Before we drown, we may die of thirst

The island nation of Kiribati is one of the world's most vulnerable to rising sea levels. But residents may have to leave well before the ocean claims their homes.

Kenneth R. Weiss, 28 October 2015

High tide left its mark on the houses like a dirty ring in a bathtub. The flood crept into the village of Teaoraereke under the cover of darkness, sending filthy seawater sloshing through pigsties and shallow graves, and into people's homes.

Teaoraereke residents scrambled to retreat, hoisting sleeping children, sodden bedding and other belongings to higher ground. But some stayed put, including Rerema Kauria, a 63-year-old grandmother who was marooned just inches above the floodwaters on a raised platform bed. She was still there by mid-morning as the water receded, her possessions tucked into the rafters of her traditional house of wooden poles and thatch. She knew that when high tide returned that afternoon it would bring more flooding, but she gave a roaring laugh when asked if she had considered leaving. “Where would I go?”

The uncertain future of people such as Kauria has drawn attention to a collection of atolls in the central Pacific Ocean that make up the Republic of Kiribati (pronounced Keer-re-bahs). The average height of the country's 33 islands is little more than 2 metres above the ocean, which makes Kiribati acutely vulnerable to climate change. By the end of the century, melting polar ice and the thermal expansion of warmer seawater is expected to raise global ocean levels by perhaps 1 metre. That upsurge would, according to some predictions, displace many from Kiribati and millions of others around the world — and the water will keep going up.

For years, Kiribati President Anote Tong has sounded the alarm over his nation's plight, warning that residents would soon have to abandon their homeland. The flooding that hit Teaoraereke last year reinforces those dire predictions. Although it is impossible to know how much, if at all, climate change contributed to the flooding, village residents say that they have never before seen such inundation. To some of them, it seemed as if the swelling seas were starting to consume Kiribati and the end of the atoll might come sooner than they had thought.

But researchers who study Kiribati say that the situation is not a simple story of rising seas swallowing low-lying islands. In fact, some coastal experts dispute the idea that Kiribati will soon sink beneath the waves like a modern Atlantis. They have gathered evidence that many of these islands have been gaining ground in recent decades by capturing sediments from surrounding coral reefs. “It's just plain wrong to assume that all atolls are washing away,” says Arthur Webb, a coastal geomorphologist affiliated with the University of Wollongong in Australia who has spent two decades living and working in the Pacific Islands. “It's also wrong to sugar-coat the sobering facts that rising sea levels will ultimately seal the fate of low-lying islands and their limited soils and groundwater. The confusion isn't surprising. It's just more complicated than many expect.”

Even if Kiribati does not drown in the near future, its residents may soon need an exit strategy. Poverty, overcrowding and poor sanitation are galloping ahead of rising seas to deplete the islands' resources, especially their supply of clean fresh water. And residents' habits of altering the shoreline and removing coastal protections can magnify the impacts of the swelling oceans, leaving villages more exposed to flooding.

The story playing out on these tiny islands shows how difficult it is to tease out the impact of climate change from other human and environmental pressures. And what happens to the Kiribati people has implications for the hundreds of millions in low-lying coastal areas across the globe who will be threatened with flooding and displacement in coming decades. But unlike the residents of Miami, Guangzhou or Mumbai, the Kiribati people have no option of retreating inland or up-slope as their vulnerable flyspecks of land become uninhabitable. As Kauria says: where would they go?

At the mercy of the tides

From the air, Kiribati's Tarawa atoll emerges from the Pacific as narrow strands of land that join to form a wispy V shape. On the outside of the V is the deep blue of the ocean; inside are the aquamarine and turquoise waters of the shallow lagoon.

Tarawa is the capital of Kiribati, which is one of the most remote countries on Earth, located on the equator about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Its atolls are scattered across a patch of the Pacific the size of India, and yet they have a total of just 811 square kilometres of land, about half the size of Greater London.

When a plane lands on Tarawa, a crowd gathers at the airport, drawn by the excitement of the jet making the three-hour flight from Fiji. Aside from occasional freighters bringing canned food, this twice-weekly Fiji Airways flight provides the primary connection to the outside world.

The airport was built on relatively high ground, an elevation of 3 metres, in one of the atoll's widest sections. It happens to sit above the main subsurface reservoir, a freshwater layer floating on top of the seawater that presses against the porous island from all sides.

