Cuba found to be the most sustainably developed country in the world, new research finds — Matt Trinder

The Sustainable Development Index (SDI), designed by anthropologist and author Dr Jason Hickel, calculates its results by dividing a nation’s “human development” score, obtained by looking at statistics on life expectancy, health and education, by its “ecological overshoot,” the extent to which the per capita carbon footprint exceeds Earth’s natural limits.

Countries with strong human development and a lower environmental impact score highly, but countries with poorer life expectancies and literacy rates as well as those which exceed ecological limits are marked down.

Based on the most recent figures, from 2015, Cuba is top with a score of 0.859, while Venezuela is 12th and Argentina 18th....

Britain, ranked 14th in 2018’s HDI, falls to 131st in the SDI, while the US, 13th in the ul Haq index, is 159th out of 163 countries featured in the new system.

Mr [sic, should be Dr.] Hickel added: “The SDI ranking reveals that all countries are still “developing” – countries with the highest levels of human development still need to significantly reduce their ecological impact, while countries with the lowest levels of ecological impact still need to significantly improve their performance on social indicators.”...

Defend Democracy Press
Cuba found to be the most sustainably developed country in the world, new research finds

Matt Trinder

Randy Wray — Eric Holder Makes it Official: Crime Is The Economic Model

It’s official. The nation’s top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, has clearly articulated the administration’s policy on crime at the biggest banks: it will not be prosecuted. Indeed, as we’ve long expected, the criminals in top management will not be investigated, they will not be indicted, they will not be prosecuted, and they will not be punished.

Period.

Economonitor— Great Leap Forward
Eric Holder Makes it Official: Crime Is The Economic Model
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, UMKC

This is an indictment rather than a take-down.

Oh, and what was that about the purpose of business is profit-maximization?

Remember General Electric—Thomas Edison’s industrial giant? Jack Welch took it over and ran it like a financial firm—reporting profits of 20% quarter after quarter through, shall we say, “creative accounting”. He drove up the stock price by 4000% over his tenure, then cashed out, making a reputed half a billion dollars for himself. He was a key figure in promoting the notion that generous compensation for top management—much in the form of stock options—properly aligns incentives.

As Bill Black notes, what this does is to provide spectacular rewards to control frauds and to ensure massive losses for average shareholders and employees of the firms when stock prices collapse. Shortly after Welch took the money and ran, GE’s stock price fell by two-thirds and the firm had to take big write-offs for the phony profits it had been reporting. While GE stocks slowly recovered in the mid-2000s boom, they collapsed to 5 in the GFC and in the current, historic, stock bubble GE is only in the low twenties. Welch is still treated as a corporate hero. And teaches his business philosophy to MIT students.