Sunday, January 24, 2016

One round of Global Goals done, now it's time for the next

The reason that I called my book The Secret Peace is that while the world has been making unprecedented progress, many of us remain completely unaware of this transformation. As Nicholas Kristoff reports:

One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly the same.
That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half, from 35 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2011 (the most recent year for which figures are available from the World Bank).

A big driver of this change has been the UN Millennium Development Goals, which helped focus aid efforts and countries' priorities to focus on what matters most. Each country had specific targets in eight different topic areas. This creates hundreds of individual goals, and not all of them were met. But, against seemingly-impossible odds, the majority were.

The world has agreed on a new set of goals, the Global Goals. These 17 goals are even more ambitious - but achievable. It's a good idea for us all to familiarize ourselves with them, to be aware of the progress most of the world is focusing on.

Read more here.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Progress in Southeast Asia

Two recent incredible developments in Southeast Asia. First, ten countries recently signed a pact to form a European-Union-style organization. The countries - Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam - have a population of over 600 million, which is more than the EU itself.

Obviously there are always pros and cons to such an arrangement, but history shows that closer economic ties between countries lead to more development and less conflict overall.

In more immediate, concrete news, the military dictatorship in Myanmar was recently defeated in a fair election and seems due to concede power to a more democratic system. The New York Times reports:

The official results are still being tabulated, but all signs so far point to that rarest of things: an authoritarian government peacefully giving up power after what outside election monitors have deemed a credible vote.
Analysts and Myanmar’s citizens are still coming to grips with the results. But the outcome appears to stem from the simple fact that veneration for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was underestimated and the ruling party’s strength overestimated.
In the days before the elections, the ruling party organized large convoys of tractors to ride through the countryside. Thousands of farmers, wearing T-shirts given out by the party, chanted slogans and waved party flags. Wedding bands performed patriotic songs.
But that show of support was misleading. Many of the farmers said they had taken part in the rallies because they were paid, but when it came time to stamp their ballots, they voted for the National League for Democracy.