Although the sea presents an existential threat, the more immediate problem is not too much water, but too little — of the fresh, clean kind. A dozen of Kiribati's islands are deserted, too arid to support human habitation. Without enough replenishing rains, their thin lenses of groundwater turned brackish. On Tarawa, groundwater is heavily overdrawn and contaminated by the local practice of defecating on the beach or in the bushes. With little land, residents bury their relatives and raise pigs next to their homes, which also contributes to groundwater pollution.

Next to the road leading to the airport, a buried white plastic pipe that carries fresh water from the reservoir has been exposed in places, owing to erosion by waves and tides. Public workers have fought back by using old tyres filled with concrete to hold it in place. They have had less success keeping locals from tapping illegally into the waterline, directing the flow into hand-dug wells for their homes. Water supplies are so limited that authorities turn on the airport's groundwater pumps for only a couple of hours every other day.

The perils of water, both sweet and salty, are intertwined with Tarawa's history, says George Fraser, high commissioner to Kiribati from Australia, which is the biggest provider of international support to the developing nation. In one of the bloodier clashes in the Pacific during the Second World War, US commanders misjudged the tides and landing craft got stuck on the reef, forcing marines to wade through chest-deep water under heavy Japanese fire.

Fraser deconstructs that infamous battle as he takes a tour of the island the day before the king tide that flooded Teaoraereke. A fast and confident driver, Fraser weaves his small sport utility vehicle around wobbly wheeled trucks, dodging potholes. In narrow spots, the atoll's main road is soaked with seawater and he swerves to avoid a wave splashing over a concrete berm. “Some people use calendars to get through the week,” he says. “We use tide charts.”

The road is the only paved one on the atoll. It crosses a series of causeways that have been battered by wheels and waves; road crews repair cavities, stuffing them with as much concrete and sand as possible to slow the decay. The Australian government has bankrolled much of a repaving project along the length of South Tarawa.

As Australia's top representative, Fraser has a keen sense of the various challenges that this poor country faces in coming decades, and how they stack up. “If you look at rising sea levels as the train coming down the track, it's a couple of kilometres away,” he says. “If you look at what's 100 metres down the track, it's no water, and right behind it is no food.”

More than half of Kiribati's 110,000 residents live on Tarawa, and their numbers are rapidly increasing as more arrive from outer islands seeking jobs, cash and better schools. Many were subsistence fishers and farmers on their home islands, struggling with depleted fisheries and poor soil damaged by periodic over-wash of salt water. When they get to Tarawa, they often end up jobless or underemployed.

The Kiribati culture is communal, with families accustomed to bedding down together on woven mats on the floor. It is taboo to refuse the request of a relative, so households often pack dozens of extended family members from other islands under one roof. That has made South Tarawa one of the most densely packed places in the Pacific; its clusters of shanties resemble slums in the poorest capitals of Africa and Asia. Factoring in high birth rates and ongoing urbanization, the government projects that the population of the island will almost double in 15 years. The new Battle of Tarawa will be over where all these people will live.

The incredible shrinking island

Today's scientific debate about whether Kiribati is growing or shrinking can be traced to Charles Darwin — who first worked out how coral atolls form. While sailing the Pacific on the HMS Beagle in the 1830s, he theorized that these curiously shaped sand islands are produced by coral reefs that sprouted on the slopes of volcanic islands and have continued to grow as the volcanoes sink into the abyss. He was proved right a century later, when scientists drilled into an atoll and hit volcanic rock.

Over the millennia, the exoskeletons of millions of tiny coral animals fuse with coralline algae and the shells of molluscs and other sea creatures to form limestone reefs, often arranged in a circle with a shallow lagoon in the middle. Living corals grow on the fringes of these limestone platforms. As the crest of the living reef reaches close to the ocean surface, waves break some of it into rubble and sand that gets deposited on the dead limestone platform to form land.

The atolls that exist today are the survivors, ones in which coral reefs kept pace with rising seas and the subsidence of the undersea volcano. The pressing issue is, what will become of those atolls as sea levels start rising faster? Researchers wonder whether corals can keep up, given the host of environmental problems they face. In many places, overfishing and nutrient pollution have triggered the growth of coral-killing bacteria and algae. Abnormally warm seawater is causing 'bleaching' die-offs throughout the tropics, and as ocean water takes up more carbon dioxide and acidifies, it will be harder for coral polyps to build rugged exoskeletons.

