#Enough to Lift 2 Billion People out of Poverty

[nando161mando]

A Tax of 5% on The World’s Multi-Millionaires and Billionaires Could Raise $1.7 trillion, Enough to Lift 2 Billion People out of Poverty

[kick-the-clouds]

The Ultra-Wealthy are Parasites

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. It's not just a saying; it's a harsh reality that's tearing our society apart. Imagine a world where a handful of people have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes, while millions struggle to put food on the table. This is our world, and it's getting worse every day.

Billionaires aren't just wealthy; they're wealth hoarders. Since 2020, the top 1% have snatched up nearly two-thirds of all new wealth created globally. That's like taking 63 slices of a 100-slice pie, leaving only 37 for everyone else. And this pie isn't getting bigger for most people. While CEO pay skyrocketed by over 900% from 1978 to 2018, regular workers saw a measly 11.9% increase. The math is simple: the gap is widening at an alarming rate.

The damage spreads like a disease through generations. Children born into poverty are likely to stay poor. Their parents can't afford good education or healthcare. They grow up in neighborhoods with fewer opportunities. The cycle continues, and the wealth gap becomes a chasm. It's a mathematical certainty: compound interest works for the rich, while compound disadvantage crushes the poor.

Environmental devastation follows the money trail. The wealthiest 1% produce twice as much carbon emissions as the poorest half of humanity. Climate change hits the poor hardest, creating a vicious cycle. Floods destroy homes. Droughts kill crops. The rich can adapt, but the poor suffer. Over time, this environmental injustice multiplies, creating climate refugees and exacerbating global inequality.

Democracy itself is under siege. Billionaires buy influence like it's on sale. They fund campaigns, lobby for laws, and shape public opinion through media ownership. One dollar, one vote becomes the unspoken rule. The will of the many is drowned out by the wallets of the few. Year after year, this erodes the foundation of our society, turning democracy into a plutocracy.

The numbers are staggering, the human cost immeasurable. A mere 5% tax on the ultra-rich could raise $1.7 trillion annually. That's enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty. Instead, we watch as the middle class shrinks, with their share of income falling from 62% to 43% in just five decades. Each year this continues, millions more fall into despair.

It's not just inhumane; it's mathematically unsustainable. Like a game of Monopoly, it ends with one player owning everything. But unlike a game, we can't just reset the board. The devastation accumulates, compounding like interest on a debt we can never repay. Families fall into poverty. Communities crumble. Entire regions become wastelands of lost potential.

We must act now. Every day we wait, the problem grows exponentially. The math is clear, the story it tells is heartbreaking. We're not just losing money; we're losing lives, dreams, and the very fabric of our society. It's time to rewrite this story, to use math for good, to calculate a future where everyone has a chance to thrive. The alternative is too cruel to contemplate.

[nanobreaker]

I look at the incredible organisational efforts made by kind-hearted and diligent communities: the amazing spreadsheets listing fundraisers by country and need, tracking the progress of said fundraisers; the people raising money on behalf of those in dire circumstances; the work that goes into vetting fundraisers and providing updates; the initiatives like donation matching and all the art, writing, crafts and other skills that have been freely given to encourage others to help — I look at all the selflessness and feel inspired because people are good; they put so much love and time into easing the suffering of others in any way they can.

But it's laced with this sense of heartache, sometimes, because I scroll the spreadsheets and wish that I could help everyone.

And then my blood boils because I think about the scale of inequality; I think about wealth distribution and how the richest 1% own almost half the world's wealth; I think about these people and their vast empires and how they couldn't spend all that wealth if they lived for 1,000 years — and it burns. It burns that there are people out there who are so full of greed and callousness, that any individual could have such disregard for humanity... how can anyone feel that such levels of wealth are justified or deserved?

'A tax of up to 5 percent on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty.'

Press Release by Oxfam International, published on 16 January 2023

Two billion people. A quarter of the planet's population.

It's sickening.

[aloeverawrites]

“According to new analysis by the Fight Inequality Alliance, Institute for Policy Studies, Oxfam and the Patriotic Millionaires, an annual wealth tax of up to 5 percent on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty, fully fund the shortfalls on existing humanitarian appeals, deliver a 10-year plan to end hunger, support poorer countries being ravaged by climate impacts, and deliver universal healthcare and social protection for everyone living in low- and lower middle-income countries.”

Please read and share this and stay up to date on the efforts of Oxford International.

[palmerowyoung]

Why Are So Many People Unhappy? How Modern Society is Making Us Miserable and Lonely and What To Do About It

You might think that humans are innately wired to be happy but our brains are not wired to make us happy. They are wired to keep us alive so that we can reproduce. So, we are often oblivious as to what will make us happy. So we chase moments of fleeting pleasure as a substitute. 

We live in a modern world full of conveniences in which food, information, sex, drugs, booze, and entertainment, are available at the click of a few buttons, but Americans are less happy than they ever have been. 

In the United States, over 44% of college students reported symptoms of depression and 15% reported being suicidal. In 2022 U.S. suicides hit an all-time high of 50,000 in a year. Globally, suicide remains one of the leading causes of death and kills more people every year than HIV, malaria, breast cancer, war and homicide. In 2019, over 700,000 people died by suicide. Alcohol and drug abuse are also on the rise in the US.

It’s clear that despite all of our modern conveniences and technology, we are doing something wrong. We have all these misconceptions of what will bring us happiness, like wealth, accomplishments, beauty, a better body, good food, fame, a bigger car, a nicer house, the latest gadget, or the admiration of others. While all of those things can bring us moments of pleasure and joy, they don’t bring us the long-lasting happiness that we crave.

So why is society so unhappy and what can we do about it? 

