Climate Change : data collection

Working groupİİ of the İPCC, Report on climate Change, April 6, points with regret to notable lack of geographic balance in data and literature on observed changes, with marked scarcity in develping countries. A figure in the report reveals that 28,671 significant observed changes in biological systems from around the globe of which the report made use, 28,115 originated from Europe. Just 2 were from Africa. This disparity is all the more alarming because as the report makes clear, it is in Africa and and other parts of the develping world that such data are most sorely needed. The data are needed so that fplicy makers can know what is happening to crops, to river flow, to soil moisture and make appropriate use of the information.

Nature, April 2007

Write to Say

When we learn to think, we develop understanding and commitment to quality in every aspect of life.


İdentities we claim for ourselves

The question of identity has many dimensions which might differ with the one we construct and articulate, or that of others attribution to us.



Our language is orgainsed according to topics, contexts, the networks and communities to which we belong and through which we move, the itineraries we make in our lives.

J. Blomaert, School of Culture, Language & Communication, İnstittue of Education, London

Measurement Instruments

Individual set goals and direct their action accordingly with the help of social capital are classified into taking instrumental actions to gain resources. While investigating other social capital questions as in many other dimensions of life, actions taken are classified as expressive to maintain resources and support. To measure managing resources for concrete results mostly economic results, access to higher occupational prestiges and access to diverse networks are indicators of assessment. While in expressive actions, benefits of rich social capital are measured by the amount and depth of support, attention, care, or accompaniment, one expects to receive or to mobilise. The other measurement instrument for social capital which is widely used - the single core-network reflected in the answer to question "with whom do you talk about personal matters?"which can provide detailed social network and social capital information. Each instrument emphasises different aspects of social capital. Measures from each instrument have distinctive account on specific outcomes, hence, need to be carefully chosen to match the value of social capital that we intend to measure.

Source: Dept of Research Methods in Social Sciences, Oxford Univ.,
Social Capital Measures, http://Remiss.politics.ox.ac.uk


Measuring ıntentions

"But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its indistry or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual therefore endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labours to rend the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generaly indeed neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By prefering the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain and he is in this, as in many othe rcases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was so part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently than when he really intends to promote it, I have known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affection, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in disuading them from it."

Adam Smith, Wealth of the Nation

The Academic and the Policy-Maker

Of the fourteen prime ministers since 1945, British prime ministers since 1945, who attended any University, fourteen attended Oxford University.

Here in Oxford, a full service University, with very eminent scholars and practitioners across the board of all academic subjects, and extremely bright students, many of whom are interested in going into public service careers in the UK or in other countries.

We would like to be available to policy makers in as many ways as is mutually convenient and likewise we want to hear what policy makers have to say to us. And some of the ways are familiar ways that academics are used to working in.

.......

it’s inevitable that the relationship between academic work and government and politics is going to be messy, imperfect, problematic on both sides, in part
because the starting points for both sides are different. Academia should be concerned with the pursuit of knowledge and truth, in sometimes quite long time scales, primarily retrospective, hopefully sober and thoughtful. Politics has to be governed by decisions, it has to be in real time, it has to often jump ahead of research and faces a whole series of constraints, most of which are about
the public or politics rather than anything else. And in some ways it is not surprising that the nature of the relationship has gone through a series of very different phases.

The famous comment from Keynes is that there’s nothing governments hate more than to be well informed, because it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult. And I think one of the questions for Iain and his colleagues is how do you overcome that barrier because most research, most knowledge, problematises things before it simplifies things.


There is statistical knowledge. There is policy knowledge; let’s say, what works in cutting vehicle burglary. There is scientific knowledge, for example on climate change, or oxytocins’ effect on trust levels - another interesting recent example. There is professional knowledge, the knowledge which is organised within the teaching profession, the medical profession, usually who have their own guardians within government, like the chief medical officer. There is public opinion, knowledge
of what the public thinks (quantitative, qualitative); again, another body of people within the public sector. There is political knowledge, knowledge of what will play within the ruling party, knowledge which perhaps this week has been slightly lacking in the ruling party. There’s classic intelligence, both overseas intelligence, but also domestic intelligence, so the questions of what is happening within the UK urban young Muslim population; that is a question in which, in a sense, academic
research, media research, and intelligence, and policing compete in terms of the quality of their insights and understandings. And that list can go on.

In making sense of the relationship between knowledge and action there were some fields where knowledge was reasonably stable; there was pretty broad consensus
about what was known; about how new knowledge could be created. Usually these were fields where it made sense to do a lot of piloting, a lot of testing, with very clearly specified hypotheses - fields like much of microeconomics, labour markets, some areas of medicine - where policy science was not that different from a natural science. And knowledge was generally fairly cumulative in nature, and where good new innovations or good new knowledge tended to, therefore, diffuse fairly widely
across the field. And, in some ways, those are the fields which are most clearly evidence-based in terms of policy making (macroeconomics, to some extent, would fit in that category as well).

There’s a second, though, much larger field, where there was much greater fluidity than that; where many of the best informed people actually had profound disagreements about what was known, about what worked, about even defining the key concepts, where there was not any agreement about what a research agenda should be, what counted as a success, and where the evidence – really reliable evidence which could last over ten or twenty years – was pretty thin. Much of education, I think, falls into that category. A fair amount of criminal justice or criminology policy,
much of the knowledge about public services and how they should be organised (the subject of a very big ESRC programme), I think, probably falls into that category, where there’s likely to be swings of fashion as much as cumulative development of new knowledge. And, in those fields, many of the practitioners are very strongly attached to particular beliefs and assumptions, and pretty good at resisting new claims and new knowledge, if they don’t happen to fit their existing beliefs. Now there are some methods for trying to change that and improve that at the margins, like the collaboratives in health, but my sense is that most policy fields probably are in this category.