Around Tarawa, the coral reefs are in particularly poor shape, says Simon Donner, a climatologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who has done diving surveys. “Coral cover is lower than you'd expect around the island,” he says. “That's the legacy of pollution, sewage mostly, and frequent bleaching events in the past 20 years.”

To help predict how corals may fare in the future, Dennis Hubbard, a geologist at Oberlin college in Ohio, and his colleagues have been peering into the past, amassing a database of sediment core samples obtained by drilling into limestone beneath coral reefs. With carbon dating, they can determine how quickly these reefs have grown: in yet-to-be-published work, they have found that more than half of the world's coral reefs grew more slowly over the past 10,000 years than sea levels are rising today. Extrapolating forward, those results suggest that only half of all atolls in existence today have a chance of keeping pace with rising seas under the best of conditions, he says. “Given that this was in a time with no human impact, we feel this is the most optimistic scenario possible.”

Not so fast

Kiribati and other low-lying island nations have long been held up as the countries most susceptible to the ravages of rising seas. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted predictions that two-thirds of Kiribati and the nearby Marshall Islands would be inundated by a sea rise of 80 centimetres.

But the idea that these atolls will disappear any time soon has been challenged by Paul Kench, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Auckland. He and his colleagues have pored over satellite images, comparing new and old aerial photographs to see how such islands have changed.

In a 2010 study, he and Webb determined that 23 out of 27 atoll islands scattered across Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia had either increased in area or remained stable in recent decades. The results, they reported, “contradict widespread perceptions that all reef islands are eroding in response to recent sea level rise”. The researchers concluded that these islands are more “resilient landforms” than previously thought. The study created a media stir in the region and beyond. It has been widely cited by climate-change sceptics seeking to punch holes in research on global warming and its impacts.

Kench recognizes the powerful forces of climate change but complains that too many scientists and activists focus solely on rising sea levels while ignoring the other part of the equation: how the land responds. “There are a lot of claims that islands are passive geological entities that will sit there and drown,” he says. “Our work shows that they are anything but static. They are dynamic. They move around and they can grow. So just because sea level is rising, it doesn't mean doom and gloom for all atolls.”

He also believes that most scientists make a mistake by tethering the fate of atoll islands to the health of surrounding coral reefs. Even if reefs die, he says, they can provide sufficient sediment to maintain islands for a century or more.

But Hubbard considers Kench's views shortsighted. “If you run out of reefs, you run out of sediment, and once you run out of sediment, you run out of islands,” he says. “A lot of this is a semantics issue, challenging when the reef island is going to be physically underwater. Those reef islands are going to be abandoned long before that because they are uninhabitable.”

On Tarawa and other Kiribati islands (see 'Isolated islands'), most people do not dwell on such matters, going about their daily lives just like residents of other countries. But their president has earned international recognition for speaking out on the threats of climate change.

In an interview, Tong dismisses those who suggest that atolls are resilient to rising seas, saying that they have the luxury of “talking from the top of a mountain” and not putting their lives on the line. “These people are not living here. Their grandchildren will not be living here. If they believe that, let them come here,” he says, pounding his fist on a chair armrest for emphasis. “I'd rather plan for the worst and hope for the best.”

Tong has told his people that they must prepare to leave, seeding the idea of an early “migration with dignity”, rather than fleeing as refugees when storm-generated waves wash over the islands. Last year, his government completed an US$8-million purchase of 22 square kilometres of hilly land in Fiji, to grow food and provide possible refuge for some of his people — although it will not accommodate all of them. He does not know when people will need to migrate, but he wants to purchase more land in Australia and New Zealand, saying that it is much cheaper than trying to build sea walls and other defences. “If we build up these lands, it's going to cost billions of dollars,” he says. “We might as well be buying land for millions of dollars elsewhere.”

Developing challenges

For nearly a week after Teaoraereke flooded, resident Matua Kamori worked alongside his neighbours to build a makeshift sea wall where the high tide had breached a sand berm on the beach. Villagers piled up chunks of coral scavenged from the shore and grouted them together with cement donated by a local church.

Kamori, 33, lives in the village with his wife and 4 kids on a small parcel of land given to him by his wife's uncle in exchange for looking after one of his sons. To prepare the land, Kamori spent months scouring sand and coral gravel off the beach and hauling it to the site with nothing more than a rice sack. Over time, he fashioned a building pad half a metre high and constructed a hand-hewn traditional house of wood and thatch on it. Such beach mining is rampant on Tarawa, according to household surveys. Government studies show that it increases the likelihood of flooding by lowering the protective sand berm that keeps the highest tides at bay.