Drugs and Alcohol

Two of the most socially acceptable ways of dealing with stress are drinking and using prescription drugs. This means we rarely develop the healthy tools necessary to deal with stress. It’s only in recent years that young people have been eschewing alcohol in favor of becoming “sober curious,” but opioid deaths are still hitting all-time highs each year that passes. In 2022, 109,680 people died, more than car crashes and gun deaths combined, fueled by the proliferation of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. 

So, skills like meditation, deep breathing, and yoga need to be taught in schools from an early age to give us other means of dealing with the emotional pain that is an inherent part of life. 

Increasing Social and Economic Inequality

Social and economic inequality has been on the rise globally for decades, affecting over two-thirds of the world. In the U.S. the top 1% own about 16 times the assets that the bottom 50% does. According to economist Thomas Pinketty, globally the world's richest 1% has taken more than a third of all additional wealth accumulated since 1995, while the bottom 50% captured just 2%.

The system makes already wealthy people wealthier by design, and this compounds, since they can pass the assets down through subsequent generations.  

Inflation

The wealth gap is bad enough, but add increases in the cost of living with stagnating wages and it’s a recipe for depression. For example, the cost of homes in the United States has outpaced wage growth over the past decade. According to the Federal Finance Housing Agency, home prices rose 74% from 2010 to 2022. The average wage rose only 54% during the same time. In the U.S., the house price to income ratio in the first quarter of 2022 amounted to 135.2, so house price growth has outpaced income growth by over 35 percent since 2015. 

The cost of food has also risen by 20.4% between 2018-2022, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA),

So how do we solve this? One way is a wealth tax, according to an Oxfam study called Taxing Extreme Wealth, The study found applying a 2% to people who have $5 million or more, 3% to those who have $50 million or more, and 5% to those who have over $1 billion would raise $2.52 trillion per year in revenue. This would be enough to lift 2.3 billion out of poverty, provide vaccines to the world, and provide some level of global health and social welfare. 

Loss of Connections and Community

Despite having more connections to one another in cyberspace through social media, we are becoming less connected in the real world. So much so that the U.S. Surgeon General recently declared loneliness an epidemic.

This lack of real-world connections is also leading us to have less sex than we did 20 years ago. This is especially true of men, who are often turning to online pornography and its idealized images of women, rather than having genuine relationships. 

Experts say that having less sex can damage our sense of well-being and a lack of social interaction can make it more difficult to have future relationships.   

 This lack of social interaction in the real world is also contributing to our loss of community and our sense of belonging in the world. 

While some of us chase fame and adoration from strangers as a recipe for happiness, study after study tells us that true happiness comes from the connection and belonging that you can get from being part of a community. However, for a variety of reasons, communities are becoming more fragmented and most Americans say they only know a few of their neighbors.  

So what we can do about this? One solution is to turn our communities into Blue Zones. These are five regions around the world that have disproportionate numbers of centenarians (people over 100 years old). Two of the common characteristics Blue Zones possess are that they walk a lot, and they have a strong sense of community with tight social bonds. 

To encourage Blue Zones, the author of the book has created Blue Zones Projects in which he transforms cities by changing how its citizens interact by adding parks, bike lanes, walking paths and volunteer opportunities. This encourages people to get out of their cars and houses and to take part in their community, all of which science tells us can make us happier and healthier. The best part is that insurance companies and corporations pay for the changes to the communities because these changes reduce health care costs and increase worker productivity. 

There are already more than a dozen Blue Zone Projects across the United States and Canada and you can apply to have your city considered by going to Blue Zones Projects. 

Although changing our society which foments loneliness into one which creates connections won’t be a quick fix, there are inexpensive solutions to solving this problem and often the best place to start is with yourself and your own community.  

[dogandbooks]

More reasons why Tumblr should love Kamala Harris

Based on chapters 3-6 of her book The Truths We Hold

During the mortgage crisis she held out against the banks, inclduing having a shouting match on the phone with the JP Morgan CEO ('You're trying to steal from my shareholders!' 'My shareholders are the homeowners of California.. talk to them about who got robbed!'), to get Californians $20 billion, plus smaller settlements, instead of the $2-4 billion originally offered in settlement damages

The Bank of America counsel tried to sway her by talking about the terrible pain of the banks and their trauma. Kamala ripped her a new one

The JP Morgan counsel tried to bait her with 'a lot of voters would be happy if you settled.' She replied, 'Do I need to remind you this is a law enforcement action?'

She takes off her earrings when she's on the phone

She was willing to go door-to-door, person-by-person through the state senate to get the legislation preventing a repeat passed

When same-sex marriage was first allowed in 2004 she went to see the joyful couples in San Francisco waiting for the time when the marriages could begin - a city official asked her to help them perform the marraiges as they didn't have enough people for them all and she was 'delighted to be a part of it.'

She refused to defend Prop 8 in the courts, and followed it up to the Supreme Court when a group of individuals defended it instead, then when it was ruled that goup had no standing for their appeal, she pressured the Ninth Circuit to lift their stay as soon as possible

The first marriage after that was between two of the women who had contested Prop 8 - they asked Kamala to perform the ceremony them and she did

She understands the connection between education, poverty, and crime and worked to reduce elementary school truancy to stop the cycle. 'If we didn't see that child in elementary school, where they belonged, chances were we'd see them later in prison, in the hospital, or dead.'

'Political capital doesn't gain interest. You have to spend it to make a difference.'

She and Doug were set up by a friend of hers, he had precisely ZERO chill about it. 'The morning after our first date, Doug emailed me with all of his available dates for the next couple of months. "I'm too old to play games or hide the ball," the email read. "I really like you, and I want to see if we can make this work."'