Then, thirdly, there’s another category which is rather different, where it’s inherently impossible to have any very solid knowledge about what will work or what won’t. This is clearly the case in relation to technology, so e-government, a topic on which the British government is spending £30 billion on health alone, let alone other fields. There is no settled knowledge about what works in terms of the use of the Web, the technology to restructure services, because everyone around the
world is experimenting in tandem, and all are making lots of mistakes in tandem. The regulation of reproductive technology and bio-technology I put in the same category -there simply isn’t enough experience to have firm knowledge - and much around globalisation is in this category too; how to create viable institutions around climate change, or indeed around conflict prevention, or weapons of mass destruction.It’s quite hard to have anything like the kind of knowledge you can have on Welfare to Work programmes in these fields because they are so inherently new and there simply isn’t the track record.

Source: Dept of Politics and Intl Relation, Public Policy Unit,
http://ppu.politics.ox.ac.uk/materials/Approved_transcript.pdf

On Friends

Books dont change with fortunes. Erasmus


How very makeable the realm of fact may really be (Mills 1959)

Measuring unknowable risk taking behaviour

On the website of Fair Isaac (history) one of the early events recorded in 1958 was when the company sends letter to the 50 biggest American credit grantors, asking for the opportunity to explain a new concept: Credit Scoring. Only one replies. Yet that one reply from American Investment Corporation provided the humble launch pad to prove the irresistable benefits of credit scoring (lewrence 1992:74).

While a discourse of risk may have eventually triumphed to become the pre-eminent means of conceptualizing consumers. The technologies through which risk itself is constituted are seen by experts to be subject to a permanent process of failure. Although certain regularities can be seen within the population, the future actions of any one individual are not known, but are inherently unknowable.

The effectiveness of a credit-scoring model can thus be judged only generally on how well it distinguishes at the level of the population of consumers the distinctive sub groupings of good and bad consumers. Each of credit scoring models are seem to be subject to numerous risks themselves. Methodological risk suffer from the assumption of equal covariance and normal distribution within the population sample, while procedural risks attach to the specific construction of a model which shows the problem of sample bias (Lewis 1992a). Temporal risks pose a threat tot he integrity of a scoring model's risk determination (Henley & Hand 1997:525). All these risks are perceived to affect the ability of a formulated credit scoring model to distinguish groups of good and bad borrowers, deplete the accuracy of the risk assessment made at an individual level and degrade the efficiency of the lender at producing profit. At any given threshold, more costly defaulters will be accepted and more profitable consumers will be refused credit: therefore within credit scoring the construction of the constitution of risk must be constantly evaluated, maintained and recreated to preserve the reliablity of such constitution. But not only have statistical models been problematized, but also challenged by alternatives. Each technology seeks to know better the risk adhering to an individual applicant within the context of a population. Each is concerned with the calculable effects of default, not cause. In every case, default is conceived as an inherent aspect of the group and individuals are persistently conceived as agglomerations of attributes that are historically associated with a repayment outcome.

None of these alternatives provides a clearly dominant paradigm for the construction of risk interms of showing superiority in the practice of making credit decisions and are bound to common conception of risk. Whereas risk technologies are presented as an advance upon traditional judgemental sactioning processes, assessable through a discourse of efficiency that measures its superiority in terms of greater calculability and accurecy, lower costs and higher revenues, competing risk technologies are locked into a discourse of relativism.

Credit scoring model based on the consumer credit history data held by creditors transformed credit scores into a commodity that could be bundled with individual credit reports sold to lenders who were unwilling or unable to formulate risk-scoring models of their own or wanted to incorporate the score ranking within their own cusotmiyed systems, thus, it became standardized continuous measure of risk constructed within the context of the sider national population an enduringly standardized measure of risk.

Just as credit scoring transfers the uncertainty of repayment into a calculable risk, statistical modelling transforms uncertainties in segmented marketing, debt collection and fraud avoidance into similarly numerical probabilities incorporable into a more efficient organisation of those domains. But market specific conditions and unaccounted population drift and the simple perils of chance all conspire to render levels of default imperfectly calculable and make uncertainty a seemingly irreclucible aspect of consumer credit.

Forms of credit such as credit cards are more profitable for customers who are a higher risk when interest charges, fees and penalities are taken into account. There has been a recent shift away towards optimizing profitability indepndant of the minimization of default risk. This increases the complexity of data mgt to target profitability simply turning the risk of default risk one variable to be included within a more diffuse actuarial form of decision making within the lender organisation.

Process of learning

Students learn and study in different ways, hence, one approach to teaching does not work for every student. Five learning style instruments are defined as:

- The process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience . Learning as a holistic set of processes that are continuous, with a lesser emphasis on outcomes. The processes of learning cycle starts with concrete experience, moving to reflective observation, then to Abstract Conceptualization and finally to Active Experimentation. While learning can start at any one of the above modes (Kolb 1984).

- Distinctive and observable behaviours that provide clues about the mediation abilities of individuals andhow their minds relate to th e world and how they learn. Individuals have natural predispositions for learnings while they learn from and act upon their environments (Gregorc 1979).

- An individual's characteristics and preferred ways of gathering, organising, and thinking about information. It is focused on the different ways that we take in and give out information (Felder & Silverman 1988).