In the case of the recent inundation, Kamori says that he fared better than most: the water reached calf-deep in his house, rather than thigh-high. But nothing could be done to stop the briny stew of salt water, mixed with human and animal waste, from polluting his well or killing his garden of vegetables and banana and papaya trees.

Kamori says that he settled on the land because he had nowhere else to go. As crowding increases, new settlements are pushing into vulnerable lowlands, places they historically would have avoided.

The individual actions of settlers such as Kamori are only part of the problem on Tarawa. Large-scale construction projects over the years have also exacerbated flooding and erosion, says Naomi Biribo, Kiribati's secretary of fisheries and marine resources development. Biribo earned a PhD in Australia by examining the impact of the sea walls and other human structures on Tarawa. The construction of causeways, rather than bridges, to connect the islets had the effect of closing channels and disrupting the flow of sediment that normally resupply some eroding coastlines, she found. Reclamation projects that create new land are another problem: although such efforts have added hundreds of hectares to Tarawa, they accelerate erosion elsewhere, says Biribo.

For Tarawa residents, she says, the thin ribbons of land leave little room to move. “In many places on Tarawa, you can stand in the middle and you can see the ocean on one side and still see lagoon on the other side,” she says. “If we retreat from the ocean side, and institute a setback, we will fall into the lagoon.”

Biribo's work suggests that sea-level rise may be having a small influence on the shoreline changes happening today, but nothing compared to human activities and the seasonal variations in erosive tides and waves in the Pacific that come with the El Niño periods of warming and La Niña cooling.

Donner agrees that climate change has been dwarfed by other factors so far. “You cannot blame the flooding on sea-level rise,” he says. “At least not yet.”

Where does this leave residents of Kiribati? Webb has long wrestled with that question. He is married to a woman from Tarawa, and they own a house there, where they live with their children for part of the year.

Webb was also a lead author of the small-islands chapter of the IPCC's fifth assessment report in 2014, which found that rising seas present “severe sea flood and erosion risks for low-lying coastal areas and atoll islands”. It highlighted one projection that a 50-centimetre rise in sea level could displace 1.2 million people from low-lying islands in the Caribbean Sea and the Indian and Pacific oceans; that number almost doubles if the sea level rises by 2 metres. And yet, the latest assessment steered clear of the IPCC's previous assertion that an 80-centimetre rise would inundate two-thirds of Kiribati.

Scientific understanding of atoll geology has sharpened since that earlier projection. Webb expects some remnants of Tarawa to remain a century or two from now, but probably no more than some wave-washed gravel banks — and by that point, everyone will have long gone.

The geological evidence does not get to the key human question about the destiny of these Pacific islanders. That leaves Webb facing a difficult question — one he hears from his own Kiribati-born teenagers. “How long do we have?” they ask. To that, he replies: “Your children will not grow old in the atolls.”

Nature

526,

624–627

(29 October 2015)

Why Elephants Rarely Get Cancer

Why Elephants Rarely Get Cancer

Why elephants rarely get cancer is a mystery that has stumped scientists for decades. A study led by researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah and Arizona State University, and including researchers from the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation, may have found the answer.

According to the results, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and determined over the course of several years and a unique collaboration between HCI, Primary Children’s Hospital, Utah’s Hogle Zoo, and the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation, elephants have 38 additional modified copies (alleles) of a gene that encodes p53, a well-defined tumor suppressor, as compared to humans, who have only two. Further, elephants may have a more robust mechanism for killing damaged cells that are at risk for becoming cancerous. In isolated elephant cells, this activity is doubled compared to healthy human cells, and five times that of cells from patients with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, who have only one working copy of p53 and more than a 90 percent lifetime cancer risk in children and adults. The results suggest extra p53 could explain elephants’ enhanced resistance to cancer.

“Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer. It’s up to us to learn how different animals tackle the problem so we can adapt those strategies to prevent cancer in people,” says co-senior author Joshua Schiffman, M.D., pediatric oncologist at Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah School of Medicine, and Primary Children’s Hospital.

According to Schiffman, elephants have long been considered a walking conundrum. Because they have 100 times as many cells as people, they should be 100 times more likely to have a cell slip into a cancerous state and trigger the disease over their long life span of 50 to 70 years. And yet it’s believed that elephants get cancer less often, a theory confirmed in this study. Analysis of a large database of elephant deaths estimates a cancer mortality rate of less than 5 percent compared to 11 to 25 percent in people.

