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The World Economic Forum is promoting a new economic model that could help end inequality. Like the doughnut it resembles, it looks appealing, but has no nutritional value. It is empty at its core and in practice will benefit nobody other than corrupt politicians and their cronies.

On the eve of the World Economic Forum on Africa (WEF-Africa), held in Durban last week, the group of government jetsetters and their rich cronies unveiled a doughnut. They called it a new economic model that could help end inequality. Heres what it looks like:

The image is described as follows: The hole at the Doughnuts centre reveals the proportion of people worldwide falling short on lifes essentials, such as food, water, healthcare and political freedom of expression and a big part of humanitys challenge is to get everyone out of that hole. At the same time, however, we cannot afford to be overshooting the Doughnuts outer crust if we are to safeguard Earths life-giving systems, such as a stable climate, healthy oceans and a protective ozone layer, on which all our well-being fundamentally depends.

It was written by a self-proclaimed renegade economist, Kate Raworth, an Oxford academic who focuses on environmental and sustainability issues, a former researcher for Oxfam, and a member of the Club of Rome.

The Club of Rome is a group of professional alarmists that has since 1972 been warning us about the The Limits to Growth. It restates the old Malthusian misconception that population grows exponentially, while the technology to produce more resources grows only linearly. Therefore, Malthusians argue, the world is in trouble, and it will only get worse unless economic growth is somehow constrained.

A typical phrasing, by Kenneth Boulding, an environmental adviser to the late US President John F. Kennedy, was made famous by naturist and filmmaker David Attenborough: Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist.

Ironically, technology did advance at an exponential rate, and neither population growth nor resource depletion has proved to be catastrophic. On the contrary, by any measure of human welfare poverty, hunger, literacy, farm productivity, life expectancy, child mortality, disease burden, you name it the world has become a better place.

In previous columns, I have debunked the inanity of limits to growth rhetoric, disputed the resource depletion myth in great detail, and showed how history keeps proving prophets of eco-apocalypse wrong. Last year, I wrote an article (and a follow-up) defending the record of free-market capitalism in terms of both human welfare and environmental risk.

Oxfam, which co-hosted WEF-Africa and whose international chairperson, Winnie Byanyima, was a co-chairperson, likewise has a dismal record. Its inequality rhetoric is fatally flawed, and based on blatant falsehoods. They bang on about inequality because they cant make the case that things are getting worse using just poverty statistics, but even then theyre wrong. Global inequality is actually decreasing. (See a more technical treatment of the subject here.)

The WEF-Africa doughnut explicitly cites Oxfams false and misleading inequality reports. It also cites the 2009 book The Spirit Level, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, which argues that more equal societies almost always do better. Although wildly popular on the left, the book has been harshly criticised in economic circles for using outdated data, cherry-picking countries, and ignoring confounding variables in its analysis. Its conclusion is simply not supported by the facts presented.

Having done a re-analysis using the very same methodology the book used, but using newer data, Christopher Snowdon, research fellow at the Institute for Economic Affairs, concluded: It seems that the relationship between inequality and life expectancy only holds when we use data from early in the last decade and arbitrarily exclude a number of countries. It fails the basic scientific test of reproducibility. A law that only works under certain circumstances and in certain years is no law at all.

Finally, the doughnut article cites the book that made Thomas Piketty a superstar on the left, Capital in the 21stCentury. His central thesis is that if interest rates on capital are consistently greater than wage growth, social conflict results. While the book has its merits, particularly in collating vast amounts of economic data from around the world, its conclusions are far grander than the limits of the data he presents allow, as Clive Crook argues for Bloomberg.

This tendency is apparent all through the book, Crook writes, but most marked at the end, when he sums up his findings about the central contradiction of capitalism:

The inequality r>g [the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth] implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future. The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying ...

Every claim in that dramatic summing up is either unsupported or contradicted by Pikettys own data and analysis.

