borders

President Obama has broken the record for highest number of deportations.

Yes, some of the deportees are criminals, but over all, immigration is a good thing. Granted the less free the United States becomes, the weaker the moral imperative to allow people from even less free nations come here, but still.

Even if your moral compass doesn't point toward the freedom of movement as an inherently good thing and you don't believe in natural rights, look at the numbers. And the science.

Immigrants Create More Wealth Than Native-Born Americans

A recent report from the Partnership for a New American Economy found more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Eighteen percent (or 90) of the 500 companies had immigrant founders. The children of immigrants started another 114 companies. (A copy of the report can be found here.)

http://blogs.forbes.com/stuartanderson/2011/06/19/40-percent-of-fortune-500-companies-founded-by-immigrants-or-their-children

Immigrants Bring American DNA

Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion.

http://chronicle.com/article/What-Poker-Can-Teach-Us/48641/

Social-Ecological Resilience

”Waiting for a single worldwide `solution´to emerge from global negotiations is also problematic.”
Elinor Ostrom

When policymakers speak about climate change, one gets the impression that the global warming problem is so clear and so tidy, that we're merely a few stubborn votes away from a one-sized-fits-all solution that'll save the world. Anyone with an understanding of the principles of ecology, however, knows that top-down mandates are hardly compatible with the ways of Mother Nature.

We had certainly hoped that the Nobel committee's recognition of Ostrom's and WIlliamson's work would encourage more people to explore the possibilities of market solutions and local decision making. It may take time for policymakers to catch up, but it's refreshing to see so many scholars getting attention for asking the right questions.

Thanks to research institutions like the Stockholm Resilience Center (which, it should be noted, was founded in 2007, before the Nobel committee had cottoned onto the idea), there's ever more literature available on the importance of adaptability as we face extreme weather patterns and other challenges of climate change.

In an older article on the resilience of societies for governing complex socio-ecological changes, Jonas Ebbeson suggests that when it comes to climate change, we need to learn to deal with uncertainties and surprises because we can't control nature. What does that mean? To summarize Sanford Gaines, we need:

• flexibility in social systems
• transparency of institutions
• local decision making
• effectiveness multilevel governance
• promotion of learning
• social structures which don't restrict options

In other words, following Mother Nature's lead, we need to facilitate the right conditions for experimentation, and watch what evolves.

In Pursuit of Happiness Research

"After controlling for initial health conditions, we find that happiness extends life expectancy."
via @bakadesuyo

Happiness research is certainly interesting, but Will Wilkinson has questioned whether it's reliable and what it means for policy.

Wilkinson draws on the work of (among others) philosopher Dan Haybron:

Happiness itself seems to be multidimensional and plural in constitution, having complex biological underpinnings. First, neuroscientific studies have established that good and bad feelings do not exist on a single continuum—an increment of pleasure does not cancel out an equal increment of pain—and it is possible to feel happy and sad simultaneously.

Decoding Reality

The Economist reviews book on quantum calculation:

Vlatko Vedral, an Oxford physicist, examines the claim that bits of information are the universe’s basic units, and the universe as a whole is a giant quantum computer. He argues that all of reality can be explained if readers accept that information is at the root of everything.

The Region No One Could Name

Interesting musing on a label that would fit Poland, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Hungary, Serbia, et al. from Boyko Vassilev at Transitions Online:

If it is so hard to name the region’s countries, maybe they are not a region at all. And perhaps they do not want to be one. “Central and Eastern Europe” sounds too dull; “new democracies” like a bunch of newcomers; “ex-bloc” forces them to remember things they would rather forget. They are not interested in themselves. They look more to the West than to one another. “Our countries communicate through Brussels and Washington rather than directly,” said Veselin Vackov, a journalist in Prague. “We may have a common interest, but hardly a common voice.”

Long gone are the times when artists like Pole Jan Englert, singers like Czech Helena Vondrackova, and athletes like Lithuanian Arvydas Sabonis enjoyed fame throughout “the region.” Serbian writers, Polish film directors, and Czech TV series were easily recognizable from Sopot, Bulgaria, to Sopot, Poland. Today there are only distant remnants of that cross-cultural pollination. A Bulgarian might whistle the biggest hit of the Hungarian rock band Omega or put in a disc of ex-Yugoslav rock band Bjelo Dugme. “When we were on the ex-communist reservation together, we had nothing left but to communicate with one another,” said Vackov, a Bulgarian who has been the editor-in-chief of a major Czech daily newspaper for nine years. “Today the whole world is open to us – and thank God.”