- The chracterstics strengths and prefernces in the ways individuals take in and process information. Individual students have relative preferences along each type but can learn to function in the other direction. Active learners prefer doing things, particularly in groups, Reflective learners work better on their own, with time to thik about the task before doing it. Sensing learners like facts, data and experimentation and work well with detail. Intuiting learners prefer ideas and theories particularly when they can grasp new ideas and innovation. Verbal learners like to hear their information and engage in discussion, especially when they can speak and hear their own words. Visual learners like words, pictures, symbols, flow charts, diagrams step by step procedures, and material that comes to them in a steady stream. Global learners are strong integrators and synthesiyers, making intuitive discoveries and connections to see the overall system or pathern (fleming 2001).

- The way n which individuals begin to concentrate on process, internalize, and retain new and difficult information. The five learning style are environmental (sounds, light, temperature, and room design), emotional (motivation, persistance, responsibility, structure), sociological (hearing alone in a pair, with peers, with a teacher and mixed), physiological (perceptual, in take while learning, chronological, energy pattern, and mobility needs), and physiological processing (global or analytic, hemisphericity, and impulsive or reflective)(Dunn & Dunn, 1990).

- The composite of characteristic cognitive, afective, and psychological factors that serves as an indicator of how an individual interacts with and respond to the learning environment (Duff 2004).

Source: Decision Sciences, Journal of Innovation Education, Jan 2007, Vol 5 No 1, Blackwell Synergy publishing

www.vark-learn.com
www.gregorc.com
www.ncsu.edu/effective-teaching
www.humanresources.com
www.scotcit.ac.uk

Comparative principle

Comparative point of view deepens our understanding of things

Prof Jerome Bruner, Oxford Univ's Dept of Educational Studies







Comparative study of Oxford

Without the others
it is possible as time passes

Without Oxford
It is impossible

Delibrative methodology

The methodology of the deliberative workshop: This qualitative approach involves bringing together a broadly representative group of people for a day of discussion on a particular topic. There is time to explore people's attitudes and beliefs and then provide them with information and arguments to reach an informed position. We plan to hold two such events in different parts of the country.


The deliberative methodology has its roots in James Fishkin's pioneering work on Deliberative Polls and recent experiments with Citizen's Juries (see Fishkin, 1995). The deliberative methodology has advantages over traditional quantitative surveys or focus group discussions. Participants are allowed the time to get to grips with the details of a particular issue, in e.g. researching wealth distribution ın the case of inheritance tax, rather than simply offering their unreflective, and often uninformed, beliefs. The development of an informed opinion over the course of a day shows whether and how views change and what arguments and information have most impact. The deliberative workshop also provides a forum for participants to be challenged by each other. Participants from different backgrounds and with different initial views discuss a common topic together. They are encouraged to develop their arguments in a focused way to reach an informed position.

The questions the deliberative workshops will address

We will use the deliberative workshops to explore the following basic questions:

What are people's initial views of inheritance and inheritance tax?
What are people's initial notions of fairness in this area?
How (if at all) do views change when people are presented with relevant facts about wealth distribution, inheritance and inheritance tax?
How (if at all) do views change when arguments, from different sides of the inheritance tax debate, are presented?
In addition, we aim to use the workshops to explore some more policy-specific questions:

On informed reflection, do people's views of inheritance tax differ according to whether the tax falls on donors (an estates tax) or on recipients (a capital receipts tax)?
On informed reflection, do people's views about inheritance tax differ according to whether the tax is explicitly linked to a policy of stakeholder grants (or to other equal opportunity-promoting policies such as publicly-funded child centres)?

Source: Public Policy Unit, Oxford Univ.,
http://government.politics.ox.ac.uk/Projects/New%20Politics%20of%20Ownership.asp

Public Health at Risk

Even though the world faces the threat of potential new epidemics like avian influenza, the effects of trade rules on public health attract little attention. Governments recently reaffirmed their commitment to meet the Millennium Development Goals which include combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases, yet little attention is given to the implications of United States Free Trade Agreements (US FTAs) with developing countries such as Thailand, for access to affordable medicines to treat those diseases. These FTAs do much more than regulate tariffs for cross-border trade in goods and services: they change the rules of intellectual property protection in ways that will undermine public health by limiting access to affordable medicines.

Intellectual property rights with regard to medicines can come
into conflict with other rights, notably the right to health. The right to
health has been recognized as a fundamental human right, and is
enshrined in a number of treaties, including the Constitution of the
World Health Organization, the United Nations Charter, 32 the
Universal Declaration on Human Rights, 33 and the Convention on the
Rights of the Child. 34 The most important human rights instrument
that explicitly recognizes the right to health is the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Article
12 of the ICESCR creates a legally binding right to health, and Article
2 imposes legal obligations on all States parties to co-operate
internationally to realize this right.
The right to health was defined as ‘a right to the enjoyment of a
variety of facilities, goods, services and conditions necessary for the
realization of the highest attainable standard of health.’ This includes
‘a system of urgent medical care in cases of accidents, epidemics and
similar health hazards,’ as well as ‘the provision of essential drugs’ for
prevalent diseases.


Source: Public Health at Risk, www.Oxfam.org.uk

Warning signs

Warning signs of climate change - İt was on Christmas day 1983 that Smith first noticed that something weird is happening. When they were going to the church is was raining in İnuvik a town in north of the Arctic Circle, at a time when it was suppose to be some 30 degrees below zero. None of elders had any memory of such mild weather in winter. Nowhere else on the planet is the current warning tread more pronounced than in the Arctic, and nowhere else does it seem to leave a deeper mark. The Arctic is changing extremely abruptly on a geological time scale. There even might be a good side to the story, less ice during the Arctic summer night open new shipping channels and oil and gas regions could open up for instance and local hunters could get around by boat more easily!!! Arctic is the early warning system for Climate Change.