In search of an explanation, the scientists combed through the African elephant genome and found at least 40 copies of genes that code for p53, a protein well known for its cancer-inhibiting properties. DNA analysis provides clues as to why elephants have so many copies, a substantial increase over the two found in humans. The vast majority, 38 of them, are so-called retrogenes, modified duplicates that have been churned out over evolutionary time.

***********************

Why is this article of such interest to me? It doesn't take much imagination to see a near-distant future where humans have these anti-cancer genes inserted into the DNA of their eggs and/or sperm prior to conception, so that the resulting offspring have a greatly reduced likelihood of developing cancer. At present, many people are concerned about the ethical and other implications of genetic modification (GM) of foods and non-human animals. When the Chinese or Indians start experimenting with GM humans and succeed, the market potential for this new technology will see many would-be parents lining up to give their children as good as start in life as the parents can afford. 

What’s Driving the Influx of Migrants and Refugees to the West?

What’s Driving the Influx of Migrants and Refugees to the West?

Victor Davis Hanson

June 4, 2015

Tuscany - Northern and central Italy are not on the southern Mediterranean. But somehow thousands of refugees from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are everywhere here - as is true of much of the European Union. Some sleep on park benches. Many peddle knock-off electronic goods and counterfeit watches. Angry Italians shoo away refugee beggars from tour groups.

The Greek islands near the coast of Turkey are likewise flooded this summer with dispossessed refugees from countries such as Afghanistan and Syria. Apparently a bankrupt Greek government lacks the resources to patrol its vast coastline. Some beleaguered Greeks assume that thousands of boat people and homeless refugees will eventually leave their makeshift camps and head northward to the wealthier homelands of Greece’s Northern European creditors.

A similar rush has overwhelmed America’s southern border. In the last two years, tens of thousands of Central American and Mexican citizens have sensed that the Obama administration has suspended border enforcement. Illegal entry into the United States won’t result in punishment, but instead in an array of social services unimaginable in Latin America.

So, what explains this constant rush of the world’s poor families into the West? And why aren’t China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba, for example, flooded with illegal entrants?

The human exodus to Western countries is not always explained by a lack of natural wealth elsewhere. Iraq and Venezuela, for example, are awash in oil. Mexico has lots of oil, minerals, and fertile soil. Wars may have driven scores of Afghans, North Africans, and Syrians from their homelands to the West, but most of Latin America is at relative peace.

The allure of the West is certainly not due to Europeans’ and Americans’ constantly brainwashing the world about their supposedly superior culture. Just the opposite is true. American media and universities constantly harangue about the race, class, and gender shortcomings of Western civilization. President Obama has retold countless Western historical sins and offered apologies for them while abroad.

Nor are Western economies currently booming and thus short of labor. The European Union faces massive debt. America never quite recovered from the Great Recession of 2008–09 and is currently experiencing negative economic growth. Many immigrants arrive without expectation of joining the labor force.

Nor do millions of refugees hear nice things about the West from their own governments. Refuges flood the West not just for economic opportunity but also for Western-style freedom. State media throughout Latin America routinely trash Yanqui neo-imperialism and arrogance. The Middle East is one big anti-American megaphone that constantly ridicules Western decadence as the antithesis of Islamic decorum.

So why, then, do millions risk their lives to get into America, Europe, and other Western nations by hook or by crook? The Western poor enjoy a level of state support and access to technology, health care, and security that would make them relatively rich in the Third World. Even a poor foreign-born peddler in Florence, Italy, has access to clean water and is safe in a way unknown to most residents of Syria or Afghanistan.

In the West, sexism means something like the glass ceiling that makes it harder for professional women with children to match the career trajectories of their alpha corporate male counterparts. Not so in the non-West, where women are not always even guaranteed a right to vote or to divorce. At worst, gender bias is a matter of genital mutilation, arranged marriages, and sexual slavery.

Gays demonstrate over the right to marry in the West; in Iran they can be stoned to death. There may be riots in Baltimore and soccer thuggery in Britain. But that is child’s play in comparison to the medieval environment elsewhere in the world. Boko Haram has carried out massacres and other atrocities in North Africa. The Islamic State films its near-daily prehistoric beheadings. Critics of the North Korean government end up dead.

