Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Oxfam


Liberalism is not about finding all life’s meaning in a shopping list, it just says that we need more meaning than can be found in a ballot paper. And that those who seek the meaning of life in collective projects that they try to enforce on everybody else have less of a sense of the beautiful richness and diversity of human nature than the alleged cold and robotic market liberals.--norberg

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Since 2020, there have been about 500 encounters between orcas and boats, Alfredo López Fernandez, a coauthor of a 2022 study in the journal Marine Mammal Science, told NPR. At least three boats have sunk, though there is no record of an orca killing a human in the wild.

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Oxfam

Oxfam is a British-founded confederation of 21 independent charitable organizations focusing on the alleviation of global poverty, founded in 1942 and led by Oxfam International.

You wouldn’t learn it from Oxfam, but the global Gini coefficient measuring inequality has fallen from 92 to 88 since 2000. The top 1% saw their share of global income cut from 49% to 44.5%.

More important, the world’s poorest five billion have become significantly richer. The Oxfam report makes it seem as if things have gotten much worse for the poor since the pandemic. Oxfam makes this claim five times in its report, but never says by how much. It turns out that the poor’s share of global wealth—as measured by assets minus debts—declined by 0.2%, a figure so small that it is within the margin of error.

Something else you won’t find in the Oxfam report: Global poverty is now at its lowest level ever recorded—8.6%, down from 29% in 2000.

Not sure what these numbers truly mean but it is interesting that the numbers the organization takes seriously are better and the organization itself tries to minimize that.

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