).
Research featured on yesterday’s OECD Factblog suggests that child poverty is increasing in OECD countries, but isn’t receiving the policy attention it deserves. We’ve moved on from the days when Scrooge could point out that there were prisons and workhouses to tackle the problem of poverty, but with a combined GDP of forty trillion dollars for the OECD countries, we could do much better.
Useful links
Growing Unequal: Income distribution and poverty in OECD countries
Society at a glance 2009 contains data on poverty among children
A Christmas Carol e-text
It’s hard to overstate the importance of teachers. Strip away the other things that determine how well students do – such as social background and individual capacity – and you’re pretty much left with teaching as the major factor that can be shaped by education policy.
Unfortunately, in the past teachers were often thought of in terms of quantity not quality – it didn’t matter what they were like so long as you had enough of them. That attitude is changing. In part that’s a response to student assessments like the OECD’s PISA . It has shown that differences in how well students do are often greater within schools than between schools. In the U.S., research suggests students with the strongest teachers can be a full year ahead of those learning under the weakest teachers.
But what makes a teacher good? Two recent articles offer some interesting ideas. In The New York Times, Elizabeth Green reports on a couple of interesting approaches, including the Lemov Taxonomy. This emphasises the need for teachers to capture students’ attention and then get them to follow instructions. That may sound like a call for a return to old-style classroom discipline, but in fact it mostly comes down to better classroom management and simple techniques.
An example: When Doug Lemov, creator of the taxonomy, was carrying out his research, “he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. ‘Stand still when you’re giving directions,’ a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.”
In The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley reports on Teach for America , a non-profit organisation that hires college graduates for two years to teach in poorer neighbourhoods. With more than 7,000 teachers on its books, the group has a large pool of research to work from. It has come up with a number of findings on what makes teachers effective. Firstly, it found they were ambitious – they set big goals for their students and constantly reexamined their own approaches to try to make them better.
Strong teachers shared four other tendencies, adds Ripley: “They avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully – for the next day or the year ahead – by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”
Useful links
OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)
OECD work on attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers
OECD work on evaluating and rewarding teachers
educationtoday – including the OECD education blog
Last night’s news carried a story on the status of women in the workplace today. The teaser promised to inform us on France’s relative progress on pay differentials, discrimination and harassment.
My 13 year old son piped up in disbelief, “That’s not true anymore…Maybe it used to be, but women are treated just the same as men now.”
I pause to think of an age-appropriate explanation of ”the treatment of women” – on the history of women’s rights, the progress made and the confounding barriers that remain.
Trying to explore the meaning of equity and equality is actually a great way to put the issue in perspective. In the developed world, women are present in most fields (and have begun to outnumber men in higher education). Still, they lag behind in average pay – and what more concrete measure is there than compensation?
The latest data show that across the OECD, men’s median earnings are on average about 18% higher than women’s. In some countries the difference is as much as 30%. We may appear to be on equal footing – projecting an image of strength and success to our children – but the figures tell a different story…
Useful links:
HIV/AIDS is now the leading cause of death and disease among women of reproductive age (15-49 years) worldwide. That’s the stark message coming from UNAIDS as it launches the Agenda for Accelerated Country Action for Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV.
Violence against women and girls is the key driver of the epidemic. The risk of HIV among women who have experienced violence, or fear they might experience it, may be up to three times higher than among those who have not. These women are less likely to have safe sex, go for HIV testing, share their HIV status and get treatment.
Their inferior social status puts women and girls at risk too.
The infection rate among young women (15-24 years) is three times higher than that of young men in some countries where men are encouraged to have more than one sexual partner and it is common for older men to have sexual relations with much younger women.
When they do get infected, women are likely to face barriers in accessing HIV prevention, treatment and care services because benefiting from services often requires time, money and the possibility to travel that men are not prepared to grant.
Women and girls can find themselves in a double bind. They have to stay at home to look after the family, including HIV/AIDS victims, thereby limiting their chances of earning money and increasing their autonomy.
The death of a partner, whatever the cause, means that many women lose everything and have to adopt what UNAIDS euphemistically calls “survival strategies that increase their chances of contracting and spreading HIV”.
The United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, is more direct: “Driven by poverty and the desire for a better life, many women and girls find themselves using sex as a commodity in exchange for goods, services, money, accommodation, or other basic necessities.”
