World Economic Forum – Women have more active brains than men, according to science – by Rosamond Hutt

A study by scientists has found that women’s brains are more active in more regions than men’s. Image: REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Women’s brains are significantly more active in many more regions than men’s, according to new research.

The findings could help explain why women are more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, insomnia and eating disorders.

The study by scientists from Amen Clinics in California is the biggest brain imaging survey to date. It compared over 46,000 brain scans from nine clinics and analyzed the differences between male and female brains.

Women in the study tended to have increased blood flow in the red-coloured areas of this brain scan, while men had higher blood flow in the blue parts. Image: Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease

Understanding these differences is important, the researchers say, because it helps to shed more light on how brain disorders affect men and women differently.

For example, women are more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, depression and anxiety disorders, while men have higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct-related disorders.

The study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, found that women’s brains were significantly more active in many more areas than men’s, especially in the prefrontal cortex which is involved in focus and impulse control and the limbic or emotional areas of the brain responsible for mood and anxiety.

However, the visual and coordination centers of the brain were more active in men.

Image: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Lead author Daniel G. Amen, a psychiatrist and founder of Amen Clinics, said: “This is a very important study to help understand gender-based brain differences.

“The quantifiable differences we identified between men and women are important for understanding gender-based risk for brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.”

The researchers used brain scans from 119 healthy volunteers and 26,683 patients with a range of psychiatric conditions such as brain trauma, bipolar, mood disorders, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, and ADHD.

The study subjects rested or performed cognitive tasks while researchers measured blood flow in their brains using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).

The researchers analyzed a total of 128 brain regions at baseline (at the beginning of the study) and during a concentration task.

They found that women had greater blood flow in the prefrontal cortex compared to men, which may help to explain why women tend to be stronger in the areas of empathy, intuition, collaboration, self-control and showing appropriate concern.

It also revealed increased blood flow in limbic areas of the brains of women, which may also partially explain why women are more prone to anxiety, depression, insomnia, and eating disorders.

However, the human brain – regardless of gender – is changeable and notoriously difficult to understand.

As Gina Rippon, Professor of Cognitive Imaging at Ashton University, wrote last year:

« The notion that our brains are plastic or malleable and, crucially, remain so throughout our lives is one of the key breakthroughs of the last 40 years in our understanding of the brain. Different short- and long-term experiences will change the brain’s structure. It has also been shown that social attitudes and expectations such as stereotypes can change how your brain processes information. Supposedly brain-based differences in behavioural characteristics and cognitive skills change across time, place and culture due to the different external factors experienced, such as access to education, financial independence, even diet. »

 

Agence France-Presse – Les principales revendications autonomistes au sein de l’Union européenne.

« Le travail est l’avenir de l’homme » de Nicolas Bouzou – Économiste et chroniqueur à l’Express- Edition de l’Observatoire

C’est une ode au travail, l’auteur pointe du doigt l’irrationalité qui est mise en avant par les tenants de la fin du travail ou sa raréfaction ou le revenu universel. Le travail pour lui est profondément humain. Les animaux ne travaillent pas, ils vivent, cherchent de la nourriture, jouent et dorment, mais ils ne construisent pas un monde différent de la nature.

Le travail est le propre de la condition humaine, il évolue avec nous. Nous construisons et fabriquons des objets qui vont nous accompagner dans la transformation du monde. Ce qui explique que le travail change car notre besoin aussi change.

Ceux qui parlent de la fin du travail construisent et confortent leurs idées sur l’étude de 2013 menée par Carl Frey et Michael Osborne de  l’Université d’Oxford, selon la quelle 47% des emplois seront automatisés à l’horizon de 2034 aux états unis, tout en faisant remarquer que ce sont les emplois routiniers qui sont les premiers concernés ce que les économistes dénommaient « le progrès technique biaisé ». Les propos de JimYongKim directeur de la Banque Mondiale ciblant les pays nouvellement industrialisés et concluant que les deux tiers des emplois pourraient être détruits à cause de l’automatisation.ont aussi apporté de l’eau à leurs moulins. Force est de constater que les évolutions technologiques récentes comme l’intelligence artificielle conjuguées avec  une accumulation de données sans précédent(le big data) permettent d’automatiser des métiers moins routiniers qui concernent les classes moyennes. Ce ne sont plus les métiers d’en bas qui sont visés mais ceux du milieu. Cependant un peu de précaution est nécessaire, il suffirait que la création d’emploi nouveau puisse compenser la perte des anciens métiers, ce qui laisserait dire que théoriquement la destruction des emplois routiniers n’impactent pas sur le chômage et n’est pas un problème macro économique. Une politique économique saine doit libérer les créations d’emplois et non entraver les destructions. Les économistes du travail ont tendance à dire que la destruction des emplois constitue un signe de bonne santé économique et de progrès.

