Ian Adams for the R Street Institute: California is a land of calamity. The ground shakes, it runs dry and, with underappreciated frequency, it catches fire.
Surprisingly, the cost of modern life in the Golden State does not always track the risks its residents confront. Be it for earthquake insurance, for water or for fire protection, folks from Yuba City to Los Angeles all too often fail to pay what actuarial tables and resource meters suggest they should for the risks they take and the resources they consume.
California’s risks and resources are imprecisely allocated and undervalued. This is a legacy of an information-deficient age. It was an age in which a large land mass with a small population and bountiful, easy-to-access resources could mask profligacy. It was an age in which meaningfully apportioning the burdens of living could be overlooked. That age has passed and California is charging headlong toward a population of 50 million increasingly tightly packed and resource-hungry people….
Fairness requires people pay for the resources they actually consume and bear the risks they actually choose to take. Using modern tools to measure risks and resource use allows us to move past the present dull fog of mass, undifferentiated responsibility. Californians can be freed from the burdens faced by their more resource-intensive neighbors, and far less wealth will be needlessly tied up in a state-enforced bargain for which they receive no personal benefit.
The lives we choose to lead, and where we choose to live them, will change as the cost of our riskier and more resource-demanding choices are made apparent.
CARLY FIORINA AND THE GLASS CLIFF
Bryce Covert for ThinkProgress: As she announces her bid for president, Carly Fiorina’s biggest asset is also her biggest liability: her time as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
One of Fiorina’s biggest life accomplishments was being named to that chief executive position, which made her the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 company, and is likely to be at the center of her campaign. “HP requires executive decision-making and the presidency is all about executive decision-making,” she told CNN.
Her tenure was marked by struggle, including the layoff of 30,000 people, and she was eventually pushed out. Those struggles are already being raised as a reason to doubt her ability to lead the country as president. “She did damage to a great company and I don’t want to see her do damage to a great country,” said Jason Burnett, the grandson of the late HP co-founder David Packard.
But they weren’t necessarily troubles of her own making. Fiorina was appointed to the position of CEO in 1999, just as the tech bubble of the dot-com era was bursting, hurting most technology companies and destroying many. On her own website, she writes, “Hewlett-Packard recognized the tremendous challenges facing their company and asked Carly to be their new chief executive.”
Fiorina’s appointment to that historic role as trouble hit is not unique. Multiple studies have found that women are far more likely than men to get a chance at the top job when companies are facing significant struggles than when times are good. White men tend to keep control of top positions during smooth sailing, but challenges can make companies feel the need to try to shake things up and try something different, which can mean turning to women for leadership. But that means women are set up with a more difficult job from the get go.
MORE LIVE ON $1.25 A DAY IN AFRICA
Laurence Chandy for the Brookings Institution: 2015 marks the 20th year since sub-Saharan Africa started on a path of faster economic growth. During that period, growth has averaged 5.2 percent per year. Meanwhile, the number of people on the continent reportedly living under $1.25 a day has continued to creep upwards from 358 million in 1996 to 415 million in 2011—the most recent year for which official estimates exist.
What can explain these divergent trends? …
The first is the region’s rapid population growth of 2.6 percent a year. While African economies are generating more income, that income has to be shared among an ever-increasing number of people …
The second factor is the depth of Africa’s poverty compared with poverty elsewhere. In other words, poor people in Africa start further behind the poverty line. So even if their income is growing, it is rarely enough to push them over the $1.25 threshold …
The third factor is that even though inequality isn’t rising in most African countries, inequality is already at unusually high levels …
The fourth factor is that there is a degree of mismatch between where growth is occurring and where the poor are on the continent. To be sure, the region’s growth acceleration has benefited some of its poorest countries, including Ethiopia, Mozambique and Rwanda. Yet others such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar have recorded little or no growth over the past 20 years, and the number of poor people in these countries has risen accordingly.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