Control without hierarchy - We should expect a general theory of complex systems to emerge but it is clear we dont have one yet. Studying natural systems operational functions without central control will reveal whether such systems share general properties. Understanding complexity, self organization, and synergies - when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - have emerged as alternatives for metaphors of control. But these terms are used merely where we cannot explain phenomenons. İn physics, we notice dissatisfaction with linear definitions such as
that a particle's behaviour is caused by the equivalence of two terms in an equation.

Job polarization in Britain

Job polarization in Britain

Complex information processing programs will supplant labour in routine jobs, intense in many relatively simple and repetitive eye-brain-hand-sequences. Consequently workers will sort into nonrountine jobs requiring the flexible use of the brain-eye-hands-and legs. (Simon 1960).

The skill biased technical change hypothesis predicts that demand for skilled jobs is rising relative to that for unskilled jobs, while the recent paper by Autor, Levy, and Murnane ALM hypothesıs suggests a more subtle impact of technology on the demand for labour of different skills.

The 'non-routine' tasks which are complementary to technology as skilled professional and managerial jobs are benefiting.

'Non-routine' unskilled jobs such as cleaning are not directly affected.

Studies show that in Britain, in the last 30 years, there has been a very big increase in the number of high paid jobs, and an increase in the number of low paid service jobs, matching job polarization prediction of the ALM hypothesis.

(Data used the New Earnings Survey NES and the labour force survey LFS)

Ref:
Maarten Goos & Alan Manning, Lousy & Lovely jobs, The rising polarization of work in Britain (2007)
David Autor, Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, the Skill contect of recent technological change, Quarterly Journal of Economic CXVİİİ (2003)
David Autor, Laurence Katz, Changes in the wage Structure and Earning inequality in Hand book of Labour Economics, Vol. 3 A



Geography matters

One study shows that firms benefit greatly from proximity to a large supply of inputs and good market access. Firms with the best supply or market access can afford to pay more than 20% higher wages than those with the poorest access. Labour pooling is less quantitativly important and positive effects from techneology spillovers are not found. These results are robust to controlling for more standard explanations of wage variation such as skill levels and firm size, and infrastructure variables. The results are also robust ot a set of sensitivity tests designed to test the extent of endogeneity of the market access and supply access variables. İt was found that the benefits of vertical linkages are highly localized. Firms do benefit from vertical linkages, but not if they are located in periphery. The large agglomeration benefits arizing from vertical linkages combined with the high localization of the benefits can explain why firms are reluctant to relocate to low wage areas. These findings underscore the difficulty governments around the world have in generating economic growth in far flung regions where the citizens are often the poorest and benefit the least from economic growth. Large regional inequalities are a worldwide phenomenon and governments continue to spend large sums of money to try to attract firms to poorer regions. Overcoming the attraction of existing agglomerations is likely to continue to be a difficult task.

Ref.:
Lisa Cameron, Vivi Alatas, The İmpact of minimum wages on employment in a low income country, World Bank policy research working paper 2985, (2003) 1-31.
Lisa Cameron, Mary Amiti, Economic Geography & Wages, CEPR discussion paper, 2004


Economic Growth

Economic growth can affect fertility because with more income parental human capital improves and thus raises the return to investment in the human capital of children relative to investment in the number of children (Lewis & Becker, 1973). With growth the real wage of women rises, which also leads to lower fertility. The impact of the birth rate on economic growth in China over 20 years was examined by using a panel data set of 28 provinces. Becasue Chinese' one child policy, started in late 1970s, applied only to the Han Chinese but not to minorities this unique policy allowed using the proportion of minorities in a province as an instrumental variable to identify the causal effect of the birth rate on economic growth. The study found that birth rate has a negative impact on economic growth.

Ref.:
Lewis Arthur, Economic developmentswith unlimited supplies of labour, Manchester school 22 (1954)
Galor, Odel, David Weil, The gender gap, fertility, and growth, American Economic Review, 1996

Hope that the situation will be resolved quickly and safely

An Urgent Appeal

An urgent appeal has been made to raise another £850,000 needed to build Oxfordshire's planned multi-million pound community-owned wind farm.
Backers of the Westmill wind farm at Watchfield, near Shrivenham, have called on their 2,240 members to help raise the cash by the end of the month.

The money is needed to fund an increase in the size of the five turbines, which will power about 2,500 homes.

Backers of the scheme are confident the new sum needed will be raised.

But if the money is not found in time, the scheme - the first wind farm co-operative in the south east of England - will not go ahead and investors will only get back 90% of their money.

A spokesman for the wind farm said the extra money needed to be in the bank by 30 April to "secure delivery of the turbines by January 2008 in order to be trading by April 2008".

He added: "We believe that despite the short timescale we can raise the required sum."

Plans for the farm ran into trouble last year when suppliers of the five turbines delayed their delivery date, because of an increase in global demand for eco-friendly energy schemes.

Source: BBC Oxford, www.bbc.co.uk/oxford

Westmill Wind Farm Co-op was established to build the first onshore wind farm in the south-east of England and is 100% Community Owned.

URGENT CALL FOR FUNDS
The Co-op is now seeking to raise a minimum of £850,000 further equity from members to build the wind farm. Click here for more info

The scheme will produce enough ‘green’ electricity to power more than 2,500 homes whilst avoiding the release each year of 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.

