Global child mortality drops; One in five US kids in poverty; In China we (don't) trust; Why men fail

1 Global child mortality drops (BBC) The number of children dying before the age of five has fallen significantly over the past 20 years, the UN children's agency Unicef has said. Some 6.9 million children died before the age of five last year, compared to 12 million such deaths in 1990. Almost 19,000 under-fives died daily in 2011. Unicef said some of the reduction was due to poorer countries getting richer.But some was also due to well-targeted aid such as encouraging breastfeeding or immunising against common diseases.

The sharpest drops in levels of child mortality were in countries that had received a lot of external assistance. "If you look at the countries that have achieved the best results - the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Timor Leste and Liberia - those are the top three - I think in all of those three aid has been a very important contributor," said Unicef's UK director, David Bull. Efforts to target infectious diseases such as measles have cut related deaths globally from 500,000 in 2000 to 100,000 in 2011. 

2 One in five US kids in poverty (The Guardian) New figures have been released by the US census bureau revealing a yearly decline in median household income for Americans, growing inequality and more than one in five children under 18 years old living in poverty. In a survey of data for 2011, the census discovered that real median household income in the US had dipped by 1.5% from its level in 2010 to sit at $50,054 a year. The fall is the second consecutive annual drop and comes in the middle of a bitterly contested election in which America's tepid economic performance has been a central theme.

While President Barack Obama has based his campaign on a claim to have saved America from the brink of financial disaster, Republican challenger Mitt Romney has lambasted the country's lacklustre economic performance, especially continuing high levels of joblessness.

The figures released by the census also show that little dent has been made on America's high levels of poverty, with some 15% of the nation – representing around 46.2 million people – living in poverty in 2011. The figures are worse for the very young, where the poverty rate for those under the age of 18 is 21.9% – or some 16.1 million children. These latter figures are roughly unchanged in 2011 from 2010.

3 In China we (don’t) trust (Thomas L Friedman in The New York Times) One of the standard lines about China’s economy is that the Chinese are good at copying, but they could never invent a Hula-Hoop. How is it that a people who invented papermaking, gunpowder, fireworks and the magnetic compass suddenly only became capable of assembling iPods? I’m wondering if what’s missing in China today is not a culture of innovation but something more basic: trust.

When there is trust in society, sustainable innovation happens because people feel safe and enabled to take risks and make the long-term commitments needed to innovate. The biggest thing preventing modern China from becoming an innovation society, which is imperative if it hopes to keep raising incomes, is that it remains a very low-trust society. China is caught in a gap between its old social structure of villages and families, which created its own form of trust, and a new system based on the rule of law and an independent judiciary. The Communist Party destroyed the first but has yet to build the second because it would mean ceding the party’s arbitrary powers. So China has a huge trust deficit. 

The creation of global trusted business frameworks like Alibaba is starting to enable a new generation of Chinese innovators — who are low cost, but high skilled — to extend their reach. We’ve seen cheap labor out of China; now we’re going to see more cheap genius. Which is why Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder, in a recent essay argued that a big shift of the global labor market is under way, in which “many of the things we thought could only be done in the West can now be done anywhere in the world, not only more cheaply but sometimes better.” 

4 Why men fail (David Brooks in The New York Times) In her fascinating new book, “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin posits a new theory. Women, Rosin argues, are like immigrants who have moved to a new country. They see a new social context, and they flexibly adapt to new circumstances. Men are like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one. They speak the old language. They follow the old mores. Men are more likely to be rigid; women are more fluid.

This theory has less to do with innate traits and more to do with social position. When there’s big social change, the people who were on the top of the old order are bound to cling to the old ways. The people who were on the bottom are bound to experience a burst of energy. They’re going to explore their new surroundings more enthusiastically. 

Rosin reports from working-class Alabama. The women she meets are flooding into new jobs and new opportunities — going back to college, pursuing new careers. The men are waiting around for the jobs that left and are never coming back. They are strangely immune to new options. Rosin is not saying that women are winners in a global gender war or that they are doing super simply because men are doing worse. She’s just saying women are adapting to today’s economy more flexibly and resiliently than men. There’s a lot of evidence to support her case. 

Forty years ago, men and women adhered to certain ideologies, what it meant to be a man or a woman. Young women today, Rosin argues, are more like clean slates, having abandoned both feminist and pre-feminist preconceptions. Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits their vision and their movement.