She is friends with Doug's first wife and they used to attend the kids' school events together to cheer them on. The kids would invite her to more things than Doug and they call her 'Momala'

Sunday night dinner is her big thing for everyone to come together

She chose to run for senator to bring the work she had been doing in California to the national stage

Her campaign bus was called the 'Kamoji bus' because they painted an emoji version of her on it

'I tackled the race as I had every other, meeting as many people as I could, listening carefully to their concerns, mapping a plan of action to address them.'

She comfort/stress ate an entire family size bag of doritos election night 2016

A lifetime of going through customs as a woman of colour has her prepared, everything in order, and polished. Doug was casual. 'We had been raised in different realities. It was eye-opening for us both.'

She came into the senate prepared to ask tough questions of those who came before every committee she was on

She attended and spoke at the Women's March in 2017, arguing that every issue is a women's issue

She has zero qualms about calling cabinet members at home when she wants answers

Her first bill she introduced was to guarantee access to legal representation to anyone detained for trying to reach the United States

Her maiden speech in the senate was a defence of the good immigrants do, she fights for DACA, and was a co-sponsor of the DREAM Act

And she voted against it when it was tied to the border wall proposal in a funding bill, because 'How could I vote to build what would be little more than a monument, designed to send the cold, hard message "KEEP OUT"?'

As California attorney general she badgered law firms and corporate lawyers (including from Warner Bros and Disney) to donate time to representing children seeking asylum, and they did it

She was forcefully against the then-adminstration's policy of separating parents and children at the border, visited and exposed some of what was going on at the detention centres

'A society is judged by the way it treats its children--and history will judge us harshly for this. Most Americans know that already. Most Americans are appalled and ashamed. We are better than this. And we must make right the wrongs this administration has committed in our name.'

I recommend watching the debate if you haven't already, she had fun and some of her delightful takedowns are going to joyously live rent free in my head for years. Plus she showed herself to be capable, intelligent, and presidential.

Perhaps your followers would like reading this, @reallyndacarter?

Why Tumblr should love Kamala Harris

Based on things from her memoir The Truths We Hold

I am currently reading Kamala's book (which is excellent, by the way) and I feel like some people would appreciate her so much more if they knew this stuff.

Her parents literally met as part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s

She was brought to protests as a toddler, in a stroller, and her mom once had to run for safety while pushing her after counter-protest violence broke out

The first protest she organised herself was when she was still a child, to be permitted to play soccer in front of her apartment building. She won

She spent her weekends while at Howard University protesting apartheid in South Africa

She chose to become a prosecutor and then a district attorney and attorney general, and then politics, because of all the things she had protested and been an activist for - because someone on the inside needs to be there to meet the outside pressure and make the changes happen: 'When activists came marching and banging on the doors, I wanted to be on the other side to let them in.'

In her first campaign she would meet voters by standing outside grocery stores using an ironing board as a portable standing desk, with her campaign sign duct taped to it

'The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren't being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice. It is to recogise that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite plainly, is help.'

She changed the law so that people who paid to have sex with children could be charged with child sexual assault

She asked the question 'What if we gave people education, training and support instead of prison sentences?' and then created a programme to answer it with success by every single metric, including reducing reoffending from 50% to 10% and saving at least $40k per person per year of taxpayer money. And graduates of her programme got their records wiped to help them succeed long-term. It became a nationwide model programme.

She supports legalising pot - and also doing the research to understand its effects properly

'We also need to stop treating drug addiction like a public safety crisis instead of what it is: a public health crisis.'

'It's one thing to say black lives matter. But awareness and solidarity aren't enough. We need to accept hard truths about the systemic racism that has allowed this to happen. And we need to turn that understanding into policies and practices that can actually change it.'

She advocates for police reform to counter systemic racism and brutality

She acknowledges that intense pressure from outside opens up space on the inside for change- citing the example of the Black Lives Matter movement on making body cameras mandatory - 'the movement created an environment on the outside that helped give me the space to get it done on the inside. That's often how change happens. And I credit the movement for those reforms just as much as anyone else in my office, including me.'

This is just from the first two chapters. I'll add more as I keep reading.

@wilwheaton this feels like something your followers would enjoy?

[atlanticcanada]

N.S. child poverty dropped in 2020 due to pandemic-related financial support: report

A report has found that child poverty numbers in Nova Scotia dropped dramatically in 2020 -- an improvement that researchers say was driven by pandemic financial assistance.

The report, released Thursday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives based on Statistics Canada data, found that in 2020 Nova Scotia had a child poverty rate of 18.4 per cent, down from 24.3 per cent a year earlier.

Christine Saulnier, the Nova Scotia director of the think tank, said that the one-year drop in the number of children living below the poverty line in the province is "historic" and is directly tied to government financial support.

"It really tells us that significant investment makes a huge difference, and it can be done in a short time period," Saulnier said in an interview.

The report found that 14,500 Nova Scotian children would have been under the poverty line in 2020 if their families that not received pandemic government benefits, including the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and Canada Recovery Benefit. More than 569,000 Nova Scotians received some form of pandemic financial relief that year.

"Not only did the temporary pandemic benefits stop people from falling into poverty, it actually lifted almost 15,000 more children in Nova Scotia out of poverty," Saulnier said. "We've never seen our rates go down so much."

Of the more than $2 billion that Nova Scotians received in pandemic government assistance in 2020, 99 per cent came from Ottawa.

While Nova Scotia's child poverty rate dropped significantly between 2019 and 2020, the rate remains significantly higher than the national average of 13.5 per cent of children below the poverty line. Nova Scotia had the highest child poverty rate among the Atlantic provinces and the fourth highest rate Canada-wide, the report said.

As well, poverty rates in Nova Scotia were almost twice as high for racialized children, at 29.5 per cent, compared to a 15.8 per cent poverty rate for white children.

Child poverty rates are highest among immigrant children in Nova Scotia at 32.6 per cent, compared to 15.9 per cent of children who are not immigrants. This rate is significantly higher than the national average for immigrant children, which is 18.8 per cent.

