USA - Civil War ? No, America is not on the brink of a civil war

According to a number of polls and surveys, significant majorities of Republican-aligned voters seem to believe the big lie that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 US presidential election and, consequently, the Biden administration is illegitimate.

Fortunately for all of us, these dire predictions are almost certainly overblown. We are not living in a “post-truth” world. We are not on the brink of a civil war. The perception that we are is almost purely an artifact of people taking poll and survey data at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we probably shouldn’t.

Read more at: No, America is not on the brink of a civil war | Musa al-Gharbi | The Guardian

The GDP: A Better Way to Measure GDP - by Justin Talbot Zorn and Ben Beachy

The news of the record-shattering 33.1% percent annualized GDP growth in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2020 seemed, to most people, like a farce. It’s not that the data — reflecting the rebound from an abysmal spring and summer — was technically wrong. It’s that it bore no resemblance whatsoever to most people’s lived experience.

At a time of a massive public health crisis, long lines at food banks, record-breaking hurricanes, glaring racial disparities, and mounting feelings of stress and overwhelm, no one wants to hear about the historic triumph of an abstract number that’s supposed to tell us how well our society is doing. This raises the question: Why do we measure our economy according to a metric that says so little about our well-being?

This isn’t just an academic musing. It’s a practical question for governments today. The measurement that most societies use as the benchmark for national progress doesn’t meaningfully account for successful management of priorities like public health, economic equity, climate action, or racial justice. This poses a problem because, in government, as in business, “we manage what we measure.”

Read more at: A Better Way to Measure GDP

US Presidential Elections: Georgia's most populous county stopped counting ballots at 10:30 p.m. - by Jeva Lange

It's bedtime in Georgia! In Fulton County — the state's most populous county, which includes Atlanta — officials said they would stop counting mail-in ballots at 10:30 p.m., with the plan of resuming in the morning, NBC News reports. Hey, that's fine, it's not like we're in the middle of an incredibly contentious election or anything!

The count in Fulton County had already been delayed earlier in the evening, after a pipe burst near a room where some of the ballots were being held. Because the region is home to a tenth of all Georgians, the further hold-up will affect when the whole state is able to report its final tally. Trump leads in the Peach State as of 11 p.m. ET with 63 percent reporting, although his margin is expected to narrow or potentially flip, since mail-in ballots are projected to skew blue, especially in Atlanta.

Read more at: Georgia's most populous county stopped counting ballots at 10:30 p.m.

GDP - a questionable measurement: 5 ways GDP gets it totally wrong as a measure of our success - by David Pilling

The beauty of gross domestic product is its single figure. It squishes all of human activity into a couple of digits, like a frog jammed into a matchbox. As this image of an unfortunate amphibian suggests, this condensing is also GDP’s flaw. How can the sum total of everything we do as human beings be so compacted? How can our activity be conflated with something as complex, nuanced and contested as our wellbeing?

GDP's inventor Simon Kuznets was adamant that his measure had nothing to do with wellbeing. But too often we confuse the two. For seven decades, gross domestic product has been the global elite’s go-to number. Fast growth, as measured by GDP, has been considered a mark of success in its own right, rather than as a means to an end, no matter how the fruits of that growth are invested or shared. If something has to be sacrificed to get GDP growth moving, whether it be clean air, public services, or equality of opportunity, then so be it.

GDP is how we rank countries and judge their performance. It is the denominator of choice. It determines how much a country can borrow and at what rate. But GDP is well past its sell-by date, as people are starting to realise. However brilliant the concept, a measure that was invented in the manufacturing age as a means of fighting the Depression is becoming less and less capable of imparting sensible signals about complex modern economies.

Pointing out the defects of GDP and even tentatively suggesting alternatives is no longer controversial. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned a panel led by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist, to examine the issue. It was creating a dangerous “gulf of incomprehension”, Sarkozy said, between experts sure of their knowledge and citizens “whose experience of life is completely out of sync with the story told by the data”.

GDP is a gross number. It is the sum total of everything we produce over a given period. It includes cars built, Beethoven symphonies played and broadband connections made. But it also counts plastic waste bobbing in the ocean, burglar alarms and petrol consumed while stuck in traffic.

Kuznets was uneasy about a measure that treated all production equally. He wanted to subtract, rather than add, things he considered detrimental to human wellbeing, such as arms, financial speculation and advertising. You may disagree with his priorities. The point is that GDP makes no distinction. From the perspective of global GDP, Kim Jong-un’s nuclear warheads do just as well as hospital beds or apple pie.

Read more at: 5 ways GDP gets it totally wrong as a measure of our success | World Economic Forum

EU-China Relations: Emerging Europe starts to question wisdom of Chinese-funded infrastructure projects - by Tamara Karelidze

A number of emerging Europe countries which have agreed big money infrastructure deals with China are beginning to reconsider their options. Members of the so-called 16+1 group, which includes 11 European Union member states (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) and five Western Balkans nations (Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia) are increasingly concerned at what they see failed Chinese promises and unacceptable conditions placed on finance.

The 16+1 group was set up in 2012 by China as a means to attract Chinese investment in infrastructure – mainly roads and rail networks – and to boost their economies. Many countries initially viewed the investment as having far fewer strings (and requiring less transparency) than European Union money. A major new report by Bloomberg suggests that they were wrong, and that alternatives, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) may be better.

“Some of those projects that have materialised with Chinese help have attracted unwelcome attention. Mounting costs for a highway development in Montenegro prompted the Washington-based Center for Global Development to single out the country as ‘at particular risk of debt distress,’ while the tender for an as-yet unfinished high-speed rail link between Budapest and Belgrade prompted an EU commission probe,” writes Bloomberg.

“Some feeling of unease about the whole scheme has been brewing for some time,” said Jan Weidenfeld, head of European affairs for the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, told Bloomberg. The conditions attached to projects are seen by 16+1 members as similar to those offered to African states, meaning that some countries “even feel insulted,” he said. “The package just isn’t quite as attractive as China would make believe it is.”

Not that China’s much-hyped Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which calls for massive investment in and development of trade routes, has been without trouble in Africa. Just this week Sierra Leone scrapped plans to build a China-funded 318-million US dollar airport outside the capital, Freetown. This is the first instance of an African country announcing the cancellation of a China One Belt One Road project. Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had warned that the project could place an unnecessary debt burden to Sierra Leone.

Read more: Emerging Europe starts to question wisdom of Chinese-funded infrastructure projects - Emerging Europe