Ruminating Out Loud

In a previous post, a comparison of per capita spending and life expectancy for some of the developed countries in the world was compared. In it, the incommensurate cost to the quality of care being delivered to the population was discussed. Then (at the beginning of the year), the post was more of an exercise in the sharing of information. There is a new found urgency nowadays in ensuring that relevant information is shared and spread given the significant amount of attention the issue is getting from lawmakers and the population at large. It is instructive to take a look at yet another graph that highlights how much of an outlier the U.S. is in comparison to other nations of the world in terms of health care expenditure.

Via Wikipedia, below is a map of the countries in the world that use the Latin alphabet as the official script in dark green. The lighter green indicates the countries that use the Latin alphabet as co-official script with other(s). Do you see the diagonal divide that separates the two sides of the world?

The Latin Alphabet Divide

In the spirit of continuing the demonstration of global inequality using data from the UC Atlas of Global Inequality, below are maps showing the sex ratio (Female:Male) for countries around the world for the years of 1960 and 2000. Yet again, it is remarkable how some places remained unchanged over the span of almost half-a-century. Surprisingly, Canada and Australia were lagging behind most of the underdeveloped countries in Africa, Asia, and South America fifty years ago and have since caught up with these countries. Russia has the highest ratio then and now. The other surprising insight is that the land stretching all the way from China through India, the Middle East, and North Africa was, and remains to be, the most female-deficient region of the world. Incidentally, Canada and Australia were in the same league as this region fifty-years ago.

Sex Ration: The Missing Women of the World

I love graphs and pictures. They tell a story better than any other medium of communication. That is why I include them in these pages from time to time to anchor our thoughts on the human experience by hard-to-face facts and realities. The graphs included here were obtained from the UC Atlas of Global Inequality, which is also the source of the graph in a previous post. They show the life expectancy at birth in countries around the world for the years of 1962 and 2004. While significant progress has been successively made in all continents and countries, the sub-Saharan Africa remains to be one place where multitudes of people are being left behind; left to die at less than half the lifetime of those living in most other parts of the world. It is simultaneously amazing and depressing that almost no change has been made with regard to life expectancy at birth in this forgotten corner of the world for almost half a century! Sadly, given the existing structural disadvantages of the people living in this part of the world, it difficult to see a way forward in overcoming this stagnation of life in the near future. Lawlessness and cruelty, disease and despair, and poverty of leadership are raping the continent. A call for drastic intervention is in order to liberate the millions of people out of misery and humiliation.

Comparison in life expectancy between 1962 and 2004.

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the 2004 Tsuinami of the Indian ocean, which caused a tremendous amount of destruction, took the lives of more than 200,000 people, and caused the displacement of many others. It was a moment that shall remain transfixed in the collective imagination of all the people. In a previous post, we have covered how social media facilitated the transfer of information from the affected regions to the different corners of the globe. While commemorating this anniversary, one can not help but feel saddened and depressed about the continuing silent tsunamis taking and causing havoc in the lives of many more across the globe. Almost always, these tsunamis are occurring in the forgotten corners of the world, where no media attention is paid and the socioeconomic condition is poor that the affected have little power by way of plugging into the sphere of the social interaction. When I speak of these people, I am thinking of the millions that are brutalized and affected by the continuing unrest in Congo, the hundreds of thousands in Darfur, the millions living in a lawless land that is Somalia, the thousands that are having to suffer from among the most avoidable illnesses such as Cholera in Zimbabwe, billions in the world living on less than three meals a day, the millions that die from treatable diseases such as malaria, the millions more that die of starvation and malnourishment, and millions more living in the dilapidated of circumstances devoid of any hope for a better future. The silent tsunamis are everywhere and are quietly destroying the lives of significantly more people than those affected by the one we remember today looking back at the horrific images of destruction that were brought into the attention of the world.

These people are helpless. They are unsafe fearing from attack of not just the ill-intentioned, but also those that are charged to protect them. They are terrorized to live another day. They are voiceless in the global discourse. They are desperate and hungry. The world needs to remember past disasters and check to see if the necessary learnings about prevention and preparedness have been taken. But, let us not forget also those that are living through the silent tsunamis now. They need an outlet of voice; a helping hand. In the moment of despair and anguish, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a gem hidden deep in President-elect Obama’s speech on November 4, 2008. He said:

…And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”  

They are waiting for the new dawn of leadership to rescue them. They are waiting for miracles.

In the two previous posts here and here, we saw that the brain development of kids from low socioeconomic background significantly lags behind that of those from rich background and that a relatively large portions of the world remain underdevelopment (measuring by the visibility of city lights at night), respectively. It is striking to me how the two reinforce each other. The underdeveloped corners of the world have significantly larger proportion of their population as underprivileged and from low socioeconomic background. Could the implication of this natural coincidence be that the gap between the developed and underdeveloped world is forever deemed to continue to exist? How can this viciouscycle be broken?

Of all all the choicelessness a human being experiences throughout life, this one is by far the worst them all. It makes a difference whether one is born in Darfur or Boston, or inner-city or suburbia. Policy-making aimed at alleviating suffering will need to critically look at the structural disadvantages of the underprivileged in overcoming the odds stacked against them. The combination of these two factors, the underdevelopment of the environment and its consequence in the development of the individual, beg for intervention at early stages of development. For example, if one is to offer help to the underprivileged, it will be more sensible to give support for early childhood education than pour money in the form of affirmative action at institutions of higher education.