Refuges flood the West not just for economic opportunity but also for Western-style freedom. The state restricts free speech in China and in much of the Middle East. Academics in the West may preach past U.S. sins to impressionable 18-year-old students. But refugees from Latin America assume that once they cross the border into the U.S., they will have freedoms, legal protections, compassionate social services - and respect - of the sort that is impossible at home.

Millions have decided that it is far better to be immigrants of illegal status in America than native-born citizens inside Mexico. What, then, explains the magnetic attraction of the often-criticized West? Add up the right to free expression, human rights, religious tolerance, constitutional government, an independent judiciary, separation of church and state, free-market economics and the protection of private property - and everyday life becomes simply far better.

There is one final irony. The richer, freer, and more technologically pampering that life becomes for self-critical native Westerners, the whinier they become - as if their West is not good because it is not perfect.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

September 7, 2015 

Editor's Note: To mark Labor Day, we are republishing Stratfor founder George Friedman's essay on how the American middle class — one of the country's core values — is steadily losing ground. This analysis was originally published in January 2013, when unemployment in the United States was hovering around 8 percent and recovery from the 2008-2009 financial crisis was still tenuous.

Bernie's comment: there are many similarities between the USA and Australia. While the differences are not unimportant, one has to ask whether Australia is traveling down a similar path to the USA and, if so, how long until the nation's social cohesion begins to unwind.

Analysis

By George Friedman
When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.
At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends. The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.

The Crisis of the American Middle Class

The median household income of Americans in 2011 was $49,103. Adjusted for inflation, the median income is just below what it was in 1989 and is $4,000 less than it was in 2000. Take-home income is a bit less than $40,000 when Social Security and state and federal taxes are included. That means a monthly income, per household, of about $3,300. It is urgent to bear in mind that half of all American households earn less than this. It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner — normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker — and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.
Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher. At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and closing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.

And this is for the median. Those below him — half of all households — would be shut out of what is considered middle-class life, with the house, the car and the other associated amenities. Those amenities shift upward on the scale for people with at least $70,000 in income. The basics might be available at the median level, given favorable individual circumstance, but below that life becomes surprisingly meager, even in the range of the middle class and certainly what used to be called the lower-middle class.

The Expectation of Upward Mobility

I should pause and mention that this was one of the fundamental causes of the 2007-2008 subprime lending crisis. People below the median took out loans with deferred interest with the expectation that their incomes would continue the rise that was traditional since World War II. The caricature of the borrower as irresponsible misses the point. The expectation of rising real incomes was built into the American culture, and many assumed based on that that the rise would resume in five years. When it didn't they were trapped, but given history, they were not making an irresponsible assumption.
American history was always filled with the assumption that upward mobility was possible. The Midwest and West opened land that could be exploited, and the massive industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries opened opportunities. There was a systemic expectation of upward mobility built into American culture and reality.

The Great Depression was a shock to the system, and it wasn't solved by the New Deal, nor even by World War II alone. The next drive for upward mobility came from post-war programs for veterans, of whom there were more than 10 million. These programs were instrumental in creating post-industrial America, by creating a class of suburban professionals. There were three programs that were critical:

1. The GI Bill, which allowed veterans to go to college after the war, becoming professionals frequently several notches above their parents.
2. The part of the GI Bill that provided federally guaranteed mortgages to veterans, allowing low and no down payment mortgages and low interest rates to graduates of publicly funded universities.
3. The federally funded Interstate Highway System, which made access to land close to but outside of cities easier, enabling both the dispersal of populations on inexpensive land (which made single-family houses possible) and, later, the dispersal of business to the suburbs.

There were undoubtedly many other things that contributed to this, but these three not only reshaped America but also created a new dimension to the upward mobility that was built into American life from the beginning. Moreover, these programs were all directed toward veterans, to whom it was acknowledged a debt was due, or were created for military reasons (the Interstate Highway System was funded to enable the rapid movement of troops from coast to coast, which during World War II was found to be impossible). As a result, there was consensus around the moral propriety of the programs.

The subprime fiasco was rooted in the failure to understand that the foundations of middle class life were not under temporary pressure but something more fundamental. Where a single earner could support a middle class family in the generation after World War II, it now took at least two earners. That meant that the rise of the double-income family corresponded with the decline of the middle class. The lower you go on the income scale, the more likely you are to be a single mother. That shift away from social pressure for two parent homes was certainly part of the problem.