In an article for Reason Magazine, Garett Jones points out that taxing capital, which is Pikettys proposed remedy for reducing inequality, cannot work: The Boston University economist Christophe Chamley and the Stanford economist Kenneth Judd came up independently with what we might call the Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility Theorem: Any tax on capital is a bad idea in the long run, and that the overwhelming effect of a capital tax is to lower wages. A capital tax is such a bad idea that even if workers and capitalists really were two entirely separate groups of people if workers could only eat their wages and capitalists just lived off of their interest like a bunch of trust-funders it would still be impossible to permanently tax capitalists, hand the tax revenues to workers, and make the workers better off.

As Tim Worstall explains in Forbes: Average wages in an economy are determined by the average productivity of labour in that economy. Applying capital to labour is what drives up productivity in an economy. Thus we would like there to be more capital applied to labour as that raises the average income in said economy.

So whether it relies on Oxfam, The Spirit Level or Piketty, from the outset, the economic validity of the doughnut model looks suspect. But even on its own, it doesnt bear a lot of scrutiny.

The first problem with the chart is that it quantifies nothing. The green lines it draws for the social foundation and ecological ceiling are entirely arbitrary. What constitutes inadequate, sufficient, or excessive prosperity? How much pollution is too much? The model doesnt even say whether the lines indicate income, wealth, productivity, growth, or some other measure of economic performance. Its just a vague and generalised critique of wealth. No wonder it is popular in the halls of academia, the only place where discredited socialist ideas which have killed more people than Nazism retain an air of respectability.

It also does not show the proportion of people worldwide falling short on anything, as Raworth claims. It doesnt show proportions at all. How to interpret the funny-shaped red boxes in the hole is a mystery. In fact, the shapes that are supposed to indicate proportions of poor people who suffer various shortfalls dont even occur in Raworths original concept. The illustration is meaningless, and relies on no data at all. It depicts ideology; it does not depict reality.

In the outer, overshoot ring, which is supposed to represent the dangers of exceeding some arbitrary ecological ceiling, there is no indication of the possible causes of environmental harm. It just assumes that excessive wealth causes them all. It does not recognise that some of the worlds most serious environmental problems are caused not by rich people, but by poor people trying to get rich. Compare the environment surrounding poor slums and rich suburbs. Consider that poor farmers are the primary culprits in deforestation. Big corporations with valuable brands to protect have to be far more careful about their environmental record than the thousands of small, obscure miners or manufactories of the developing world. Think about the difference in attitude towards species conservation between rich elites and poor communities for whom wildlife is either potential food or a potential threat. Contrast the environmental policies of rich countries with those of poor societies.

When you dont know where your next meal is coming from, youre not likely to care much for anything else. When youre well-off, your horizons become broader and youre far more likely to consider the social and environmental impact of your choices. Simply put, rich people can afford to look after the environment, and inevitably choose to do so. None of this complexity is reflected in the WEFs new economic model.

All this is not to say we shouldnt address the worlds problems, of course. But they are best solved by increasing prosperity for all instead of appealing to populism about restraining the rich. According to Simon OConnell, executive director of Mercy Corps Europe, the World Bank recently elevated conflict from being one of many drivers of suffering and poverty to being the primary driver. Hunger is not an environmental problem or a problem caused by inequality. It is a man-made problem caused by war, marginalisation and weak governance. I would add socialism and corrupt dictatorships to that mix, as weve seen in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and so many postcolonial African countries. Address these underlying problems, and much of the worlds remaining poverty will evaporate like dew under the bright rays of economic freedom.

That an institution such as the World Economic Forum instead falls prey to socialist rhetoric about inequality is distressing, not only for the rich that are targeted (by which we mean the capitalists funding the worlds productivity, not the rich who are represented at WEF shindigs, of course). It is especially distressing for the worlds remaining poor. Self-serving hot air by wealthy elites who can afford to indulge socialist fantasies, and government bureaucrats whose only motive is to manipulate the poor for votes, are a curse they dont deserve.