Source: Westmill wind farm Cooperative
http://www.westmill.coop/

Follow the news

In the book, “Tuned out: Why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news,” David Mindich tracks the way young people have become progressively less informed about their world in recent decades.

He starts with a telling anecdote. Only 4 million of those aged 18 to 24 years old cast their vote in the 1998 midterm elections. By contrast, 24 million votes were cast, mainly by young people, in the 2003 final of American Idol, the reality talent show.

It’s not at all clear how market forces, left to themselves, will help to resolve this digital divide. What commercial interest would a news publisher have in seeking to engage a relatively unsophisticated and uninterested young person into what’s happening in the world? And as economic forces increasingly shape editorial judgments, how will we be able to develop a properly informed citizenry?


There are no signs that US policymakers have any interest in this agenda, or serious concerns about the risks........ What about the UK?


RICHARD LAMBERT,2006,“THE FUTURE OF THE NEWS IN THE DIGITAL ERA”, ANNUAL WINCOTT FOUNDATION LECTURE, Oxford Unıversity's study of Journalism, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/

Risk Pricing

Systems of risk do not simply disperse through the consumer credit industry and according to their own interminable logic as more rational, more efficient means of governing consumers. Crucially, the systematic statistical constitution of default risk is itself perceived by its experts as being beset by perpetual risks which require the constant reappraisal of methods and procedures and the periodic renewal of models within which risk assessments are created.

In the mid 1990, credit risk pricing became more common as more sophisticated risk modeling techniques and lower computerization storage costs made such a process practicable. Since 1995 risk defined premiums have increased for numerous types of consumer credit, most prominently first home mortgages, automobile loans and credit cards.

The extension of risk based pricing is related to the profit motivated expansion of consumer credit allowing as it does for market growth in two directions: individuals formally excluded for being unacceptably risky are now included at a higher price, even among conservative creditors, while indivduals formerly included are now offered credit at a lower price and so are given the potential to consume more of it. Risk pricing is thus seem to enhance the general welfare-rewarding the low risk with low rates and allowing the high risk the opportunities of credit formerly denied to them (Johnson 1992:28).

Eventually with the development of more creditors due to the perceived saturation of the mainstream credit market for good risks began to specialize in differentiating between bad risks, offering credit ot the more acceptably risky with restrictive terms including high interest rates, low credit limits, collateral deposits and swingeing penalties and fines.

However, success of banks accepting higher risks with higher rates were clouded bz accusations of predatory lending, illegal colection practices, and exploitation leading to class-action suits and company settlements. A similar down market process is discerned for their analysis of the contemporary insurance industry through either pricing different levels of risk or concentrating on a particular risk nich market. Substandard risk are profitable once they are adequately priced. Therefore rather than risky being supressed they are actively engaged with, in a sense , that there are no longer bad risks, seeking new ways within which individuals as consumers can be understood and acted upon as risks.

There are still exclusion and the question then arised as to the fate of the excluded; that risk residuum deemed to lack the responsibilitz to pay for their own risk, what to do about those not in a position to aspire to pay for their own risk, what to do about those not in a position to aspire to the seductions of commodities- the unemployed, the incompetent, the criminal and the DISPOSSESSED.

They are denied access to the seduction of the market, excluded from circuits of credit consumption through their paltry or blackened credit record and the manifestation of personal attributes - occupation income, neighborhood -objectively indicative of their lack of credit worthiness. For them the second-tier financial services await the pawn broker, the payday lender which envelop them within more coercive mechanisms that ensure their repayment: the pledge of collateral, the holding of a customer's post-dated, guaranteed check or the scheduling of incremental rental contracts that mask the rights of the individual as a credit consumer.

Risk pricing ensures that the individual is made capable for the costs of their own risk and those who share it. deserving consummers pay less while, by implication, undeserving consumers pay more.





References:
Leach, W., 1993, Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, NewYork: Pantheon

Lewis, E.M. 1992b, Credit scoring and credit control from four points of view, in Credit scoring and credit control, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Johnson, W., 1992, Legal, social a and economic isues in implementing scoring in the US, Credit scoring and credit control from four points of view, in Credit scoring and credit control, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Garison, L., 1976, Credot-ability for women, The family coordinator 25(3)

Simon, J., The emergence of a risk societz: Insurance, law and the stateö Socialist Review, 95




Individual Risk propensity

Based on a random survey of the British population, it was shown that there is no statistically significant difference between respondents’ risk propensities according to either the means of retirement saving or the type of pension plan. This is an important finding in that DB and DC pension plans have very different characteristics as regards the distribution of risk—in DB plans the risk of retirement benefit value is borne by the plan sponsor whereas in DC plans the risk of retirement benefit value is borne by the participant. Pension plan participants do not appear to appreciate their relative insulation from, or their vulnerability to, the risks of different plan types. This finding suggests that UK pension plan participants are often ignorant of the basic structure and risk profiles of different types of retirement saving institutions.

The results of this paper have three implications for the design and implementation of supplementary pensions. The first follows from the fact that respondents do not appear to distinguish their risk propensities by the means of retirement savings and the type of pension plan: on this most basic of issues, plan sponsors may need to improve their education and information programmes. If important for those already enrolled in a pension of a certain type, it is crucial that plan participants be able todistinguish between plan types when confronted with the choice of continuing with anemployer-plan, and with a DB pension as opposed to the offer of a DC alternative.Given that DB pension plans are closing and employers are seeking to redistribute therisks associated with offering pension benefits, confusion on these two counts couldsignificantly disadvantage many people. This suggests the need for information andeducation programmes that recognise the likely existence of such confusion anddeliberately seek to foster informed decision-making (see, more generally, Cutler1997). Should our results be replicated in larger samples with closer analysis of theattitude-behaviour nexus, financial and consumer regulators may be called upon to make-up the advisory deficits in those programmes.

