Weekly Picks – January 7, 2024
This week’s collection:
- The False Link Between Climate Change and Mass Migration
- Why is Gaza so central to the Palestinian Struggle?
- How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons
- Welcome to Canada’s New Gilded Age
- Greenwashing Oil
- Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
1. The False Link Between Climate Change and Mass Migration
“We are told that rising sea levels are forcing more and more people to relocate—the world’s first climate refugees. Experts have claimed that a series of devastating climate change-related hurricanes in Central America have spurred migration to the United States, and that protracted droughts are forcing more and more Africans onto boats in desperate attempts to reach Europe. From this viewpoint, countering climate change by reducing carbon emissions is the only way to prevent a human tide of climate refugees from overwhelming Western countries.
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Global warming is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity. However, to link this issue with the specter of mass migration is a dangerous and misleading practice based on myth rather than fact.
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The idea that climate change will lead to mass migration is based on popular ‘push-pull’ models that naively assume that migration is somehow a linear function of poverty, violence and other forms of human misery. However, migration requires considerable resources, particularly long-distance migration from rural areas to cities or abroad. Extreme poverty—whether caused by environmental stress or other factors—actually tends to deprive vulnerable people of the means to travel and migrate over large distances, and they might therefore find themselves trapped where they are, unable to flee.”
2. Why is Gaza so central to the Palestinian struggle?
“How has such a small piece of territory — comprising less than 1.5 percent of historic Palestine, and smaller than most U.S. cities — become the focal point of a major national, regional, and global struggle?
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Over the last 75 years, Gaza has continually been at the epicenter of Palestinian-Israeli history. All the major themes of the Palestinian struggle — dispossession, occupation, uprising, autonomy, and militancy — are encapsulated in this coastal enclave. Tracing the Strip’s history through these milestones can therefore illuminate the present moment and help explain the background to the current crisis.”
3. How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons
“It’s one of the most famous experiments in psychology. Back in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment on inattentional blindness. They asked test subjects to watch a short video in which six people—half in white T-shirts, half in black ones—passed basketballs around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the players and thumped their chest at the camera before strolling off-screen. What surprised the researchers was that fully half the test subjects were so busy counting the number of basketball passes that they never saw the gorilla.
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Thirteen years later, the two psychologists are back with their latest book, published last July, called Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. Simons and Chabris have penned an entertaining examination of key habits of thinking that usually serve us well but also make us vulnerable to cons and scams. They also offer some practical tools based on cognitive science to help us spot deceptions before being taken in.”
4. Welcome to Canada’s New Gilded Age
“In a new report, the [CCPA] finds that 2022 was a smashing success for CEOs, who broke records with an average annual pay of $14.9 million — a surge of $600,000 above their 2021 remuneration.
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The average CEO salary shakes out to 246 times the earnings of the average worker, which means that by the morning of January 2, chief executives had earned as much as one of their workers does in a year.
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Workers, on the other hand, saw a 3 percent pay bump, translating to a meager $1,800 for the year. When put against the inflation rate, this essentially means they took a hefty pay cut, compromising their ability to meet basic needs such as food and housing and transportation.
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When the powerful set the rules, they set them to benefit their class. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
An additional video that contextualizes the report’s findings:
“Sustainable investing was once a niche. Ethical investors played a modest role in the abolition of slavery: they refused to make money from industries that employed slave labour. A small group of European and US investors turned their backs on Shell late last century because the Dutch-British company was active in apartheid-torn South Africa.
Then impact funds were created, focussing on investments with a positive social impact instead of excluding companies.
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Since the turn of the century, there has been a steady growth in the number of investment funds that claim to invest their clients’ money sustainably.
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The breakthrough came in 2015. That year, the Paris Climate Agreement was concluded, the United Nations set the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Pope Francis called upon humanity in the encyclical Laudato Si’ to be frugal with the Creation. Investors responded. They are no longer merely concerned with financial returns: more and more, they want to help create a better world through their investments.
The financial industry answered that call. In Europe, roughly 100 new funds labelling themselves as sustainable were set up that year; currently, around 100 are added every quarter. According to financial services provider Morningstar, 50 percent of all the money in European investment funds is presently labelled as ‘sustainable’. This amounts to over 4.18 trillion euros, an amount comparable to the market capitalisation of Alphabet, ASML, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Pfizer, Samsung, Shell, Toyota, Walt Disney, and Walmart combined.
That’s a lot of money. But where does it actually end up?”
6. Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic
“In normal times, the United States stands out among advanced democracies for its high levels of poverty and its low levels of aid. In 2019, right before Covid struck, America’s relative child poverty rate resembled that of Mexico or Bulgaria. Then, during the pandemic, the federal government enacted three enormous and historic relief bills. These reduced child poverty by an astonishing 57.5 percent, more than doubling the government’s typical impact and suddenly placing the United States alongside Germany and Switzerland on this score. For a moment we had a different country, one with a European-style welfare state (which is to say, large) and European-style levels of poverty (which is to say, low).
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“How could so much good,” Fulford asks, “come out of a pandemic that killed more than a million of us?” And how, we must ask today, having done so much good, having designed and deployed social policies that made a profound difference in the lives of millions of Americans, could we have let it all slip away?”