In the Mail & Guardian, Patrick Bond, professor of political economy at Wits and honorary professor of development studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, compiled a scathing account of how Oxfam facilitated the corruption swamp of controversial politicians and crony capitalists that were involved in WEF-Africa.

One consequence is to embolden corrupt leaders like Jacob Zuma. As Sean Gossel and Misheck Mutize point out in The Conversation, his attacks on capital are a dangerous political approach used in failing states like Algeria, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Its aim is to deflect attention from its policy failures and from numerous scandals surrounding President Jacob Zuma, his family and the politically connected Gupta network.

This approach, they argue, makes it harder to hold the private sector to account for its real sins, damages our chances of economic recovery, and fails to address the countrys structural challenges.

What needs to be made clear is that the debate around white monopoly capital and radical economic transformation is about much more than statistics and definitions, write Gossel and Mutize. It is about the ownership and control of both public and private capital by a politically connected elite. Thus it comes with the potential risk of turning South Africas entire economy into a centrally controlled patronage network.

That the World Economic Forum is aiding and abetting this descent into socialism, cronyism and poverty is a disgrace. Their new economic model is as unhealthy as the doughnut upon which it is based. DM

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Ivo Vegter - Daily Maverick

In his column "What Happened in France," Bruce Bawer tries to explain why Front National's Marine Le Pen suffered what he calls a "devastating loss." His conclusion is basically that Europeans have been "psychologically manipulated to the point where they truly believe, on some level, at least in some Orwellian doublethink kind of way, that acting in clear defense of their own existence, their own culture, their own values, and their own posterity, is an act of ugly prejudice." And so Emmanuel Macron, the darling of the politically correct left and Brussels, won.

That sure sounds like a wonderful, easy-to-grasp explanation, but I'm afraid Bawer is overlooking one rather important detail: the Front National is simply a horrendous party. Yes, yes, I'm aware that we all have to celebrate the rise of populism, and yes, to some degree those parties certainly have an important role to play in modern Europe. Even if you disagree with Le Pen's policy ideas, you can at least respect her role as a battering ram against political correctness.

All true.

But if you look at the actualcontent of the Front National's platform, you can only conclude that the party is anythingbutconservative. Le Pen and her party are opposed to the free-market system; they're against free trade. They actuallybelieve the government should take over entire sectors of the economy. Additionally, Front National supports France's untenable and unaffordable welfare state. Thirty-five-hour work week? Check. Lower the retirement age to 60? Check. Introduce trade barriers? Check.

Let's face it: When it comes to economics, the Front National and Marine Le Pen are diehard socialists.

Oh, and if that isn't bad enough, the party was also the subject of a controversy because Le Pen's intended temporary successor as FN's leader,Jean-Franois Jalkh, had in years pastpublicly doubted the existence of Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers. When he was confronted with those statements Jalkh quickly resigned, but it was too late: he had reminded French voters of Front National's less-than-stellar reputation on the issue. And that's exactly what Le Pen couldnot use.

It must give American "nationalists" a great feeling of superiority to simply declare that Europeans have surrendered to political correctness and have forgotten who they are, but the fact of the matter is that French immigration and integration hawks used a very problematic party to take on Macron. Le Pen personally certainly has potential, but she'll need to change her party's platform of nationalistic socialism if she ever wants to become president. If she does not, well, I guess that just means that conservatives' best hope for the future is a revived Republican Party -- that's the party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy that lost this year's election because its candidate, Francois Fillon, was involved in a corruption scandal. Had he not been, he, not Macron, would have beenthe favorite to win.

More:
Marine Le Pen Lost Because Front National Is a Bad Party With Bad Ideas - PJ Media

Remember the photos of Soviet Union department stores with virtually nothing on the display shelves? In the 1970s, while I was serving in the military, we were told about the hardships the Soviet citizens were undergoing at the hands of their Communist government.

Aside from typically abysmal fiscal policy manifested by a command-and-control economy and the huge burden on that economy caused by military spending, the people were helpless to improve their lot. For them to protest or force change meant imprisonment or death.