Lack of education is also responsible.
The cheapest way to inform people about HIV prevention is through written material such as posters and leaflets. Illiterate women can’t take advantage of this information, which is one reason why they are four times more likely to believe there is no way to prevent HIV infection.
Useful links
WHO site on gender inequality and HIV
Women and health : today’s evidence tomorrow’s agenda a new WHO report reviewing evidence on the health issues that particularly affect girls and women throughout their life
The Global Coalition on Women and AIDS
The Finnish government analysed HIV/AIDS related strategies and key interventions of 25 development partners funding the HIV/AIDS related activities
OECD statistics on aid to HIV/AIDS control in official development assistance programmes
Wikigender was initiated by the OECD Development Centre to improve knowledge on gender equality-related issues around the world and facilitate information exchange
A hard-hitting report from the United States warns of a second Great Depression unless urgent action is taken to fix the financial system in the U.S. and G20 countries. It argues that the economic system is in the grip of a “doomsday cycle”: Banks behave recklessly during the boom part of the cycle, confident in the knowledge that during the bust “they can walk away and let the state clean up”.
Despite the damage caused by the crisis, nothing has changed to alter financial institutions’ attitudes to risk, claim the authors: “It is now obvious that risk-taking at banks will soon be larger than ever. […] nothing has changed to make us believe the regulatory system will succeed this time, when it has failed so enormously – and repeatedly – in the recent past. To bring about the dramatic change that is needed also requires international cooperation and consistency.”
The report sets out its own fresh ideas for regulating financial markets, and places special emphasis on the need to make banks and their shareholders pay the price of their mistakes. The proposals, says the report, would “serve to prevent, detect, and credibly resolve financial crises. Making markets work as a system is the focus — emphasizing transparency, competition, and the important discipline of failure.”
The report, Make Markets be Markets, was written by a number of contributors, including Dr. Robert Johnson , who serves on the UN commission of experts on financial reform, and Prof. Elizabeth Warren, who chaired the congressional oversight panel on the U.S. crisis bailout. Its findings are being discussed at a conference organised by the Roosevelt Institute in New York today (Wednesday March 3).
Useful links
OECD Policy Framework for Effective and Efficient Financial Regulation
The OECD’s Adrian Blundell-Wignall discusses U.S. proposals for bank reform
Where does dirt comes from? As for “Why is the sky blue?”, “How does grass grow?” and of course the one about babies, the most popular reply is “Ask your father/mother, can’t you see I’m busy?”
So where does dirt come from? The answer is a combination of geological, chemical and biological processes, with bugs of various sizes, from bacteria to insects and worms playing a vital role. By decomposing plants they produce CO2 and help to dissolve minerals. They extract nitrogen from the air and transfer it to plants. They help to aerate the soil by burrowing.
In the first study of its kind, the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology has estimated how many organisms there are in Britain’s soil. They reckon there are 12.8 quadrillion organisms (that’s 12,800 million million) in the top 3 inches (8 cm), the layer where most species are found, weighing 10 million tons.
The researchers found two main trends. First, numbers have increased by almost 50% in a decade, but biodiversity declined by 11%. They think this may be due to increases in temperature and rainfall. Warmer, wetter soil means many species can breed more quickly, but species that fail to adapt disappear.
They’re not sure what this means in terms of the soil’s resilience to pressures from climate, pollution and farming or other land use practices. There is a large degree of redundancy in the organisms’ contribution to the ecosystem, with many species capable of carrying out the same function. More data are needed to see whether the result really does reveal a trend or whether it is due to the particular conditions in the years when the sampling was done.
However, as the report notes: “The activities of the soil biota are critical for the provision of many important soil functions and resulting ecosystem services. These include… acting as a biodiversity pool from which future novel applications and products can be derived.”
Useful links
Sustainable agriculture at the OECD
What if re-building devastated cities won’t protect them from future catastrophes? Can a city be condemned? Guest author Professor John Mutter discusses the issue here.
Old MacDonald had a farm, but what will Young MacDonald have?
A fine life as he or she adapts the old man’s farm to new markets and growing demand for rural amenities?
A barren field poisoned by overuse of chemicals?
Constant worry climate change will provoke drought or flooding or bring a new pest?
An enviable bank balance after selling the farm to a real estate developer?
A thriving business supplying feedstock to the local biofuels refinery?
