Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: I numeri contano

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?col=&section=opinion&xfile=data/opinion/2007/July/opinion_July108.xml
When numbers do matter
BY PAUL KENNEDY
30 July 2007
THE US federal deficit is recorded, second by second, on a counting
machine above Times Square in Manhattan. The annual rankings of the
quality of world universities and colleges creates excitement among
all who care about such things.
The highly successful "Guinness World Records" makes it sales upon our
insatiable curiosity for figures: Who has eaten the world's largest
number of sausages at one go, who has swum farther than anyone else?
Who is the richest man in the world?
Most of this is harmless nonsense; who really cares who has swum
farther than anyone else? Besides, most of us rightly avoid
statistics, except when we are checking our bank balance. Any
politician or professor who throws out lots of numbers during a speech
should be cautioned that the audience's attention-level plummets
immediately. Learned op-ed articles that are crammed with statistics
cause even the most erudite reader to turn the page.
So, an essay on "When Numbers Do Matter" is a risky one indeed. Yet it
seems to me that there are some data-laden items that bear perusal,
and careful reflection. What follows is my reaction to a couple of
recent such items that managed to disturb me - a lot.
They are not about high politics, so they are not about the Russian
government's increasing share of energy supplies, or China's defence
expenditures, or the cost of the war in Iraq. They are statistics -
numbers - about lots of rather ordinary human beings. Unfortunately,
both items suggest that parts of the social fabric of our planet are
in deep trouble.
The first item, written for the Financial Times by Gunnar Heinsohn, a
professor at the University of Bremen, in Germany, explored the
connection between the ever-exploding violence on the Gaza Strip and
the massive expansion of angry young men in that territory. Many of us
refer to the connection between demography, frustration and street
violence, but we do it anecdotally and rather casually. Heinsohn puts
some real figures on this catastrophic problem.
Between 1950 and 2007, Gaza's population has soared from 240,000 to
nearly 1.5 million people, due to the high fertility levels of
Palestinian families. Decade after decade, the numbers march on. The
Palestinians may not be able to defeat the formidable Israeli tanks
and bulldozers, but they are outgrowing Jewish families at a
stupendous rate.
In one of Heinsohn's more startling remarks, he notes that "Had the
people of the US multiplied at the same rate as the people of Gaza,
the US would have gone from a population of 152 million in 1950 to 945
million in 2007, more than triple the size of its current population
of 301 million."
But the author's point is much sharper than that: It is that there are
many more young (and frustrated, angry, unemployed) Arab boys than
there are young Jewish boys, and that the former are growing in
numbers so fast that no one can really control them. Worst of all are
the private admissions by top Palestinian policymakers that neither of
the country's top two parties, Fatah and Hamas, can really check this
pent-up juvenile chemistry.
If that is true, then all the peace missions by the US or the European
Union just fade into insignificance. Numbers count. And no one will
feel that fact more than Israel over the next several decades.
The second item about numbers that caught my attention was an article
in the June-July edition of The Catholic Worker, that rather obscure
but most wondrous American Catholic magazine founded by the amazingly
conscience-raising Dorothy Day well over 60 years ago. This particular
piece was about a totally non-headlines-news-grabbing and absolutely
non-sexy matter within the entire United States: prisoners.
The article, by Jim Reagan, is entitled "2,193,798 And Counting." That
figure was the number of people incarcerated in the United States of
America as of 2005. We rank number one in the world, way ahead even of
China (1.5 million in prison) and our good pal Putin's Russia
(870,000), according to the numbers provided by London University's
International Centre for Prison Studies.
We incarcerate seven to eight times more of our population
proportionately than do most of our European friends, and the absolute
number of our prison inhabitants has doubled since the early 1990s. We
are even better at incarcerating black, Hispanic and other minority
males. At New York's best-known prison, Rikers Island, according to Mr
Reagan, "over 90 per cent of its population is Latino and black."
Then there is the frequent abuse, disregard and poor treatment of not
just a small number of crazed murderers (as if that would be a
justification), but of many other incarcerated American citizens.
These numbers count in another remarkable way. In the state of New
York, for example, while prisoners are denied the vote, their numbers
are credited against the districts, chiefly rural, in which they are
lodged. "At least seven Senate districts in NY State would be under-
populated and need to be redrawn if their inmate populations were not
counted," writes Regan. This is scandalous, but nobody seems to care;
no wonder that we tumbled into the Guantanamo prison mess.
When faced with such mind-boggling figures, my mind blurs over. I can
neither imagine what the youth population of the Gaza Strip will be in
2020 nor get a handle on how the United States will be able to run a
prison system that could have three or four million inhabitants, the
majority black and Hispanic, by that same date.
In much the same way, I admit, I find it hard to figure out the
implications of the many reports on global warming, or those
concerning Asia's rise to global economic dominance by mid-century.
What's more, I'm pretty suspicious of anyone who claims to know
exactly what any of these various statistical trends and projections
mean.
Still, I'm sure they mean something. Which is why, alas, we cannot
automatically close our eyes or hit "fast forward" when we come across
a news item that contains a bunch of statistics, whether it is about
the real prisons all over America or the virtual one that Gaza has
become. Sometimes, numbers do count.
Paul Kennedy is the J Richardson Professor of History and the director
of International Security Studies at Yale University. His most recent
book is "The Parliament of Man," about the United Nations.

prison mess.
Il nesso tra "distretti Senatoriali" e "Guantanamo" lo sa solo il
*COGLIONE* che ha scritto l'articolo.
-Stefano

 wrote:
CUT THE BULLSHIT
i numeri contano, sono i facoceri falliti che si permettono di
criticare a vanvera il più grande esperto inglese di storia delle
relazioni internazionali che grazie a dio non contano un cazzo...

più grande esperto inglese di storia delle relazioni internazionali
*ROTFL*
E sei tu a definirlo "il più grande esperto inglese di storia delle
relazioni internazionali", caro *PIRLA* di un Giovannino? :)
-Stefano

 relazioni internazionali", caro *PIRLA* di un Giovannino?
no, l'ha fatto chi l'ha ritenuto degno di tutti questi titoli:
"holds many honorary degrees, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical
Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. He was made Commander of the Order of the
British Empire (C.B.E.) in 2000 for services to History and elected a
Fellow of the British Academy in June 2003. His best-known work is The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House), which provoked an
intense debate on its publication in 1988 and has been translated into
over twenty languages."
ma tutto questo un sopravvissuto alla legge Basaglia come te non può
saperlo, nella sua colossale ignoranza di facocero che si permette di
giudicare gente quando non vale niente...
per tutti gli altri, consiglio la lettura degli articoli di Kennedy
pubblicati sull"internazionale"
http://www.internazionale.it/firme/archivio.php?author_id=33

giudicare gente quando non vale niente...
Idem come sopra :)
-Stefano