Not far to the south of us, Venezuela has surpassed the old USSR in mismanagement by a wide margin. Unfortunately, under Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro, the downhill slide is accelerating into perilous territory, that of civil disorder and chaos.

Ironically, Venezuela is reportedly sitting on the largest supply of oil and gas in the world, but is paralyzed in its ability to benefit from it. Foreign oil companies and other businesses have been nationalized (a polite term for stolen by the government) and in so doing has frightened-off any more significant industrial investment. Why should a corporation invest in a country where its assets can be easily seized? It would be stupid to take that risk.

The basic mode of failure is the standard template of socialism which can be summarized by Dame Margaret Thatchers famous quote: The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money. To apply a commonly-used phrase used to describe terminal cases, Venezuela is circling the drain to economic oblivion.

The populist/socialist Hugo Chavez really got the cart rolling by dolling out largess to people he thought would support him and thus keep him in power. But it becomes difficult to support a leader who cannot keep his people in paper toilet paper.

Chavez died March 5, 2013, just when things were becoming tense. His hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, has been trying to keep the economy bailed out, and to say that it hasnt been working out is a vast understatement. Conditions have deteriorated to the point of massive demonstrations, marches and rebellious actions by the now-nearly starving citizens.

But everything will probably turn out okay because in 2012 Chavez forbade the ownership of firearms by all citizens, presumably to keep them out of the hands of criminals so to protect the more and more angry (and hungry) citizens.

However, Maduro saw that the police and military forces might not be able to handle the rebellious Venezuelan people, so he did what every self-respecting dictator would do: He formed his own private, armed (non-government) militia to maintain order through force of intimidation or through whatever means necessary.

Now, instead of cutting his losses and returning the government to a democratic form, he will try to hang on until the end and either he is driven from power and killed, or becomes so ruthless that the people simply have no choice but to give up or be exterminated. The former is exactly what happened in Cuba when the Communists under the Castro brothers took over. But guess whose families are well-off, set for life and protected? Yes, its the tyrants.

Note that banning the private ownership of firearms in Venezuela was enacted just before conditions became intolerable. Without the means to defend themselves effectively against a rogue government and its enforcers, the people will suffer dearly.

The United States is the only nation that was founded on the principle of individual liberty. That means the right of men and women to protect their own lives. Our history our heritage is unique in that regard. The people of other countries have not had that experience, so they do not have the liberty mindset in which we were educated emphasis on were.

It is no secret that liberals/socialists in our government were licking their lips at the thought of Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 presidential election. Except for Democrat Party primary nomination shenanigans, self-described socialist Bernie Sanders would have been a suitable substitute. The supreme prize of control of the Supreme Court was lost in that electoral defeat.

Keep an eye on Venezuela and you will be surprised at the number of similarities in the dialogue of the Maduro regime and American liberal talking points, especially regarding class warfare.

Link:
Commentary: Venezuela, a rich country ruined by socialist dictators - Austin American-Statesman

NEW YORK (JTA) The Jewish Sunday school teacher, a black accordion strapped to her shoulders, stands before a photo of a 1927 Jewish protest in Warsaw and introduces her students to an important holiday observed by their ancestors.

It isnt Passover, which has just ended, but another that is approaching in a couple weeks: May Day, the unofficial May 1 holiday celebrating workers rights.

Socialism is the idea that everyone should have what they need, says the teacher, Hannah Temple, as a projector flashes images of a protest sign and Jewish immigrants marching in a labor demonstration. On the walls, multicolored signs declare Jewish communities fight for $15 a minimum wage campaign We are all workers and Remember the Triangle Fire, a reference to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that killed 146 garment workers at a factory and galvanized the labor movement.

Temple teaches the children words to a Yiddish May Day anthem and offers a short primer on early 20th century labor activism.

We need to sleep some, we need to work some, but we need some time thats for us, she says, describing the campaign for an eight-hour workday. She invites the few dozen students and parents in the room to a May Day protest in downtown Manhattan. A few hands go up.