Re-engineering the Corporation

But there was, I think, the crisis of the modern corporation. Corporations provided long-term employment to the middle class. It was not unusual to spend your entire life working for one. Working for a corporation, you received yearly pay increases, either as a union or non-union worker. The middle class had both job security and rising income, along with retirement and other benefits. Over the course of time, the culture of the corporation diverged from the realities, as corporate productivity lagged behind costs and the corporations became more and more dysfunctional and ultimately unsupportable. In addition, the corporations ceased focusing on doing one thing well and instead became conglomerates, with a management frequently unable to keep up with the complexity of multiple lines of business.

For these and many other reasons, the corporation became increasingly inefficient, and in the terms of the 1980s, they had to be re-engineered — which meant taken apart, pared down, refined and refocused. And the re-engineering of the corporation, designed to make them agile, meant that there was a permanent revolution in business. Everything was being reinvented. Huge amounts of money, managed by people whose specialty was re-engineering companies, were deployed. The choice was between total failure and radical change. From the point of view of the individual worker, this frequently meant the same thing: unemployment. From the view of the economy, it meant the creation of value whether through breaking up companies, closing some of them or sending jobs overseas. It was designed to increase the total efficiency, and it worked for the most part.

This is where the disjuncture occurred. From the point of view of the investor, they had saved the corporation from total meltdown by redesigning it. From the point of view of the workers, some retained the jobs that they would have lost, while others lost the jobs they would have lost anyway. But the important thing is not the subjective bitterness of those who lost their jobs, but something more complex.

As the permanent corporate jobs declined, more people were starting over. Some of them were starting over every few years as the agile corporation grew more efficient and needed fewer employees. That meant that if they got new jobs it would not be at the munificent corporate pay rate but at near entry-level rates in the small companies that were now the growth engine. As these companies failed, were bought or shifted direction, they would lose their jobs and start over again. Wages didn't rise for them and for long periods they might be unemployed, never to get a job again in their now obsolete fields, and certainly not working at a company for the next 20 years.

The restructuring of inefficient companies did create substantial value, but that value did not flow to the now laid-off workers. Some might flow to the remaining workers, but much of it went to the engineers who restructured the companies and the investors they represented. Statistics reveal that, since 1947 (when the data was first compiled), corporate profits as a percentage of gross domestic product are now at their highest level, while wages as a percentage of GDP are now at their lowest level. It was not a question of making the economy more efficient — it did do that — it was a question of where the value accumulated. The upper segment of the wage curve and the investors continued to make money. The middle class divided into a segment that entered the upper-middle class, while another faction sank into the lower-middle class.

American society on the whole was never egalitarian. It always accepted that there would be substantial differences in wages and wealth. Indeed, progress was in some ways driven by a desire to emulate the wealthy. There was also the expectation that while others received far more, the entire wealth structure would rise in tandem. It was also understood that, because of skill or luck, others would lose.

What we are facing now is a structural shift, in which the middle class' center, not because of laziness or stupidity, is shifting downward in terms of standard of living. It is a structural shift that is rooted in social change (the breakdown of the conventional family) and economic change (the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage).

The inherent crisis rests in an increasingly efficient economy and a population that can't consume what is produced because it can't afford the products. This has happened numerous times in history, but the United States, excepting the Great Depression, was the counterexample.

Obviously, this is a massive political debate, save that political debates identify problems without clarifying them. In political debates, someone must be blamed. In reality, these processes are beyond even the government's ability to control. On one hand, the traditional corporation was beneficial to the workers until it collapsed under the burden of its costs. On the other hand, the efficiencies created threaten to undermine consumption by weakening the effective demand among half of society.

The Long-Term Threat

The greatest danger is one that will not be faced for decades but that is lurking out there. The United States was built on the assumption that a rising tide lifts all ships. That has not been the case for the past generation, and there is no indication that this socio-economic reality will change any time soon. That means that a core assumption is at risk. The problem is that social stability has been built around this assumption — not on the assumption that everyone is owed a living, but the assumption that on the whole, all benefit from growing productivity and efficiency.

If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated. Other superpowers such as Britain or Rome did not have the idea of a perpetually improving condition of the middle class as a core value. The United States does. If it loses that, it loses one of the pillars of its geopolitical power.