A second implication is that the design of education and information programmes may benefit from a greater appreciation of the socio-demographic characteristics of those involved. Many programmes treat plan participants as individual decisionmakers with idiosyncratic preferences and interests—many programmes are not attuned to the role of gender, age, income, and household status in affecting riskrelated attitudes and behaviour. Most importantly, to the extent that these characteristics systematically influence the risk propensities of particular types of people, there may be a role in designing education and information programmes to suit. The third implication of our analysis is that pension education and information programmes may be less relevant to those that make financial decisions within the context of the household (spousal pension entitlements). Similarly, education and information programmes that treat participants as if socio-demographic and spousal pension entitlements were irrelevant run the risk of glossing-over the plight of those with the biggest stake (low income women) in planning for an adequate retirement income while being irrelevant to the more sophisticated household retirement income strategies of higher income men and women.

Source:

Clark, G., Center for the Environment, Oxford Univ.,

Pension-related individual risk propensity, and the effects of
socio-demographic characteristics and a spousal pension

http://www.ouce.ox.ac.uk/research/transformations/wpapers/wpg07-02.pdf
entitlement


Pressures from risk management
Corporations causing environmental damage or human rights abuses generate significant financial risks for themselves (World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 2004; Dowell, Hart, & Yeung, 2000). The ‘social, environmental and ethical risk’ faced by corporations has been well enunciated by the Association of British Insurers. Their 2004 Report points to the financial implications of the ‘social and environmental risks and opportunities for companies’, which are to be found ‘in every sector’ (Cowe, 2004, p.4). Environmental or social misconduct in breach of the law leaves firms vulnerable to civil claims and criminal fines. But crucially such behaviour, even if legal, threatens corporate reputation. Risks to reputation are increasingly recognized as important. They may lead to adverse reaction from consumers and investors and consequent financial loss. These risks will be especially marked when firms derive much of their value from their brand. Recognising that risks to the business can ‘arise not only from corporate rivals or competing technologies but also from damage to reputation’, managers may seek to protect their companies and their shareholders from the adverse financial consequences of reputational damage (Financial Times Editorial, 2004).

Source: David Graham, Ngair Woods, Making corporate self regulation effective in developing countries, Oxford Univ, May 2005
http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/docs/Graham%20and%20Woods%20-%20Corporate%20Self%20regulation.pdf

The concept of class in Economy and Society

A social class makes up the totality of those class situation within which individuals and generational mobility is easy and typical (Weber, 1978:302)

Weber defines class situation probabilistically in the following all two familiar way: class situation means the typical probability of procuring goods, gaining a position in life, and finding inner satisfaction.

A probabilitz which derives from the relative control over goods and skills and their income-producing uses within a given economic order. What Weber meant by a concept of social class is made up of the totalitz of those class situation, the boundry of which is said to be given by those class situations within which social mobility is easy and typical as in likely probable.

For Weber social mobility not only takes place between social classes but also within a social class as well and he actualy seems to suggest that the degree of mobiity within a social class defines the boundaries of this concept. According to Weber then, a social class is not a class at all unless mobility takes place within its borders and crucially this type of social mobility does not there fore undermine the existence of social classes, but rather defines what these classes are. Scot in 1994 pointed out that a promising future for class analysis can be achieved only if we go back to very theoretical measure to demographic process (Scott 1996a:127-31).

Ref:
-Smith, K., Operationalizing Weber's concept of class situation, Buckinghamshire Chiltans Univ College, ken.smith@bcuc.ac.uk

-"the promising future of class analysis" (in David Lee and Turner 1996) Conflict about Class, Essesx, Pearson Education
-Goldthorp and Marshal, Essay, Social mobility and class structure in Modern Britain, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992
-Atkins, P., 2003, Galileo's finger: The ten great ideas of science, Oxford Univ Press

Environmental Rights

The Right to water


The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights has been
established with detailed provisions from which the right to water
can be inferred. Article 11 (1) establishes that the States
recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living
for himself and for his family, including adequate food. Article 11
(2) refers to State obligations related to the right of everyone to
be free from hunger, saying that States shall take measures to
improve methods of production of food by developing or reforming
agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient
development and utilization of natural resources. The right to water
could also be inferred from this part of the article. Evidently, the
most efficient development and utilization of natural resources in
order to improve methods of food production shall take into special
account aspects related to quality, distribution, and utilization of
water. Article 12 of the Covenant, which is related to t he right to
health, includes as part of the necessary steps States must take to
achieve the full realization of this right those necessary for the
reduction of infant mortality and those necessary for the
improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene.
Article 25 of the universal declaration on human rights proclaims
that “ every one has the right to a standard of living adequate for
the health and well being of himself and of his family, including
food….” unless food were imported from other states, the right to an
adequate standard of living presumes an adequate supply of water to
sustain agriculture to the extent necessary to feed a state’s
population.

Humanitarian law: Under humanitarian law (the laws governing war)
the right to water is recognized and protected. It is a well
established rule of the law of armed conflict that the enemy’s water
supply may not be poisoned or contaminated. In this respect, Article
54, paragraph 2, of the 1977 protocol 1 addition to the Geneva
conventions, related to the protection of civilians in conflicts of
an international nature, states, “it is prohibited to attack,
destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the
survival of the civilian population, such as food stuffs,
agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops,
livestock drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation
works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance
value to the civilian population or to the adverse party, whatever
the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them
to move away or for any other motive.

