Losing the Future - By Daniel Altman. The biggest problem facing the global economy is not climate change, trade imbalances, financial regulation, or the eurozone. It is short-term thinking. An epidemic of myopia has swept over the world in the past few decades, and it threatens our living standards like nothing else. It's an epidemic with more than one cause, and not all of them are obviously sinister. Part of the problem is the growing complexity of the global economy. Life is simply getting harder to handle with the brainpower at our disposal.
To understand why, imagine a chess master. Structural aspects of the global economy are magnifying the problem. Together with these challenges, there is one truly odious cause of short-term thinking: narcissism. The effects of these changes are manifest in every part of the global economy. The corporate sector is suffering too. Governments are also passing up valuable opportunities to help their economies grow. They are just accelerating the catastrophe.
Welcome. China's new world order. By all appearances, Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington last week changed little in the lopsided American-Chinese relationship. What we have is a system that methodically transfers American jobs, technology and financial power to China in return for only modest Chinese support for important U.S. geopolitical goals: the suppression of Iran's and North Korea's nuclear weapons programs. American officials act as though there's not much they can do to change this. It's true that the United States and China have huge common interests in peace and prosperity. Two-way trade (now about $500 billion annually) can provide low-cost consumer goods to Americans and foodstuffs and advanced manufactured products to the Chinese. But China's and America's goals differ radically.
Naturally, the United States opposes this sort of system, but that's where we're headed. Start with distorted trade. With details changed, similar stories apply to many industries. Finally, there's finance. Home. International News and World Headlines at GlobalPost. Famine, Affluence, and Morality. "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" is an essay written by Peter Singer in 1971 and published in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1972. It argues that affluent persons are morally obligated to donate far more resources to humanitarian causes than is considered normal in Western cultures. The essay was inspired by the starvation of Bangladesh Liberation War refugees, and uses their situation as an example, although Singer's argument is general in scope. The essay is anthologized widely as an example of Western ethical thinking.[1][2][3][4][5] Précis[edit] One of the core arguments of this essay is that, if one can use one's wealth to reduce suffering — for example, by aiding famine-relief efforts — without any significant reduction in the well-being of oneself or others, it is immoral not to do so.
It makes no difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. [...] Quotations[edit]