The left would argue that the solution is for laws to transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class. That would increase consumption but, depending on the scope, would threaten the amount of capital available to investment by the transfer itself and by eliminating incentives to invest. You can't invest what you don't have, and you won't accept the risk of investment if the payoff is transferred away from you.

The agility of the American corporation is critical. The right will argue that allowing the free market to function will fix the problem. The free market doesn't guarantee social outcomes, merely economic ones. In other words, it may give more efficiency on the whole and grow the economy as a whole, but by itself it doesn't guarantee how wealth is distributed. The left cannot be indifferent to the historical consequences of extreme redistribution of wealth. The right cannot be indifferent to the political consequences of a middle-class life undermined, nor can it be indifferent to half the population's inability to buy the products and services that businesses sell.

The most significant actions made by governments tend to be unintentional. The GI Bill was designed to limit unemployment among returning serviceman; it inadvertently created a professional class of college graduates. The VA loan was designed to stimulate the construction industry; it created the basis for suburban home ownership. The Interstate Highway System was meant to move troops rapidly in the event of war; it created a new pattern of land use that was suburbia.

It is unclear how the private sector can deal with the problem of pressure on the middle class. Government programs frequently fail to fulfill even minimal intentions while squandering scarce resources. The United States has been a fortunate country, with solutions frequently emerging in unexpected ways.

It would seem to me that unless the United States gets lucky again, its global dominance is in jeopardy. Considering its history, the United States can expect to get lucky again, but it usually gets lucky when it is frightened. And at this point it isn't frightened but angry, believing that if only its own solutions were employed, this problem and all others would go away. I am arguing that the conventional solutions offered by all sides do not yet grasp the magnitude of the problem — that the foundation of American society is at risk — and therefore all sides are content to repeat what has been said before.

People who are smarter and luckier than I am will have to craft the solution. I am simply pointing out the potential consequences of the problem and the inadequacy of all the ideas I have seen so far.

How Science is Changing Agriculture - 'gene edited' rather than 'genetically modified'

From Stratfor
August 3, 2015

In geopolitics, we often take the wide-lens view, looking at the impersonal, sweeping factors that limit the influence of individuals. Yet the microscopic — genes and their manipulations — and the deeply personal still have the potential to affect the behaviors of nations in the years and decades to come. As gene-editing techniques continue to improve and new gene functions are uncovered, the agricultural industry is poised to benefit. And while the United States will remain a world leader in agricultural biotechnology, China will likely become more competitive as well.

Farmers have been selectively breeding for desirable qualities long before the genes behind these qualities were identified. It was only when transgenic crops, in which a foreign gene is inserted into the plant's DNA, began to be used commercially in the 1990s that the term "genetically modified organism," or GMO, became part of the common lexicon on food. This first generation of genetic engineering, which focused on pest resistance and herbicide tolerance, is not the future of the industry. Genetic engineering is likely to focus on the assurance of more desirable traits, such as drought resistance and nitrogen uptake, and is not going away despite the social stigma associated with GMOs in some areas of the world. Advancements in biological techniques over the course of the last several years and a better understanding of various plant genomes have increased the ability to control these desired traits. Gene editing will be a necessary tool for future advancements in agricultural biotechnology and can save time over traditional crossbreeding methods. Mildew-resistant wheat and an herbicide-tolerant canola are just two examples in which gene editing is already being used.
 
Gene-edited crops are poised to enter the North American commercial market in the very near future: A gene-edited crop will enter the Canadian market in 2016. With a solid foundation in the academic world and a favorable entrepreneurial environment, the United States is set to remain a world leader in gene editing. The favorable rulings by the U.S. Department of Agriculture mean that gene-edited crops will be able to enter the market faster than their GMO counterparts.

The ambiguity in European legislation on gene-edited crops will likely delay commercialization in Europe because gene-edited crops are classified as GMOs in Europe, a traditionally hostile market. This is not to say that the Europeans will not make strides in gene editing at all. The industrial biotechnology sector in Europe is already well established, and with wider support to increase the environmental friendliness of many manufacturing processes, industrial biotechnology is likely to drive many of the advances toward further commercialization and advancement of gene-editing technology in Europe.

Additionally, China's burgeoning agricultural biotechnology sector will probably fully use the techniques. Chinese labs have already demonstrated less hesitation to attempt gene editing in human cells. Still, the United States will remain at the forefront of the movement. The sheer number of patents related to the field will make it difficult for any single nation to supplant Washington as a world leader in agricultural biotechnology.