Saulnier said the takeaway for the provincial and federal governments should be that significant financial support has the power to lift families and children out of poverty.

Child poverty "decreased a great deal in 2020, but 31,000 children were still living in poverty and likely there are more (children in poverty) today than in 2020," she said, adding that "it's clear that more people are struggling to make ends meet right now than there have been for a very long time" in Nova Scotia.

Feed Nova Scotia, which oversees food banks across the province, has said that in 2022 more than people ever relied on their food support services.

Saulnier said Nova Scotia should urgently raise its income support to keep up with inflation. She said the province's recent support, including the $100 monthly increase to the household rate for income assistance, is not enough.

"Because of inflation, that amount is immediately eaten up. The small changes don't make enough of a difference, and it means children are languishing in poverty," she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 9, 2023.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/MzyvEuq

[electronicwriter]

#Repost @rbreich • • • • • • By the way, a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion/year. That would be enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty and fund a global plan to end hunger. We can't afford NOT to tax the rich. https://www.instagram.com/p/CoP-qxOvJfJ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[tastydregs]

A 5% tax on the world's multimillionaires could lift 2 billion people out of poverty

Some of the world’s richest and most powerful people attend the World Economic Forum

Photo: Arnd Wiegmann (Reuters)

We hear a lot about the world’s wealthiest 1%, but just how big is the inequality gap and how can it be bridged? In a new report, British charity Oxfam attempted to answer that question in an update to their annual inequality report, titled “Survival of the richest.”

Published on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the annual gathering of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, Oxfam’s report calculates that “the richest 1% have bagged nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two years.”

In December 2022, the world’s billionaires counted $2 trillion losses to their collective net worths compared to the previous year, according to Forbes. But when counting the $1.9 trillion made between 2019 and 2020, and the $1.6 trillion earned over the course of 2021, the world’s richest people have gained $1.5 trillion in the past three years. In fact, Oxfam’s findings show that the ultra rich have captured half of all new wealth created in the past decade.

At this level of wealth, the Oxfam report calls for increased taxes on personal income as well as capital gains, contending that an annual tax of up to 5% on the world’s multimillionaires could raise $1.7 trillion, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty and start a fund to end global hunger.

How much are the rich paying in taxes, really?

3.4%: The effective tax rate of the 25 richest Americans between 2014 and 2018

20%: The minimum tax rate President Joe Biden proposed to impose on individuals with more than $100 million in net wealth. The proposal did not pass Congress amid threats of legal challenges.

G/O Media may get a commission

Up to $100 credit

Samsung Reserve

Reserve the next gen Samsung device All you need to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit for your preorder on a new Samsung device.

0.98%: What Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos paid in terms of a “true tax rate,” when factoring in unrealized capital gains, according to leaked tax returns from 2021.

$1 trillion: How much money a one-off tax on unrealized capital gains of just the 100 richest Americans could create. The Oxfam report points out that $1 trillion is more than five times the total official world development assistance in 2021, which was just $178.9 billion.

Inflation? The rich are more than keeping pace

According to Oxfam research, more than 1.7 billion workers worldwide saw inflation outpace their wages in 2022. This means that despite their wages going up, those workers can afford less than they could a year ago.

The charity points out that the companies that are most responsible for 2022’s increase in the cost of living, those in the food and energy sectors, more than doubled their profits in the past year, paying out $257 billion to shareholders. Meanwhile, over 800 million people reported not having enough to eat, a jump of 150 million people since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. This indicates the richest 1% are profiting from the rising cost of food and energy, creating wealth at record rates even amid a downturn in the economy.

With the United Nations reporting that human development fell in 9 out of 10 countries in the past year, Oxfam’s report suggests that the gap between the ultra rich and the rest of the world will only continue to grow unless action is taken to reform tax codes.

Related stories:

✏️ A 1.5% tax on billionaires could educate all the world’s children

💰 Musk’s attention shift from Tesla to Twitter is costing him the title of world’s richest person

📱 Science confirms rich people don’t really notice you—or your problems

[livingunderh20]

SINCE 1980 - THE RICHEST IN THE USA HAVE HAD THEIR TAX RATES SLASHED FROM 75% TO 27%

CORPORATIONS FROM 50% TO 25%

CORPORATE CEO PAY INCREASED BY 4000%

OIL AND CORPORATE PROFITS ARE AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS IN OVER 50 YEARS

IN 2017, THE US 1% RECEIVED THE LARGEST TAX “REFUND” IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

IF YOU VOTE REPUBLICAN...EXPECT TO LIVE IN THE HELLSCAPE TRAITOR TRUMP DESCRIBED DURING HIS INAUGURATION ‘EVENT’ IN 2018. EVERY CONSUMER PROTECTION, TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT, RELIEF FOR AVERAGE 90% TAXPAYERS IS DONE...

In the past decade, the richest 1% of people on Earth sucked up half of all new wealth. In 2020 and 2021, the richest 1% took nearly two-thirds of all new wealth – six times greater than the wealth made by the poorest 90% of the global population.

“Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million”, wrote Oxfam.

In the meantime, global poverty is getting worse, not better.

These shocking statistics were published in “Survival of the Richest“, a report authored by Oxfam, an international humanitarian organization dedicated to fighting poverty and hunger.

The document details how, while hundreds of billions of working people across the planet suffer from hunger, insecurity, rising costs of living, and decreasing wages, “The very richest have become dramatically richer and corporate profits have hit record highs, driving an explosion of inequality”.

Oxfam wrote:

Since     2020, the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth –     nearly twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population.

Billionaire     fortunes are increasing by $2.7bn a day, even as inflation outpaces the     wages of at least 1.7 billion workers, more than the population of India.

Food and     energy companies more than doubled their profits in 2022, paying out     $257bn to wealthy shareholders, while over 800 million people went to bed     hungry.