In the period from 1900-1995, global water withdrawals to satisfy
demand grew by a factor of six, more than double the rate of
population growth (UN, 2002). Water scarcity in the early part of
the twenty first century could therefore create conditions similar
to those experienced in the 1970s as result of the oil shocks. This
rapid growth in water demand is due to the increasing reliance on
irrigation to achieve food security, the growth of industrial uses,
and the increasing use per capita for domestic purposes. It is
estimated that about 460 million people live in countries using so
much of their water resources that they can be considered to be
highly water stressed. A number of well known major water pollution
problems were discussed in the 1997 WMO report. Inadequately treated
contaminated water is one of the major causes of human illness.
Micro organisms found in waters such as bacteria, viruses are the
cause of many waterborne diseases. These are present in virtually
all wastes discharged, even those from most sewage treatment plants.
It is essential to treat drinking water properly to prevent illness.
In the past two decades, essential water supply services have been
provided to millions of people worldwide, saving a great many lives
and reducing illness. However the rate of supply has not kept pace
with that of population growth, and 20 percent of the world’s
population lack access to safe water supply, while 50 percent lack
access to adequate sanitation

The quality of the water used for basic needs as sanitation,
cleansing, and growing food is equally important. An example of such
water quality is a situation in Chile, in which much of the
agricultural land is irrigated with water from the same rivers into
which most domestic and industrial waste is dumped. This practice
resulted in an outbreak of cholera in 1991, largely because
Santiago, had no water treatment plants. From the point of view of
the individuals, the human right to drinking water comprises both
the right to an adequate supply of water and the right to quality
water. The State obligations correlative to this right would differ
depending on whether the right to water is understood as part of the
right to life or as part of the right to health, of the right to
food or as a proper right in itself.

Measurement of States’ compliance with their obligation to provide
safe water can be achieved in various ways. One is by measuring the
general population’s access to water. UNDP shows measures in its
annual HD Report, measure access to water. In the report, the
programme offers data in the profile of human development and in the
profile of human deprivation related to the percentage of population
with access to safe water and to the percentage of population with
access to safe water and to the percentage of population without
access. In this sense, the 1996 Human Right Development Report shows
that in countries with high human development indicators, an average
of 84 percent of the population has access to safe water (showing
100 percent for Singapore and 71 percent for Argentina). While in
countries with low human development indicators the average falls to
55 percent (97 percent for Bangladesh and 12 percent for
Afghanistan).

Another manner of measuring a State’s compliance with its obligation
of providing safe water is through the personal consequences of the
lack of access to it. For example, if a child dies because of
illness resulting from not having access to safe water such as
diarrhoea, it could be very well argued that the State has violated
his right to life. Although there are several ways of measuring and
ensuring states; compliance with their obligations related to the
rights to water, one of the first steps should be to raise awareness
about the existence of the right to water and about the importance
of this right. One very important aspect of this is to take into
account that water is a resource that remains constant and finite.



The Right to Land

The rights of national governments to exercise jurisdiction over all
lands and natural resources located within the boundaries of the
states in which they operate are widely acknowledged. This is what
accords government the authority to promulgate regulations applying
to the activities of both owners of private property and users of
common property. But beyond this, governments can and often do
assert far reaching claims to the ownership of land and associated
natural resources in the form of public property by virtue of
conquest (e.g. Russian ownership in Serbia), the exercise of royal
prerogative purchase (the acquisition of Alaska by the US),
inheritance (Canada’s inheritance of crown lands under he British
North American Act 1867), succession or some combination of these
claims. Despite t he publicity surrounding privatization, the
government Russian Federation claims most of the land base of Russia
as public property the government of Canada treats the bulk of the
country’s land base as public property evening US, widely regarded
as bastion of private property and free enterprise, the federal
government alone claims about one third of the nation’s land as
public property (Brubaker, 1984). Yet this is not the whole story
regarding systems of land tenure. Although effective control has
flowed steadily toward national governments during most of the
modern era, many small indigenous or traditional groups residing
within states and engaging in distinctive social practices have not
relinquished their claims to ownership of large tracts of land and
natural resources in the form of common property (Berkes, 1989;
Bromley, 1992). Often these claims overlap or conflict with
assertions on the part of national governments to the effect that
the areas in question are part of the public domain. Indigenous land
claims In British Columbia, for example, cover virtually all the
land area of the province.

However the concept of property encompasses a bundle of rights, and
the contents of this bundle can be allocated in any of a variety of
ways. This has given rise to lively debates about t he nature and
extent of usufructuary rights in situations where user groups have
not been granted full title to land and natural resources. Among the
most significant aspects of this debate are issues concerning the
rights of national governments to authorize consumptive uses of
forests, hydrocarbons, and non fuel minerals in areas that are
important to the conduct of longstanding subsistence or artisanal
activities featuring the use of living resources on the part of
local peoples.

Environmental issues, in any case, are best handled with the
participation of all concerned citizen, at the relevant level. At
the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to
information concerning the environment that is held by public
authorities … and the opportunity to participate in decision making
processes. States shall facilitate and encourage public awareness
and participation by making information widely available. Effective
access to judicial and administrative proceedings, including redress
and remedy shall be provided.

