Witnesses to the riots in Salford, Greater Manchester, and Hackney, east London, tell Shiv Malik what happened this week and speak of their anger at a lack of job prospects.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/audio/2011/aug/12/salford-hackney-riots-audio
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Salford and Hackney riots: ‘We don’t want trouble. We want a job’ - audio | UK news | guardian.co.uk
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Junot Diaz On What Disasters Reveal
The Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz got everybody’s attention, and a Pulitzer Prize, with his fierce, funny, tragic first novel “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Now, in a big new essay, Diaz has moved on to bigger themes — like apocalypse and the fate of the human race.
Junot Diaz looks at our recent headlines of earthquakes, tsunamis, meltdown fears, and floods and sees revelation. Not of the hand of God, exactly. But of human realities running amok.
We avert our eyes, he says. But these disasters must be read.
This hour, On Point: Junot Diaz, on revelation and apocalypse.
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Public Lectures and Events: The Haves and Have Nots
This event was recorded on 8 February 2011 in Old Theatre, Old Building.
Inequality is a surprisingly slippery issue, involving not just straightforward comparisons of individuals, but also comparisons of price and consumption differences around the world – and over time. In this lecture Branko Milanovic, the lead economist at the World Bank’s research division, will approach the issue in a new and innovative way, focusing on inequality in income and wealth in different time periods and contexts: from inequality in Roman times (and how it compared with inequality today), to depictions of wealth inequality in literature (Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina), to inequality across generations of a single family (the three generations of Obamas illustrating this theme). As for global inequality today, the talk will examine its main cause (differences in average incomes between countries), the role China and India might play, and, perhaps most importantly, whether global inequality matters at all, and if does, what can we do to reduce it. Branko Milanovic is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality. He is lead economist at the World Bank’s research division in Washington DC, a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and the author of The Haves and Have Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm
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Public Lectures and Events: Income Distribution and Social Change after 50 years
This event was recorded on 1 March 2011 in Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House.
Fifty years ago, it was believed that income inequality was falling and that poverty had largely been eliminated. This lecture returns to Richard Titmuss’ masterly crossexamination of the evidence about income inequality and argues that we have much to learn, but also to add. Tony Atkinson is the centennial professor at LSE. His most recent book is Top Incomes: a global perspective.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm
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Favelas, AfroReggae & Brazil
Brazil’s musical group AfroReggae was born of the streets of Rio de Janiero’s hard-life shanytowns, or favelas.
Now, AfroReggae is trying to give back — to give inspiration, hope, pride and a path to youth surrounded by too much violence, drugs, and poverty.
It’s culture versus violence in the tough streets of Rio. We hear AfroReggae and explore Rio’s favelas.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/12/favelas-afroreggae-brazil
Tagged with book:author=damian platt music favelas brazil poverty crime culture money afroreggae
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Mondo Diablo Episode 286: This Christmas has Been Brought to You by Child Labor
This week, the Krampus and his workers, Knecht Ruprecht, Krampus, Hans Trapp, Zwarte Piet, Klaubauf, Muff, Butz, Pere Fouettard and Belsnickel, bring you the last in the series of Worst Jobs podcasts. This time it’s children making dolls for children, gos-herding and turkey dressing. As in, yanking the guts out of hundreds or maybe thousands of fresh turkeys, by hand, in time for Christmas.
But my own day of judgment is at hand (did you know that the Visit from Saint Nicholas could be considered a mini "day of judgment" for children? It’s true)! I will be presenting, tomorrow night, a small amount of information about Christmas political history, characters and pagan traditions that have come all the way to us. We will also have a nice atheist Christmas party. Now THAT’S how freethinkers have a Christmas party. With a lecture. Luckily, I have pictures.
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NPR’s Planet Money: When A Dead-End Job Isn’t A Dead End
"How does a guy whose mom is a heroin addict — a guy who drops out of high school, has a kid, and starts working a minimum-wage job at a fast-food restaurant — climb out of poverty?
On today’s Planet Money, we hear the answer from Katherine Newman.
Newman, a sociologist, found 300 people who were working at fast-food restaurants in Harlem in the early ’90s. She followed them for the next eight years and told the story in a book called Chutes and Ladders.
About a third of the people she followed managed to rise out of poverty during that time. A lot, of course, had to do with individual initiative — taking the civil service exam, landing union jobs, that sort of thing."
From http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/19/130678389/the-tuesday-podcast
Tagged with npr planet money in-depth employment poverty wages book explanation
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KQED: Population
There’s a consensus that Earth doesn’t have enough resources to support the world’s growing population — but there’s disagreement about the root of the problem. Some think the problem lies with the growing third world, others that it is the consumption habits of the developed nations that cause the problem.
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Nils Gilman: Deviant Globalization
Nils Gilman describes deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration."
There’s nice tourism, and then sex tourism, such as in Thailand and Switzerland. The vast pharmacology industry is matched by a vast traffic in illegal drugs. The underside of waste disposal is the criminal dumping in the developing world of toxic wastes from the developed world. Military activities worldwide are fed by a huge gray market in weapons. Internet communications are undermined by floods of malware doubling every year. Among the commodities shipped around the world are exotic hardwoods, endangered species, blood diamonds, and stolen art worth billions in ransom. Illegitimate health care includes the provision of human organs from poor people — you can get a new kidney with no waiting for $150,000 in places like Brazil, the Philippines, Istanbul, and South Africa. Far overwhelming legal immigration are torrents of illegal immigrants who pay large sums to get across borders. And money laundering accounts for 4-12% of world GDP — $1.5 to 5 trillion dollars a year.
These are not marginal, "informal" activities. These are enormous, complex businesses straight out of the Harvard Business Review. The drug business in Mexico, for example, employs 400,000 people. A thousand-dollar kilo of cocaine grows in value by 1400-percent when it crosses into the U.S. — nice profit margin there.
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Malcolm Gladwell: Who Is Successful? Why?
Sometimes the way you conduct science has profound impacts on society as a whole. Malcolm Gladwell says the way we look at who is and who isn’t successful is crucial. He says it’s dangerous to think East Africans are good runners because they have an innate gene that makes them fast. Instead, you have to look at cultural attitudes. More people run in Kenya and Ethiopia than in the U.S. Therefore, those countries produce more successful runners. If you were to think if it in terms of genes, well, that’s the same philosophy that gets people thinking African–Americans aren’t as smart as whites. The real reasons behind success rates in professions like medicine and law have to do with class, not genius. Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book is "Outliers: The Story of Success." He also writes for The New Yorker magazine. Gladwell spoke at Town Hall Seattle on January 17, 2009.