Only 4     cents in every dollar of tax revenue comes from wealth taxes, and half the     world’s billionaires live in countries with no inheritance tax on money     they give to their children.

A tax of     up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise     $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty, and     fund a global plan to end hunger.

Disingenuous Charlie Kirk frames debt ceiling while not mentioning House cuts would be to programs outside of federal spending [Social Security and Medicare]

He uses 'refuses to negotiate'. Get a clue. House bill will never pass Senate. You don't negotiate with terrorists, Charlie.

See how Robert Reich frames the Republicans both raising the deficit, then using the higher deficit as leverage for SS/Medicare cuts.

Conservative media reports a biased story, omits the bill will never pass, and omits Trump adding trillions to the deficit, mind you, a deficit Trump and Republicans were going to eliminate.

The GOP fiction is so incredibly deep, yet most who follow Charlie Kirk have no idea of the reality.

[sayedhusaini]

Blood in the Sand

Jeffrey D. Sachs | August 17, 2021 | Project Syndicate

For decades, the American political class has intervened relentlessly and recklessly in countries whose people they hold in contempt. And once again they are being aided by America’s credulous mass media, which is uniformly blaming the Taliban victory on Afghanistan’s incorrigible corruption.

NEW YORK – The magnitude of the United States’ failure in Afghanistan is breathtaking. It is not a failure of Democrats or Republicans, but an abiding failure of American political culture, reflected in US policymakers’ lack of interest in understanding different societies. And it is all too typical.

Almost every modern US military intervention in the developing world has come to rot. It’s hard to think of an exception since the Korean War. In the 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the US fought in Indochina – Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – eventually withdrawing in defeat after a decade of grotesque carnage. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and his successor, the Republican Richard Nixon, share the blame.

In roughly the same years, the US installed dictators throughout Latin America and parts of Africa, with disastrous consequences that lasted decades. Think of the Mobutu dictatorship in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba in early 1961, or of General Augusto Pinochet’s murderous military junta in Chile after the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973.

In the 1980s, the US under Ronald Reagan ravaged Central America in proxy wars to forestall or topple leftist governments. The region still has not healed.

Since 1979, the Middle East and Western Asia have felt the brunt of US foreign policy’s foolishness and cruelty. The Afghanistan war started 42 years ago, in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter’s administration covertly supported Islamic jihadists to fight a Soviet-backed regime. Soon, the CIA-backed mujahedeen helped to provoke a Soviet invasion, trapping the Soviet Union in a debilitating conflict, while pushing Afghanistan into what became a forty-year-long downward spiral of violence and bloodshed.

Across the region, US foreign policy produced growing mayhem. In response to the 1979 toppling of the Shah of Iran (another US-installed dictator), the Reagan administration armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his war on Iran’s fledgling Islamic Republic. Mass bloodshed and US-backed chemical warfare ensued. This bloody episode was followed by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and then two US-led Gulf Wars, in 1990 and 2003.

The latest round of the Afghan tragedy began in 2001. Barely a month after the terror attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush ordered a US-led invasion to overthrow the Islamic jihadists that the US had backed previously. His Democratic successor, President Barack Obama, not only continued the war and added more troops, but also ordered the CIA to work with Saudi Arabia to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, leading to a vicious Syrian civil war that continues to this day. As if that was not enough, Obama ordered NATO to oust Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, inciting a decade of instability in that country and its neighbors (including Mali, which has been destabilized by inflows of fighters and weapons from Libya).

What these cases have in common is not just policy failure. Underlying all of them is the US foreign-policy establishment’s belief that the solution to every political challenge is military intervention or CIA-backed destabilization.

That belief speaks to the US foreign-policy elite’s utter disregard of other countries’ desire to escape grinding poverty. Most US military and CIA interventions have occurred in countries that are struggling to overcome severe economic deprivation. Yet instead of alleviating suffering and winning public support, the US typically blows up the small amount of infrastructure the country possesses, while causing the educated professionals to flee for their lives.

Even a cursory look at America’s spending in Afghanistan reveals the stupidity of its policy there. According to a recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the US invested roughly $946 billion between 2001 and 2021. Yet almost $1 trillion in outlays won the US few hearts and minds.

Here’s why. Of that $946 billion, fully $816 billion, or 86%, went to military outlays for US troops. And the Afghan people saw little of the remaining $130 billion, with $83 billion going to the Afghan Security Forces. Another $10 billion or so was spent on drug interdiction operations, while $15 billion was for US agencies operating in Afghanistan. That left a meager $21 billion in “economic support” funding. Yet even much of this spending left little if any development on the ground, because the programs actually “support counterterrorism; bolster national economies; and assist in the development of effective, accessible, and independent legal systems.”

In short, less than 2% of the US spending on Afghanistan, and probably far less than 2%, reached the Afghan people in the form of basic infrastructure or poverty-reducing services. The US could have invested in clean water and sanitation, school buildings, clinics, digital connectivity, agricultural equipment and extension, nutrition programs, and many other programs to lift the country from economic deprivation. Instead, it leaves behind a country with a life expectancy of 63 years, a maternal mortality rate of 638 per 100,000 births, and a child stunting rate of 38%.

The US should never have intervened militarily in Afghanistan – not in 1979, nor in 2001, and not for the 20 years since. But once there, the US could and should have fostered a more stable and prosperous Afghanistan by investing in maternal health, schools, safe water, nutrition, and the like. Such humane investments – especially financed together with other countries through institutions such as the Asian Development Bank – would have helped to end the bloodshed in Afghanistan, and in other impoverished regions, forestalling future wars.

Yet American leaders go out of their way to emphasize to the American public that we won’t waste money on such trivialities. The sad truth is that the American political class and mass media hold the people of poorer nations in contempt, even as they intervene relentlessly and recklessly in those countries. Of course, much of America’s elite holds America’s own poor in similar contempt.

