The 007s — Week 14

I am going to pretend as if the past four months have not been a whirlwind of emotions and events and pick the 007s from where I paused. I flipped open several books in the past few months — So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder, The Dance of Anger, The Lean Startup and Hooked. Currently reading: Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead

Image Source: Psychology Today

• Middle-Income Trap: A term coined by the World Bank, the middle-income trap refers to a situation whereby a middle-income country is failing to transition to a high-income economy due to rising costs and declining competitiveness. The trap was meant to warn policy makers that lack of vigilance could trigger a long period of below-potential growth. Evidence to support the middle-income trap indicates a leveling-off of income per capita and a decline or stagnation in an economy’s competitiveness. Investment and innovation are the two key ingredients to moving a middle-income economy into a high-income economy. (Read)

• Technical Agglomeration: refers to the geographic co-location of different scientific and technological fields. Technological opportunities as well as requirements on further technological development (e.g. a next generation of chips) stimulate linkages and coordination amongst different fields, and this may create cumulative advantages for clusters in which a wide range of scientific areas are explored. Thus, there is a technological driver in the agglomeration of actors and activities in a geographical region, and more generally, in clusters building on proximity — technical agglomeration has become one of China’s key strategies for high-powered growth.

• Bowens family theory: Dr. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist, originated the family theory and its eight interlocking concepts. This is a behavioural theory that views the family as an emotional unit and uses systems thinking to describe the unit’s complex interactions. It is the nature of a family that its members are intensely connected emotionally. Families so profoundly affect its members’ thoughts, feelings, and actions that it often seems as if people are living under the same “emotional skin.” People solicit each other’s attention, approval, and support, and they react to each other’s needs, expectations, and upsets. This connectedness and reactivity make the functioning of family members interdependent.

• Health Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE): HALE is a measure of population health that takes into account mortality and morbidity. Health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) is the average number of years that a person is expected to live in good health by taking into account years lived in less than full health due to disease and/or injury. It is considered a more comprehensive indicator to measure a population’s health status because it assesses the quality of life as well as the length of life. The HALE calculation includes estimation of all-cause years lost due to disability (YLD) rate per capita, adjusted for independent comorbidity, by age, sex and country.

Image Source: bmj.com

• Cooperative Federalism: In a federal state, governance is constitutionally divided between the government at the Centre, state or provincial levels, functioning within their autonomous spheres. The Constitution of India provides for a federal system of governance that tends towards the Centre strongly. The Indian model of federalism is ‘cooperative’, as laid down by the Supreme Court in State of Rajasthan v. Union of India. Cooperative federalism means that though there is a constitutional provision for the distribution of powers, in practice, these powers are to be exercised jointly by the Centre and the States. While cooperative federalism is a constitutional ideal, many contend that it’s not realised entirely.

Image Source: Insights on India

• Lehman Sisters Claim: The EU commissioners Neelie Kroes and Viviane Reding, as well as the erstwhile IMF director Christine Lagarde, have phrased the nexus of the risk-taking behavior conducted within the largely male-dominated profession of high-finance as the “Lehman Sisters claim”. This claim is that if more women were in leading positions in banking, the crisis would not have been as annihilating. Based on behavioural, experimental and neuro-economics, Professor Irene Van Staveren brings evidence that gender differences result in important difference in key aspects of financial behavior. She argues that gender stereotypes constrain women to achieve top positions in finance; while those who make it to the top outperform their male peers, especially when facing uncertainty. This research thus adds weight to the plea for more women in trading, finance, risk management, and especially at top leadership positions.

Image Source: Semantic Scholar

• Gentrification: Gentrification is derived from the word “gentry,” which historically referred to people of an elevated social status. In its current context, gentrification was first popularized by the British sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964, when she used the term to describe the influx of middle-class people into London’s working-class neighborhoods, displacing the former residents of those localities. Gentrification is the transformation of a city neighborhood from low value to high value. Gentrification is also viewed as a process of urban development in which a neighborhood or portion of a city develops rapidly in a short period of time, often as a result of urban-renewal programs. This process is often marked by inflated home prices and displacement of a neighborhood’s previous residents.