Maybe? she asks. Maybe is great.

The Yiddish sing-along-cum-socialist teach-in is the morning meeting of the Midtown Workmens Circle School, a secular Jewish Sunday school that combines Yiddish language and culture education with progressive social justice organizing. Its one of eight such schools, called shules, in four states serving a total of 300 students aged 5 to 13 teaching them everything from an Eastern European melody for the Four Questions to how to protest on behalf of underpaid fast-food workers. The curriculum ends with a joint bar/bat mitzvah ceremony for the seventh-graders.

Students at the Midtown Workmens Circle School in Manhattan read through a play in Yiddish, April 23, 2017. (Ben Sales/JTA)

Though its more than a century old, the Workmens Circle, a left-wing Eastern European Jewish culture and social justice group, has seen its fundraising and school enrollment grow in recent years. Part of the boost, leaders say, was due to the diametrically opposed presidential campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and US President Donald Trump.

Sanders, says executive director Ann Toback, awakened American Jews to secular, progressive Jewish culture conveyed with a heavy Brooklyn accent. Trump, she adds, sparked Jews on the left to organize in protest.

Workmens Circle made a lapel pin bearing the faces of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump accompanied by the words mensch and putz, respectively. (Josefin Dolsten/JTA)

Workmens Circle isnt shy about its political leanings. Following the presidential election, it made a lapel pin bearing the faces of Sanders and Trump accompanied by the words mensch and putz, respectively.

Before there was Bernie, there was the Workmens Circle, Toback says. Is there a way we can connect to so many of his followers? The values that he based his campaign on are really the inherent values of the Workmens Circle and our movement.

In the five-month period after the election, the group saw its donations double over the same stretch the previous year. It has opened five of its eight Sunday schools in the past three years. The biggest, in Boston, has more than 100 students. In May, the Manhattan school will be hosting a spring open house for the first time.

More people are coming to us looking for I want to engage in social justice activism, says Beth Zasloff, director of the Midtown school. I know that for me, after the election, having a community, having a place to go where I know we can address these issues with our children, felt extremely important.

The Midtown school, like its counterparts, eschews traditional Jewish Sunday school mainstays like learning Hebrew or studying ritual and prayer. Israel isnt a focus. Workmens Circle has partnered in the past both with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a left-wing group that focuses on domestic issues, and Habonim Dror, the left-wing Labor Zionist movement.

Instead, kids take three types of classes: arts and crafts, Yiddish language and history, and culture and social justice. Last Sunday, the three students in the Yiddish class were reading a play, in transliteration, about a robot. The teacher would read a line in Yiddish and translate, which a student repeated.

Beth Zasloff, director of the Midtown Workmens Circle School. (Courtesy of Zasloff/JTA)

The arts and crafts class was making banners for an immigrant rights protest. In the history and culture class, four students prepared for their bar and bat mitzvahs next year. For the ceremony, theyll do a research project on their family history and interview an elderly relative. Later that Sunday, this years bar mitzvah class made presentations on children who were killed in the Holocaust.

One student said knowing Yiddish made her feel like her friends at school who hail each other in the hallways in Bengali. Another said her favorite Workmens Circle experience was participating in the Jan. 21 Womens March in New York City. And for some, the appeal lies in attending a Sunday school that avoids the standard memorization of Hebrew prayers.

This is secular, and Im not super religious in terms of my beliefs about God, says Moxie Strom. So its nice to have something that doesnt focus so much on God said this and God said that.

Illustrative: The Klezmatics at a tribute concert for Sholem Aleichem in Boston, sponsored by the Workmens Circle. (Derek Kouyoumjian/ courtesy Boston Workmens Circle)

The Workmens Circle/Arbeter Ring was founded in 1900 in large part to help Jewish immigrants from Europe succeed in America. Along with advocating for better working conditions, it offered members services like health care and loans. It supported socialism at a time when Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan helped elect a Socialist Party candidate, Meyer London, to Congress.