In the aftermath of the fall of Kabul, the US mass media is, predictably, blaming the US failure on Afghanistan’s incorrigible corruption. The lack of American self-awareness is startling. It’s no surprise that after trillions of dollars spent on wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and beyond, the US has nothing to show for its efforts but blood in the sand.

[irarelypostanything]

Billions

I’m about a season and a half through Billions, a TV series Wisecrack describes as “game theory gone wrong.”  They describe three seasons of conflict between Axe and Chuck as a drawn out Prisoner’s Dilemma - this is probably the kind of thing the writers intended, since they so frequently go out of their way to discuss games like Poker, Chess, and (a bit of a stretch to call it a game) Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Anyone else notice the hustler Chuck plays Chess against in season 2 is actually a cameo appearance by one of the most famous chess players in the world?

I like watching TV shows about superpowers.  I like watching people have gunfights, lift things with their minds, fight over overpowered stones with vague powers, and have lots of animated fight sequences.  Billions has none of that, and why would it?  In the world of drug cartels, your value might be dictated by whether or not you can have a gun pointed at your head and remain calm.  In the world of superpowers, you’re not much use if you don’t have a magic ring, a utility belt, genius-level intellect, or…

Okay I think I got a little off topic there.

Billions is carried by characters who have intelligence and charisma.  Instead of having to talk war strategy or win actual fights, these characters outmaneuver each other in the market and frequently reference popular games as their frame of reference.

Exactly when Axe appears, we have Ben.  Ben seems like a smug guy who’s smart on paper but nothing else; the deeper we go, the more we start to realize that he actually has traits Axe respects - mainly that he rises up from relative poverty.  Still, the most powerful characters in the show use more than just intelligence.  They understand psychology.  They pick their battles strategically.  And when push comes to shove, they know how to stand their ground.

Also, some if not all of them do illegal things to get ahead.

I know Taylor is a character of some controversy.  Some people love them, while others say their acting and writing is bad.  Maybe it’s a bit like Laurie in Silicon Valley, a character who wasn’t very popular likely because of how she a. Was probably introduced by the seat of the writers’ pants, as the character she more or less replaced was killed off unexpectedly...the actor for him died tragically

b. Is likely based on Marissa Mayer, who may or may not have been the best person to go with as a kind of “final antagonist”

For the most part, though, I’ve really enjoyed seeing Taylor.  Taylor is smart - we establish that immediately - they see things that even more seasoned people can’t.  But Taylor also understands psychology, and implements it into their strategy, and doesn’t waver when someone tries to bully them.  Taylor, simply put, has the very unique and incredibly underrated ability to see the motivations behind a person, what’s going on beneath the facade, and exploits this to win a Poker game with a 10-high by pretending to have “out-calculated” their opponent.

It’s already been 15 minutes.  Let me try to wrap up by talking a little more about game theory, broad strokes.

Feel free to comment if I’m wrong at this, but Chess isn’t really game theory - it’s more like calculation, and John von Neumann was much more interested in poker when he devised many of game theory’s core principles.  Chess is perfect information.  Poker is absolutely game theory.  Taylor wins by using their understanding of psychology, and not just superior strategy alone.

It’s a really interesting box you open up when you first learn about the game theory concept.  I think they do this really well in Crazy Rich Asians, and I’m kind of sad more people haven’t written about this.  So you have this character whose expertise is economics, demonstrated right at the beginning with a lecture hall poker game she plays.  You establish her rising and falling throughout the movie, until finally you have that final mahjong game.  There’s a superior hand and a much worse hand.  There’s an act of sacrifice.  The whole thing comes full circle.

If you have a compelling enough “game,” with its own players and adversaries and interesting rules, there’s no need for armor or dragons or ice zombies.  And if you have characters who have charisma and intelligence, and use it against each other, there’s no need for superpowers.

That’s Billions.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Kenyans from "the toughest neighborhood on earth" trace pixels all day to train autonomous vehicles

The Nairobi neighborhood of Kibera is Africa's largest slum, and it's home to an unlikely, Silicon-Valley-style tech park operated by Samasource (motto: "Artificial intelligence meets human dignity"), who serves clients from Google to Microsoft to Salesforce, using clickworkers who get paid $9/day, compared to the going wage of $2/day in the region's "informal economy" (the company believes that paying wages on par with rich-world clickworkers would "distort the local economy").

One major project at Samasource's Kibera office is producing training data for self-driving cars: workers carefully trace pixel-accurate outlines around road-features like signs, cars, license plates, etc.

There are many ways in which Samsource benefits Kibera: workers are paid a living wage and enjoy better working conditions than are standard in Kibera, and women make up about half of the workforce, and can take 90 days' maternity leave and use a lactation room when they return. Workers who leave Samasource continue to thrive, pursuing higher education and/or "more formal work."

But the work is still unpleasant in ways that are familiar from other places where this kind of work is done, from the poor ergonomics to the worker metric tools that encourage workers to skip breaks in order to make quota (Samasource said it would re-evaluate the ergonomics).

More problematic is that Kibera's residents are unlikely to benefit from self-driving cars at any time in the foreseeable future -- while they could benefit from much lower-tech interventions, like clean water and sanitation.

Samasource is a really good example of both the possibilities and limitations of the economic development for "lifting people out of poverty." Kenya is a rich country with many natural resources that has struggled with the legacy of colonialism: much of the wealth of the former colonizers can be traced to extraction from Kenya, and today, those colonizing powers turn a blind eye to the laundering of the billions extracted from the region by corrupt officials and businesspeople.