Reference;

Oxfam, Right to the land,
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/where_we_work/brazil/quilombola/in
dex.htm

United Nation, General Assembly, Resolution 37/7, World Charter for
Nature, 28 October 1982

Cahill, Michael; The Environment and Social Policy, Gildredge Social
Policy, Routledge publication, 2003

The Drama of the Commons, National Academy Press, Committee on the
Human Dimensions of Global Change; Editors: E. Ostrom, T. Dietz, N.
Dolsak, P. Sterm, S. Stonich, and E. V. Weber, National Research
Council, Washington DC, 2002, www.nap.edu

Linking Environment and Social Policy, edited by Romina Picolotti
and Jorge Daniel Taillant, the Univ of Arizona Press, (2003),
www.cedha.org.ar

Stephen C. Mc Caffrey, A Human Right to Water: Domestic and
International Implications, Geo. Intl Envtl. L. Rev. 1, (1992)

United Nations, Department of Technical Cooperation for Development
of Water Resources, undated brochure

Satvinder Juss, Global Environmental Change: Health and the
Challenge for Human Rights

T. Colborn, D. Dumanoski, and J. Peterson Myers, Our Stolen Future
(New York:Plume Books, 1997)

R. Campbell, V.Colas, L. Ivers, and L. Mead, “ Summary of the Third
Session of the INC for an International Legally Binding Instrument
for Implementing International Action on Certain Persistent Organic
Pollutants“, 1999, Earth Negotiations Bulletin 15, No. 27

Hayward, T., Constitutional Environmental Rights, Oxford University
Press, 2005

Re-reading texts

Any classical text worth reading is worth rereading periodically, for "what is communicate by the printed page" changes as result of changes in the readers and the worlds they inhabit. Although spoken words are considered alive and dynamic expression of self, the same is true for the interpretation of written words also change with the passage of time and place as our state of mind and our environment change.

Housing and population

Some potential impacts of an ageing population on housing and technology development
1. We are facing an increase in the proportion of the population who are in poor health and potentially vulnerable. Homes will be needed that allow for as much self-sufficiency as possible in old age. In March 2004, the ODPM committed itself to reviewing Part M of the Building Regulations (access and facilities for disabled people) in order to incorporate Lifetime Home Standards, so that homes can easily be adapted to different stages of life and to chronic illness or disability.
2. An ageing population has implications for the distribution of wealth and housing. By 2021, the proportion of the population over 45 in age is projected to be 46%, compared with 38% in 1998. Approximately two thirds of the heads of household in England with second homes are over 45 years of age: an ageing population could mean a continuation of the growth in second home ownership, some of which will be in urban areas (Direct Line 2005).
3. There is a danger that equity release on large family homes will continue to be an attractive option to the elderly, rather than trading down to smaller properties.
This is bad news in terms of direct energy use and opportunity cost: the family homes are not available for families, increasing the pressure for new build. Patrick Collinson (Guardian, 28.1.06) warned of the danger that ‘we will build a colossal, expensive and unnecessary equity release industry to allow people to remain in their homes way past any rational reason for doing so. At the same time, we will force first-time buyers into ever tinier starter homes, and ask the same hard-pressed young families to subsidise the council tax of elderly single pensioners in big, under-used properties.
4. The need to make technology accessible and manageable becomes even more pressing as the people for whom it is designed grow older. The design of appliances and controls still needs to be improved so that they are as easily understood as possible and so that users with poor sight or mobility can operate any switches and dials.

www.eci.ox.ac.uk

On Education

According to a new study by the London School of Economics for the Prince's Trust, nearly 20 percent of Britons aged between 16 and 24 are 'Neets' – that is, not in education, employment or training. As a group this 1.2 million 'Neets' costs the UK economy £3.65 billion every year.

www.adamsmith.org


what Boris is touching on is the sense of entitlement that young people have today. They grow up with luxuries and comforts that were the preserve of the rich a few years back, and live their lives through celebrities who don't talk or act that much differently to themselves. It's understandable then that they assume any failure to have their expectations rewarded is a travesty of justice. The result is envy and bitterness, and a resentment of other people's success. Combined with the state-sponsored message that men should be less competitive and assertive, they feel alienated and irrelevant. They climb off the ladder of social mobility and allow the mindset of low expectations to become part of their identity. It's all very sad.

Comments by Tayle s
www.boris-johnson.com

Planetary Emergency

The fight against climate change has developed huge momentum in UK and elsewhere. But if this movement is to have stamina, and if it is to embrace the other scarce environmental resources under threat, we must move the debate out of the box marked ‘environment’.

Al Gore calls this a ‘planetary emergency’. It is. But one of the reasons why the world has been slow to wake up to the threat from climate change is that is has been bracketed as an environmental issue – a threat to nature rather than people. It is more than that.

It is a potential humanitarian emergency – since the consequence of failure to mitigate and adapt to climate change will be suffering on a grand scale. It is a development issue, as the poorest nations will be affected the most even though they have done least to cause it. And as Sir Nicholas Stern’s report showed last year, it is also a financial and economic issue – while the cost of arresting climate change is around 1 per cent of global GDP, the cost of dealing with the consequence is between 5 and 20 per cent of global GDP.

...... As Margaret Beckett has argued, tackling climate change must be as critical to the Foreign Office and Defence Ministry as it is to Defra.

Source: David Miliband
www.davidmiliband.defra.gov.uk

Environmental preferences

Environmental preferences, which is based on value judgments, dictates even controls much of our behaviour, governs our well being and health. Environmental preferences are characteristics that make us different from one another.

Environmental preferences are learned through past experiences, and are influenced by our back ground and social-economic level while - age is an important catalyst.


İ said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing
......

Yet there is faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought
.......

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
the laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
not lost but requiring,
pointing to the agony
of death and birth


T S Eliot in Guardian, Simon Jenkins, Good Friday