In her book, A Biography of No Place, Historian Kate Brown explored the shifting borders and identities of a similar region. What it boiled down to was that only governments seemed to really car about borders and group identity. As Vassilev says "the only things that bind them are memories of totalitarianism and NATO membership. If they need, and find, a common purpose, they will find a common name as well."

Are All Employees Knowledge Workers?

So ask John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davis on the HBR Blog Network:

Their conclusion? If the goal is to mobilize the workforce:

We will begin to redefine all jobs...in ways that facilitate problem solving, experimentation, and tinkering. This will foster more widespread performance improvement. Everyone, even the most unskilled worker, will be viewed as a critical problem-solver and knowledge-worker contributing to performance improvement.

But, there is another kind of boundary that inhibits talent development. With few exceptions, executives immediately narrow the scope of discussion to their own employees. Yet, if we take talent development seriously, we begin to realize that, in the words of Bill Joy, "There are always more smart people outside your company than within it." If we are serious about developing our own talent, we must find more ways to connect with and collaborate with all of those smart people outside our organization. We should aggressively create opportunities for people within our organization to work together with leading edge talent outside our organization so that both sides can develop their talent even more rapidly. In driving scalable learning, we must expand our horizons far beyond the boundaries of our own firm.

First break all the rules

The Economist on health care solutions and the charms of frugal innovation in China and India:

GE and TCS are doing something more exciting than fiddling with existing products: they are taking the needs of poor consumers as a starting point and working backwards. Instead of adding ever more bells and whistles, they strip the products down to their bare essentials. Jeff Immelt, GE’s boss, and Vijay Govindarajan, of the Tuck Business School, have dubbed this “reverse innovation”. Others call it “frugal” or “constraint-based” innovation.

Environmental Refugees and Global Warming

ScienceDaily summarizes a recent paper in the International Journal of Global Warming:

"While a strong link between environmental changes and migration is clearly visible, it needs to be considered that these environmental factors are mostly also paired with socio-economic factors like poverty and demographic changes like population growth or conflicts and institutional factors, among others," the team concludes.

One of the reasons people like Indur Goklany have been saying things like this for years:

The primary long-term solution to climate vulnerability is for all countries to adopt institutional frameworks, including decentralised government, that encourage innovation, foster enterprise and enable individuals to develop strategies and technologies to cope with changing circumstances.

Incentivizing energy efficiency

John Timmer at Nobel Intent writes:

When it comes to reducing carbon emissions, most of the attention has focused on new technologies like renewable power and electric vehicles, as well as their associated costs. But study after study shows that we can save both energy and a significant amount of cash through the use of energy efficiency technology that's already on the market. A Policy Forum in today's issue of Science suggests that the bottleneck isn't so much technological or economic as it is behavioral, and argues that the US needs to start performing tests of behavior-oriented programs.

Bonds, Climate Bonds

In a recent article in Government: Business, Foreign Affairs and Trade John Mathews and Sean Kidney outline the idea of climate bonds to fund the transition from fossil fuels to green energy.

The role of private finance in effecting the transition to a low-carbon economy -- what will be the biggest economic transformation in history and estimated in one recent report to be more than three times the size of the whole industrial revolution -- is the crux of the issue.

Putting the emphasis on private financing allows a different perspective. In place of always talking about the ‘costs’ of climate change mitigation, we can talk instead about investment opportunities.

Shout it from the rooftop!

It's World Press Photo time.

Every year, a traveling exhibition of prize-winning photographs is visited by over two million people in some 45 countries worldwide.

The 2009 winners seem harder than usual to view, especially the photos from Somalia, which remind us how fortunate we are to live in the United States in the 21st century.

Math explains biodiversity?

Via Science Alert:

"Australian scientists have announced a major new finding that helps explain how natural systems like coral reefs and forests maintain the richness of their mix of species."

Their study also illustrates the importance of biological corridors:

"Corals and rainforests spread their offspring across surrounding fragments of available habitat. By dispersing offspring unevenly – on winds, current or carried by other creatures – across patchworks of reefs or forest fragments, the richness of biodiversity is perpetuated."

Nicaragua-based Paso Pacifico** has been restoring wildlife habitat and conserving biological corridors for five years. If you're interested in biodiversity, you may want to pay attention to their work.


**Full disclosure: this blogger does work for Paso Pacifico.