Samasource is an example of a single firm that is making a large, positive difference in the lives of the people who work for it -- but it is able to do so because it is making a much larger positive benefit to the bottom line of the most profitable corporations on earth -- corporations whose tax-dodging has contributed to falling levels of direct aid to the region, and whose tax-evasion tactics are shared by the region's looter class.

Samasource has a huge and laudable effect on a relatively small cohort of workers, and for that it deserves praise. But even a thousand Samasouces wouldn't make population-scale changes to the region -- unlike eliminating tax evasion, paying reparations that could be used to supply clean water and sanitation, and other nation-changing interventions.

Therein lies the problem: in an increasingly unequal world where inequality-producing markets are posed as the best (or only) tool for solving our problems, Samasource shows that the very best we can hope for is not nearly enough.

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/05/kibera-clickwork.html

[thevividgreenmoss]

The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labour system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide).  Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population.  This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country.   This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture.  This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population.  And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”.

All of this violence, and much more, gets elided in your narrative and repackaged as a happy story of progress.  And you say I’m the one possessed of romantic fairy tales.

The Maddison database on which you rely might tell us what the dispossessed gained in income (eventually), but it does not tell us whether those gains offset their loss of lands, commons, supportive communities, stable local economies.  And it tells us nothing about what global South economies might be like today had they been free to industrialize on their own terms (take the case of India, for instance).  

Let me be clear: this is not a critique of industrialization as such.  It is a critique of how industrialization was carried out during the period in question.  If people had willingly opted into the capitalist labour system, while retaining rights to their commons and while gaining a fair share of the yields they produced, we would have a very different story on our hands.  So let’s celebrate what industrialization has achieved – absolutely – but place it in proper context: colonization, violence, dispossession and all.  All we gain from ignoring this history is ignorance.

Now, to the present period.

You say that the “massive fall of global extreme poverty” is simply a neutral fact of the data.  But here again the data on this is more complex than you have ever acknowledged (I collaborated with Charles Kenny to review the basics here).  

The narrative that you and Gates peddle relies on a poverty line of $1.90 per day.  You are aware, I’m sure, that this line is not a neutral phenomenon, handed down by the gods or given in nature.  It was invented by people, is used for particular ends, and is hotly contested both inside and outside of academia.  Most scholars regard $1.90 as far too low to be meaningful, for reasons I have outlined in my work many times (see here and here).  See Reddy and Lahoti’s withering critique of the $1.90 methodology here.

Here are a few points to keep in mind.  Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty.  But note that the UN’s FAO says that 815 million people do not have enough calories to sustain even “minimal” human activity.  1.5 billion are food insecure, and do not have enough calories to sustain “normal” human activity.  And 2.1 billion suffer from malnutrition.  How can there be fewer poor people than hungry and malnourished people?  If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low – period.  It’s time for you and Gates to stop using it.  Lifting people above this line doesn’t mean lifting them out of poverty, “extreme” or otherwise.

Remember: $1.90 is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011.  The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).”  That goes beyond any definition of “extreme”.  It is patently absurd.  It is an insult to humanity.

...But what’s really at stake here for you, as your letter reveals, is the free-market narrative that you have constructed.  Your argument is that neoliberal capitalism is responsible for driving the most substantial gains against poverty.  This claim is intellectually dishonest, and unsupported by facts.  Here’s why:The vast majority of gains against poverty have happened in one region: East Asia.  As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have long pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation).  They liberalized, to be sure – but they did so gradually and on their own terms.  Not so for the rest of the global South.  Indeed, these policy options were systematically denied to them, and destroyed where they already existed.  From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed brutal structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive public resistance.  During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion.  In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty (to use your preferred method) increased, from 62% to 68%.  (For detailed economic data and references to the relevant literature, see Chapter 5 of The Divide). 

In other words, the imposition of neoliberal capitalism from 1980 to 2000 made the poverty rate worse, not better.  

Since 2000, the most impressive gains against poverty (outside of East Asia) have come from Latin America, according to the World Bank, coinciding with a series of left-wing or social democratic governments that came to power across the continent.  Whatever one might say about these governments (I have my own critiques), this doesn’t sit very well with your neoliberal narrative.

But there is something else that needs to be said here.  You and Gates like to invoke the poverty numbers to make claims about the legitimacy of the existing global economic system.  You say the system is working for the poor, so people should stop complaining about it.  

When it comes to assessing such a claim, it’s really neither absolute numbers nor proportions that matter.  What matters, rather, is the extent of global poverty vis-à-vis our capacity to end it.  As I have pointed out before, our capacity to end poverty (e.g., the cost of ending poverty as a proportion of the income of the non-poor) has increased many times faster than the proportional poverty rate has decreased (to use your preferred measure again).  By this metric we are doing worse than ever before.  Indeed, our civilization is regressing.  Why?  Because the vast majority of the yields of our global economy are being captured by the world’s rich.

As I pointed out in the Guardian piece, only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day.  You have neither acknowledged this as a problem nor attempted to defend it.  Instead you just ignore it, I suppose because it undermines your claims about how well the economy is working for poor people.

Here’s how well it’s working: on our existing trajectory, according to research published in the World Economic Review, it will take more than 100 years to end poverty at $1.90/day, and over 200 years to end it at $7.4/day.  Let that sink in.  And to get there with the existing system – in other words, without a fairer distribution of income – we will have to grow the global economy to 175 times its present size.  Even if such an outlandish feat were possible, it would drive climate change and ecological breakdown to the point of undermining any gains against poverty.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course.  We can end poverty right now simply by making the rules of our global economy fairer for the world’s majority (I describe how we can do this in The Divide, looking at everything from wages to debt to trade).  But that is an approach that you and Gates seem desperate to avoid, in favour of a blustering defense of the status quo.  

[aloeverawrites]

“A tax of up to 5 percent on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty.

The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today. During the past decade, the richest 1 percent had captured around half of all new wealth.”