Cette étude oxfordienne fut elle de qualité, toutefois, elle entretien une confusion entre taches et métier. La technologie peut avoir trois conséquences sur le travail :

• – Elle peut remplacer totalement un emploi, parce qu’elle l’automatise. C’est le cas des liftiers aux états unis depuis les années 1950.
• Elle peut faire disparaitre des tâches à l’intérieur d’un métier qui survit, les secrétaires ne font plus de sténographie mais organise des agendas, accueillent des clients et s’occupent de l’administration générale, on les appelle des office managers. Les concierges n’ouvrent plus la porte des immeubles mais veillent à entretenir un climat de vie agréable, ce qu’aucune technologie ne fera jamais.
• Elle peut faire disparaître un produit et les métiers qui lui sont associés, l’automobile a tué les métiers liés aux fiacres et l’électricité a signé la mort des allumeurs de réverbères. Il n’existe plus de fabricants de machines à écrire. C’est le cœur de la théorie schumpétérienne de la destruction créatrice.

L’histoire nous montre que la majorité des emplois ne sont que partiellement automatisables. L’étude de McKinsey Global Institute sur 46 pays représentant 80% de la force de travail mondiale a trouvé  que moins de 5% étaient susceptible d’être entièrement automatisés et que 60% comprenaient des tâches automatisables. Quand le remplacement par la machine est total, le nombre d’emploi dans la profession diminue mécaniquement, ainsi les poinçonneurs et les lavandières ont totalement disparu de nos villes. Ce n’est pas le cas, lorsque seule une partie des taches est remplacée par l’automatisation. L’emploi peut diminuer ou augmenter, ainsi l’introduction du métier à tisser n’a pas réduit le nombre de tisserands au XIXème siècle. L’automatisation permet des gains de productivité qui permettent de baisser les prix, exemple les vêtements. Une demande élastique au prix, entraîne une augmentation de la demande, la technologie permet d’attirer des nouveaux consommateurs et l’activité se développe entraînant l’ouverture de nouvelles usines et magasins.

L’auteur

Nicolas Bouzou, est un essayiste français libéral spécialisé dans l’économie. Il est diplômé de l’université Paris-Dauphine et a un master de finance de l’IEP de Paris. Il a été pendant six ans analyste en chef de l’institut de prévisions Xerfi. Il a depuis 2006 fondé sa propre entreprise, Asterès^, une société d’analyse économique et de conseil.

 

 

World Economic Forum – The most competitive countries are also the most progressive – Written by Mark Esposito, Fellow, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Artem Altukhov and Alejandro Pereda Shulguin, in collaboration with LSE Business Review.

Kuwait, a small country in the Persian Gulf, holds the sixth spot on the global GDP per capita ranking, with an average per capita income of over US$ 69,000 in 2015, adjusted at the purchasing power parity. At the same time, it ranked only 34th in the World Economic Forum’s 2015-2016 Global Competitiveness Index (GCI).

New Zealand, another relatively small country both in size and population, has a per capita wealth which is roughly only half that of Kuwait — a little over US$ 34,000 at the purchasing power parity, 35th place in the world. Nonetheless, New Zealand scored visibly higher in competitiveness, ranking 16th in the GCI.

Clearly, the two economies and their structures are not directly comparable. Kuwait’s heavy dependence on natural resource revenues (over 90 per cent of exports) provide for such a lush per capita value, while New Zealand’s GDP is stimulated primarily by services that dominate the local economy, at over 69 per cent. Competitiveness, both as a notion and an index, arguably transcends countries’ idiosyncrasies in relation to their economies’ compositions. Competitiveness is ultimately reliant on a set of universal and comparable parameters. Therefore, a logical question arises: why does this mismatch and others of similar nature happen?

Our tradition of measuring and understanding development and related components such as competitiveness has been dominated by the economic agenda. Conventionally, GDP and its derivatives have been employed to describe and substantiate changes in development. Often, they have revealed clear and important trends that can be useful when approaching policy implementation. For example, the World Economic Forum highlights that GDP per capita is highly correlated with GCI in large cross-county comparison.

Our own analysis has confirmed that GDP explains 69 per cent of the variation in GCI scores across 146 countries when both indexes are taken as averages for three years from 2014 to 2016 and an exponential model is used. At the same time, however, and exemplified by the above comparison between New Zealand and Kuwait, GDP per capita might not necessarily capture the full complexity of the nature of competitiveness at the macro level.

Moreover, there is large and growing body of research that shows that often, especially when a number of other parameters are controlled, GDP and GDP per capita might not explain development comprehensively when non-economic components are taken into account. It is becoming more evident that economic growth does not inevitably translate into quality changes in standards of life and opportunities for the average citizen. GDP and economic measures often sideline developmental concerns of social, environmental and personal nature. This could also be true for the social aspects of country competitiveness.

The Social Progress Index (SPI), an initiative developed by the Social Progress Imperative, an organisation formed by a group of scholars and business leaders, including Michael Porter, has been devised precisely to address the deficiency of economic measures in capturing true wide-ranging development. It measures exclusively social and environmental components, such as nutrition and basic medical care, access to information and communications, levels of tolerance and inclusion and the degree of personal freedoms and choice, among many others.

Overall, the index includes 50 measures of countries’ actual social and environmental product. This is a crucial and unique characteristic of the SPI, as it measures outcomes of development and performance of the society and economy in practical terms rather than purely measuring quantitative input that is only relevant in economic proxies. The sub-indices are aggregated into larger framework of three fundamental categories that conceptualise and approximate the phenomenon of social development: basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing, and opportunity.

