Lifeboat Foundation

Nearly 10% of global GDP is spent on health care, according to the latest data from the WHO. Rich countries spend an average of 12%, with America an outlier well above that; middle-income ones (including China) 6%; and low-income ones just under 6%. In developed countries, 60% of health spending comes from public sources. In poor economies the figure is around 40%. As economies grow and governments are able to allocate more resources to health, the share of individual out-of-pocket spending typically falls. But the variation in such spending in poor countries suggests that the health systems they end up with depend on their choice of public policies.

IN 2013 A GROUP of doctors and health economists argued in the Lancet that a “grand convergence” would be possible over the next two decades. If governments spent more on health, and more wisely, mortality rates in the poorest countries could fall to those seen in the healthiest middle-income ones. That would amount to saving 10m lives a year.

To see what a high-quality health-care system in a developing country looks like, consider the case of Farida Waree, a 55-year-old housewife in Thailand. In early 2016 Mrs Waree felt a lump on her right breast. She went to her local primary-care centre, which referred her to Nakornayok provincial hospital. She was diagnosed with cancer, and over the next year was given a mastectomy, chemotherapy and Herceptin, an anti-cancer drug. Five years earlier her treatment might have cost her 800,000 baht (about $25,000), much more than she and her family could have afforded. Instead, nearly all the costs were covered under Thailand’s Universal Coverage Scheme. The cancer is now in remission. “I consider myself very fortunate,” she says.

Continue reading “More and wiser health-care spending could save millions of lives” »

The central role of public spaces in the social, cultural, political and economic life of cities makes it crucial that they’re accessible to everyone. One of the most important qualities of accessible public spaces is safety. If people do not feel safe in a public space, they are less likely to use it, let alone linger in it.

Perceptions of safety are socially produced and socially variable. It is not simply the presence of crime – or “threatening environments” – that contributes to lack of safety or fear.

All sorts of measures are put in place to make public spaces safer, from design to policing. But when we consider the effectiveness of these measures, we always have to ask: whose safety is being prioritised?

Even more importantly, it will have wider repercussions on the overall development of China itself. Inevitably, it will hinder the country’s ambition to narrow the technology gap with the developed West.

China’s reliance on key technologies from the West shows it still needs the developed economies much more than they need China.

By Cary Huang

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Nader Al-Naji started mining bitcoin in his Princeton dorm in 2013. Now, he’s working on a stable cryptocurrency that be believes could actually replace money.

Reports began surfacing in the media earlier this week that Finland was scrapping its much-discussed basic income experiment. The country began paying 2,000 unemployed Finns a basic income of €560 ($678) a month in January of 2017.

Articles this week ran headlines implying that Finland had decided to halt the experiment, implying that it had become unpopular.” The eagerness of the government is evaporating. They rejected extra funding [for it],” said Olli Kangas, the leader of the research team at Kela (Social Insurance Institution of Finland), told the BBC.

In actual fact, Finland is continuing its basic income plan until the end of 2018, as it had initially planned. Yes, it’s true that it won’t be extended past that date — but there hasn’t been any official word from the Finnish government that the experiment has been a failure. If anything, the government appears to be intent on studying the effects of the two-year program but believe they can only do so after it’s finished.

Before 1870, India barely had railroads. It didn’t have many canals either, and only a small percentage of the population lived along the three main rivers. So when goods needed to be transported, people used steer, which could pull freight about 20 miles per day.

But the British, India’s colonial rulers, started building rail lines, and then built some more. By 1930, there were more than 40,000 miles of railroads in India, and goods could be shipped about 400 miles a day.

The result? As MIT economist David Donaldson shows in a newly published study on the economic impact of building infrastructure, railroads fostered commerce that raised real agricultural income by 16 percent.

Nuclear power plants typically run either at full capacity or not at all. Yet the plants have the technical ability to adjust to the changing demand for power and thus better accommodate sources of renewable energy such as wind or solar power.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently explored the benefits of doing just that. If nuclear plants generated power in a more flexible manner, the researchers say, the plants could lower electricity costs for consumers, enable the use of more renewable energy, improve the economics of nuclear energy and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The team explored technical constraints on flexible operations at nuclear power plants and introduced a new way to model how those challenges affect how power systems operate. “Flexible nuclear power operations are a ‘win-win-win,’ lowering power system operating costs, increasing revenues for nuclear plant owners and significantly reducing curtailment of renewable energy,” wrote the team in an Applied Energy article published online on April 24.

The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in 1971, and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Forum is tied to no political, partisan or national interests.

Researchers in artificial intelligence can stand to make a ton of money. But this week, we actually know just how much some A.I. experts are being paid — and it’s a lot, even at a nonprofit.

OpenAI, a nonprofit research lab, paid its lead A.I. expert, Ilya Sutskever, more than $1.9 million in 2016, according to a recent public tax filing. Another researcher, Ian Goodfellow, made more than $800,000 that year, even though he was only hired in March, the New York Times reported.

As the publication points out, the figures are eye-opening and offer a bit of insight on how much A.I. researchers are being paid across the globe. Normally, this kind of data isn’t readily accessible. But since OpenAI is a nonprofit organization, it’s required by law to make these figures public.

Continue reading “The Amount of Money A.I. Researchers Earn Will Shock You” »