No longer socialist but still left wing, the Workmens Circle fights for those issues largely on behalf of non-Jewish workers, leading campaigns for immigrant rights or better pay.

And instead of helping Yiddish speakers integrate into America, the organizations cultural mission has flipped, preserving and promoting an old world culture for American Jews. It runs Yiddish language classes for adults and a summer camp for kids, and hosts culinary and holiday events.

You can see this parallel universe in Yiddish

Theres so much culture theyre missing, says Kolya Borodulin, the groups associate director for Yiddish programming, who grew up in Birobidzhan, the Soviet Unions Jewish Autonomous Region. Jewish holidays, traditions described by famous Yiddish authors any contemporary issues you name are reflected in the Yiddish language. So you can see this parallel universe in Yiddish.

Even if they go to eight years of Sunday school, Borodulin says, the students are unlikely to come out speaking proficient Yiddish, or even reading a page in the languages Hebrew script. The schools aim, rather, is to reinforce a cultural and ideological Jewish identity in its students. The aspiration is that years after they leave, they will be able to connect to their Judaism on holidays, in song and on the picket line.

What resonates most with them is the social justice and having a sense of what we believe in, says Debbie Feiner, whose two sons, ages 9 and 12, attend the Midtown school. The older one, she says, understands that when you see some injustice, you need to take action. He cant be a passive bystander, and hell connect that with his Judaism.

A student and teacher play the violin during a presentation on child victims of the Holocaust at the Midtown Workmens Circle School in Manhattan, April 23, 2017. (Ben Sales/JTA)

Read more from the original source:
This Sunday school teaches kids Yiddish -- and socialism - The Times of Israel

If you took a trip to the Deep South of the USA and listened in on a local government meeting, you would probably find that most people in the room would be die-hard Republicans.

The party has dominated that area for years, and there are very few Democrats to offer up any opposition in most southern states.

Aside from Florida, which has swung between the two parties due to its huge cities, there are few areas down there not considered safe for more conservative politicians.

It might not seem out of place in a right-wing area that insults such as socialist, Marxist, or communist are still regularly used to caricature left-wing people and compare their policy ideas with the failed USSR. This I find unacceptable.

Attacking someone by using the name of an ideology as an insult is not constructive in any way. First of all, if you want to achieve anything in an argument at all, blindly insulting people is just likely to make them more angry at you. It is more likely to entrench them in their opinions and make them less likely to come away with an expanded view of how you see a situation. Thats the goal in argument or debate. I think everyone can agree that spending all our time shouting at people, on the internet or elsewhere, is not the most productive use of our time.

Additionally, just boiling your opposition to political views down to using one abstract label is just as damaging. It sends the message that you are minimising your counterparts opinions, and that you probably dont understand them. Socialism, like all ideologies, is a vague concept on how to organise a society, particularly based in this case on the protection of workers and on the state being the most efficient way to distribute things like healthcare. There are many different examples of how it has worked, from Roosevelt in the USA to Soviet Russia. Its too vast an idea to ridicule in a single-sentence, let alone a one-word put-down.

One form of capitalism rules supreme in our society, and because of this dominance, you might think that capitalism has won the Game of Ideologies. Thats not the case. While it is the dominant system, and it does work well in many cases, the rich one per cent who take most of its profits and hold the majority of the power cant be allowed to rest easy while the rest of the population get progressively poorer and more dependent on the super-wealthy.

This does not mean socialist governments always get it right. The USSRs crimes were many and it was a good thing when the oppressive regime was ended in 1991. Socialism in our western context, though, challenges capitalism to do better for workers on zero-hours contracts, the homeless, or the sick. That desire to help people is a noble urge, based on making lives better. It deserves praise, not being rejected with knee-jerk insults.

-- Will Allsopp is a student at King Edward VI School, BUry St Edmunds

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Why is 'socialism' a dirty word? - Bury Free Press