The satisfaction of supplying high-quality organic produce?
Take the poll and tell us what you think the main issue for agriculture will be over the coming decades. You can choose more than one answer.
Agriculture ministers from OECD and non-OECD countries are meeting in Paris on 25-26 February. You can find meeting documents and information here.
By way of introduction …
In Macon City, Iowa, the McMillans are coping with some new realities. In late 2008, Dennis lost his job as a saw operator after almost 15 years with the same company. “It was October 30,” the 61-year-old told the Globe Gazette newspaper. “Some dates you never forget.” Eight months later it was his wife’s turn: After working for 20 years in a hospital, Melody was let go. Today, she’s still looking for work: “I really thought I’d get a position. But I’m overqualified for some jobs because of being a specialist and underqualified for other jobs …”
In Dublin, Kelly Lynch is coming to terms with the sudden death of the “Celtic Tiger” – the booming economy that transformed Irish expectations. “Our generation never experienced anything but the Celtic Tiger. We heard about the [recession of the] 1980s, but it was all just whispers and ghost stories. Now it’s come back and, yeah, it’s a bit of a shock,” the 24-year-old told The Irish Times.
In Bangkok, Witaya Rakswong is learning to live on less. He used to work as a sous chef in a luxury hotel in Thailand. Then he worked in a bar in Bangkok until its customers stopped coming. Now he’s cooking in a cafe on the outskirts of the Thai capital, earning 60% of his hotel salary. “If you spend it wisely, you’d be able to get by,” the 37-year-old told World Bank researchers. “Getting by” has meant cutting his mother’s allowance by a fifth. “It hurts everybody,” he said. “Even if you’re not laid off, you’re still affected by the crisis, because you’re stuck with more work to do for the same or less money. It stresses me out sometimes … ”
Different stories, different cities, but all united by one thing: The recession. After the financial crisis of 2008 came an economic downturn that saw world GDP fall by an estimated 2.2% in 2009 – the first contraction in the global economy since 1945. Even more striking was how it hit so many of the world’s economies. While the extent to which economies slowed varied, most suffered some sort of setback, making this truly a global crisis, perhaps the first of its kind.
► This chapter looks first at some of the routes the recession took through economies and then at its global reach: The recession may have its roots in the financial centres of developed countries, but its impact stretched far beyond to include emerging and developing countries. Finally, we’ll look at how governments moved to tackle the crisis.
You can’t expect the public to stay interested in hunger for more than about 40 days. That’s what experience had taught the impresario in Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist. Getting the media along and a couple of pretty girls to hold the starving man’s hand helps to get attention of course, but the fact is, after a while, people lose interest completely.
Kafka’s short story has sinister echoes today, except that 40 days is far longer than any story stays on the front page now. The last time hunger hit the headlines was in 2007-2008, with food riots in a number of countries because of sudden price rises.
Prices have since fallen, but the benefit was wiped out for millions of people by the crisis, and the number of hungry people in the world grew from around 850 million before the food crisis and recession to a billion today.
There is no such thing as an apolitical food problem
There are fears that hunger will never be eradicated and that the situation will continue to get worse, with demand for food commodities accelerating while the increase in per capita food supply slows.
It’s true that several factors are combining to boost demand.
For a start, there’s the mechanical effect of population growth. Output will have to double over the next 40 years to feed a world population of 9 billion in 2050.
Added to that, although there will be crises and recessions in the future, the trend is for the world to get richer, and for more people to adopt Western-style diets rich in meat, dairy and other foodstuffs that demand higher inputs than diets based on cereals or tubers.
Food production is facing competition for land from other uses, including biofuels.
Finally, environmental pressures on agriculture are growing, with climate change introducing a number of uncertainties, and expected to have the worst impacts on countries least able to cope.
Yet, when you look at the facts, there is no “agricultural” reason for hunger today. Global food production has increased more quickly than population over the past half century, and the EU and USA even had to bring in policies to get rid of “mountains” and “lakes” of food and drink.
If people are hungry, it’s because they can’t afford to buy food, not that there is no food to buy. There are many reasons for this. Politics, policies and poverty all intertwine, and as Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen said “There is no such thing as an apolitical food problem.”
Useful links
Food security is one of the issues on the agenda at this week’s meeting of agriculture ministers at the OECD. You can find a background note prepared for ministers on markets and food security here.