SPI hence is intended, at the same time, to be a wider and more meaningful and detailed internal and cross-county measure that is expected to capture a more nuanced and accurate view of development and progress than a traditional analysis of macro-economic performance. It is envisioned to reveal those oftentimes hidden or unaccounted aspects of real conditions in a society that could be significantly more useful and appropriate for real policymaking.

For example, returning back to the mismatch between respective levels of GDP per capita and GCI ranks for Kuwait and New Zealand, SPI reveals that although, as mentioned, Kuwait enjoys significantly more wealth per person, New Zealand is, in turn, considerably better in terms of social progress than Kuwait. In 2015 and 2016, Kuwait ranked 42nd in SPI while New Zealand was among the best in the world, ranking 10th and 11th in 2015 and 2016 accordingly.

Although economic development has been stronger in Kuwait, we can see from the SPI that it did not translate into an inclusive social progress as measured by SPI. New Zealand, although a relatively poorer country, apparently has been able to better distribute and invest the benefits of economic growth into improving the social conditions and opportunities of its citizens. This fact can thus be potentially indicative to understand the difference and mismatch of competitiveness between these two countries that we have observed before. Social progress might be an important factor and foundation for competitive capacity of each country.

Our further analysis on a large cross-country level indeed demonstrates that the Social Progress Index is highly related with GCI. Based on the information from respective datasets we have calculated three-year averages of GCI (2014/2015 to 2016/2017) and four-year averages of SPI (2014–2017). The final sample conditioned by the availability of country data for both indices included 122 countries. A first look at the data reveals a clear and positive /relation between the two variables (figure 1). We note, however, that the trend is apparently not linear: as the country progresses socially, its competitiveness tends to increase more rapidly, which implies some form of exponential growth.

Indeed, plotting average SPI against log10GCI we see a very strong positive linear correlation (figure 2). Log10GCI is constructed by taking logarithm to the power 10 of the values of GCI. The logic for using logarithm is simple: by first constructing a graphic representation of the data (GCI vs SPI) we have observed a non-linear (exponential) pattern; logarithmic transformation was applied to linearise the relationship. Consequently, the findings are interpreted differently from a simple linear regression: we may say that a 1 point increase of SPI corresponds, on average, to a 0.43 per cent increase in GCI.

Linear regression of the data further confirmed that the observed correlations are statistically significant with the SPI coefficient significant at a 99.999 per cent confidence level. Furthermore, the second model, when we also control for GDP averages for the same countries for the same period, confirms that, even when economic performance is accounted for, SPI continues to be very significant (at a 99.999 per cent confidence level) with the model explaining now over 78 per cent of the GCI variance.

We have also analysed respective correlations of SPI and GCI within countries of the same income level (without controlling for GDP). We used the standard classification of countries by their income level from the World Bank where, however, we combined all of the countries in the Middle-Income group, without differentiation by the lower and upper middle. We also additionally reviewed a group of countries composed of OECD members, which are primarily located within the rightmost sector (figure 3):

Although the pattern is less clear, nonetheless, it is still positive and rather strong: developed countries seem to become increasingly more competitive as their social progress advances. Below are also the results of per group analyses (figures 4, 5, 6):

As can be observed, although the relationship is less powerful when countries are separated into income groups (where SPI explains between 42% and 49% of the variation of the GCI), which can be also a result of decreased samples sizes (Low-Income had only 17 countries while High – 38 and Middle – 67), the correlation is still reasonably strong and significant. This, hence, might signal that even within the same average level of income the countries that show better level of social progress tend to have larger level of competitiveness. This fact provides additional plausible confirmation of the original assumption that SPI and GCI are meaningfully connected.

Overall, the most important consideration is that we observe, in both original models, clear and strong correlation of SPI with GCI. SPI in the larger sample explains over 75% of the GCI variability. These are important results, as they might suggest, assuming a causality in the nature of the relationship and accounting for the exponential nature of the correlation, that even a rather small increase in social progress levels would promote a relatively larger increase in competitiveness of the country.

Indeed, the analysis would need further verification and additional research on a more detailed basis would provide superior results into the role of SPI. However, we believe that the present evidence seems to suggest that social progress or social development factors are central for increasing competitiveness and, ultimately, prosperity of the country and its population. From this perspective investing in issues such as healthcare, education and the environment becomes not just a result of political calculation but a matter of the overall economic growth and influence competitive advantage a country will have on a global scale.

Sound social policy turns thus into an element of country’s performance that would require dedicated attention. SPI in this sense could play an important role in understanding where each society stands and which social components need improvement. The nuanced image of social development that SPI offers could be used as leverage for policy makers as it allows for precision and efficiency in policy making that would be addressing real social issues that could, in the end, have an effect on the competitiveness of the country and increasing opportunities for its people. SPI might become a practical tool of primary analysis of the situation on the high-level. Developing SPI further, increasing its robustness and coverage, and improving awareness of the index on different levels of policy decision would be a positive strategy for understanding and encouraging competitiveness and ultimately, development in general.