““While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams. Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires —a roaring ‘20s boom for the world’s richest,” said Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International.

“Taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today’s overlapping crises. It’s time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow ‘trickling down’ to everyone else. Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn’t lift all ships —just the superyachts.”

“Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a “true tax rate” of about 3 percent between 2014 and 2018. Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40 percent.”

“Oxfam is calling on governments to:

Introduce one-off solidarity wealth taxes and windfall taxes to end crisis profiteering.

Permanently increase taxes on the richest 1 percent, for example to at least 60 percent of their income from labor and capital, with higher rates for multi-millionaires and billionaires. Governments must especially raise taxes on capital gains, which are subject to lower tax rates than other forms of income.

Tax the wealth of the richest 1 percent at rates high enough to significantly reduce the numbers and wealth of the richest people, and redistribute these resources. This includes implementing inheritance, property and land taxes, as well as net wealth taxes.”

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly-twice-much-wealth-rest-world-put-together-over-past-two-years

[phroyd]

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

The report is not the first to paint a grim portrait of Earth’s ecosystems. But it goes further by detailing how closely human well-being is intertwined with the fate of other species.

“For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake,” said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments. “But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries.”

A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.

But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling.

Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet’s land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.

The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for “transformative changes” that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture’s environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing.

“It’s no longer enough to focus just on environmental policy,” said Sandra M. Díaz, a lead author of the study and an ecologist at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. “We need to build biodiversity considerations into trade and infrastructure decisions, the way that health or human rights are built into every aspect of social and economic decision-making.”

Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox.

Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.“Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before,” the report concludes, estimating that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken.”

Unless nations step up their efforts to protect what natural habitats are left, they could witness the disappearance of 40 percent of amphibian species, one-third of marine mammals and one-third of reef-forming corals. More than 500,000 land species, the report said, do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival.

Over the past 50 years, global biodiversity loss has primarily been driven by activities like the clearing of forests for farmland, the expansion of roads and cities, logging, hunting, overfishing, water pollution and the transport of invasive species around the globe.

In Indonesia, the replacement of rain forest with palm oil plantations has ravaged the habitat of critically endangered orangutans and Sumatran tigers. In Mozambique, ivory poachers helped kill off nearly 7,000 elephants between 2009 and 2011 alone. In Argentina and Chile, the introduction of the North American beaver in the 1940s has devastated native trees (though it has also helped other species thrive, including the Magellanic woodpecker).

All told, three-quarters of the world’s land area has been significantly altered by people, the report found, and 85 percent of the world’s wetlands have vanished since the 18th century.

And with humans continuing to burn fossil fuels for energy, global warming is expected to compound the damage. Roughly 5 percent of species worldwide are threatened with climate-related extinction if global average temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the report concluded. (The world has already warmed 1 degree.)

“If climate change were the only problem we were facing, a lot of species could probably move and adapt,” Richard Pearson, an ecologist at the University College of London, said. “But when populations are already small and losing genetic diversity, when natural landscapes are already fragmented, when plants and animals can’t move to find newly suitable habitats, then we have a real threat on our hands.

The dwindling number of species will not just make the world a less colorful or wondrous place, the report noted. It also poses risks to people.

Today, humans are relying on significantly fewer varieties of plants and animals to produce food. Of the 6,190 domesticated mammal breeds used in agriculture, more than 559 have gone extinct and 1,000 more are threatened. That means the food system is becoming less resilient against pests and diseases. And it could become harder in the future to breed new, hardier crops and livestock to cope with the extreme heat and drought that climate change will bring.

“Most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” the report said. Biodiversity loss “can permanently reduce future options, such as wild species that might be domesticated as new crops and be used for genetic improvement.”

The report does contain glimmers of hope. When governments have acted forcefully to protect threatened species, such as the Arabian oryx or the Seychelles magpie robin, they have managed to fend off extinction in many cases. And nations have protected more than 15 percent of the world’s land and 7 percent of its oceans by setting up nature reserves and wilderness areas.

Still, only a fraction of the most important areas for biodiversity have been protected, and many nature reserves poorly enforce prohibitions against poaching, logging or illegal fishing. Climate change could also undermine existing wildlife refuges by shifting the geographic ranges of species that currently live within them.

So, in addition to advocating the expansion of protected areas, the authors outline a vast array of changes aimed at limiting the drivers of biodiversity loss.

Farmers and ranchers would have to adopt new techniques to grow more food on less land. Consumers in wealthy countries would have to waste less food and become more efficient in their use of natural resources. Governments around the world would have to strengthen and enforce environmental laws, cracking down on illegal logging and fishing and reducing the flow of heavy metals and untreated wastewater into the environment.

The authors also note that efforts to limit global warming will be critical, although they caution that the development of biofuels to reduce emissions could end up harming biodiversity by further destroying forests.

None of this will be easy, especially since many developing countries face pressure to exploit their natural resources as they try to lift themselves out of poverty.

But, by detailing the benefits that nature can provide to people, and by trying to quantify what is lost when biodiversity plummets, the scientists behind the assessment are hoping to help governments strike a more careful balance between economic development and conservation.

“You can’t just tell leaders in Africa that there can’t be any development and that we should turn the whole continent into a national park,” said Emma Archer, who led the group’s earlier assessment of biodiversity in Africa. “But we can show that there are trade-offs, that if you don’t take into account the value that nature provides, then ultimately human well-being will be compromised.”

In the next two years, diplomats from around the world will gather for several meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, to discuss how they can step up their efforts at conservation. Yet even in the new report’s most optimistic scenario, through 2050 the world’s nations would only slow the decline of biodiversity — not stop it.

“At this point,” said Jake Rice, a fisheries scientist who led an earlier report on biodiversity in the Americas, “our options are all about damage control.”

Phroyd