Development is Uneven, Get Over It

UPDATE: out of 188 recorded songs on all Beatles albums, how many are now hits on iTunes? See end of post. This a 20 minute extemporaneous talk at UNICEF headquarters in New York on the topic of "Inclusive Growth". After the talk, there is a question, comment, and response session with the audience.  The full video is an hour, if you are really a masochist. (Try this link if the video player above doesn't work.)

To summarize the talk: success is intrinsically uneven, so development and growth is intrinsically uneven, not "inclusive". (See the earlier post about the fractal stubborness of uneven geographic wealth.) In this talk, I also mention how remarkably uneven success shows up in just about every field of endeavor. One way this shows up is in a "power law": there is such a strong negative relationship between the frequency of success and the scale of success that we have to use a logarithmic scale (i.e. a scale where every unit increase means multiplying by 10)  for both to be able to fit the extremes onto the graph, like the one below:

There is no evidence that large-scale redistribution programs can succeed without killing off growth, but targeting things like health and education to the poor has worked and could work even more. Lastly, the best thing of all you can do for "inclusive growth" is asserting the individual human rights of all, including women, gays, and religious, racial, and ethnic minorities. For more detail to fill out these ideas, please watch the video.

UPDATE: Answer to how many Beatles  hits out of 188 recorded songs on their 14 albums are hits today: 15. Even the most successful band in rock history could only produce a lasting hit about 8% of the time (please draw your own profound insights into the intrinsic unevenness of success and non-inclusive growth).

(Sorry about my really excessive Beatle-mania, it's a Baby Boomer thing, you wouldn't understand.)

PS highly imperfect methodology for measuring hits today: the popularity metre on iTunes gets maxed out for hits, all others (most showing zero popularity) are non-hits.

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Analyzing We are the World for Haiti as a Music Critic and Aid Critic

Even aid critics have their sentimental side. I confess I was genuinely moved watching this video, which has been viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube. The video is very inspiring and well done. It made me let myself go and be carried along by the idealism and hope.

Unfortunately, my kids would like to point out that I also get sentimental listening to Scorpions' "There's No One Like You" , so  I may not be the best qualified music critic available.

So going back to my comparative advantage of being an aid critic, a couple of questions on the lyrics of We are the World at 25 for Haiti :

[Adam Levine] We are the ones who make a brighter day so lets start giving.

Dear Mr. Levine,  it touches me as a wee bit hubristic to restrict "brighter day" making abilities to "we" who are "the ones." Are you saying you are one of "the ones"? By the way, who are you?

[Will-I-Am] "Like Katrina, Africa, Indonesia and now Haiti needs us, they need us, they need us"

Dear Will-I-Am, Did you choose Indonesia to receive aid because it rhymes with "they need us"?

Aside from these quibbles, more power to all you artists who participated in this ! Can you let us know who to contact to make the "We aid agencies are accountable to the Haitians for results" music video?

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