StemCell Therapy

Our politics, and the news cycle, dwell too much on crises and criticism.

Lets use New Years Eve as a moment to balance that, as we reflect on some good things that happened in 2019.

The largest hydroelectric project in the entire continent of Africa, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, will continue to completion.

In November, the U.S. invited representatives of Ethiopia and the two downstream users of water from the Blue Nile, Sudan and Egypt, to Washington, to reach an agreement on how quickly the reservoir behind the dam would be filled and how the electricity produced by the dam would be shared.

A deadline for an agreement was set for Jan. 15, with arbitration agreed to for any remaining differences. Diplomatic tensions had undermined progress since 2011, with some Egyptian politicians even threatening to bomb the dam during construction.

The resolution of this dispute will allow for the electrification of huge parts of Ethiopia, Sudan and even Egypt, that lagged behind the economic development of the rest of the region. This progress was made possible by U.S. diplomatic pressure on Egypt and new leadership in both Ethiopia and Sudan.

Life expectancy in the world continues to improve, adding another three months in 2019. This small, if steady progress, continues an astounding record of improvement since 1950, when average world life expectancy was 45 years. Today, it is 73 years.

The percentage of children surviving past their first year improved during 2019, exceeding 97%, worldwide, for the first time in human history.

The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota announced that Type 3 polio was eradicated from the world in October 2019. Type 2 was eradicated in 2015. Only one type of wild polio virus still remains in the world, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Along with the U.S. and other donor nations, researchers, and dedicated public health workers of many countries, the long-standing generosity and energetic devotion of Rotary International should be recognized in this tremendous achievement.

Another service organization, the Lions, deserve thanks for their persistence in the fight against blindness around the world. An international pharmaceutical company, Merck & Co., donates the medicine to treat river-blindness, an affliction that is one of the two largest causes of preventable loss of sight.

The Carter Center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter, has coordinated the delivery of these medications throughout Latin America and Africa. River-blindness is now effectively gone from Latin America. In August, world health authorities predicted Uganda would be free of this scourge imminently.

The magazine Business Insider recently reported on major achievements in space exploration during 2019.

Among the most remarkable this year are the first photograph of a black hole, the launching of a commercial spaceship to carry human passengers (SpaceX), the discovery of seismic activity on Mars, the departure of Voyager 2 from our solar system bound for inter-stellar space with much more sophisticated equipment than its predecessor Voyager 1 and the first landing on the far side of the moon. The latter event was achieved by China.

Focusing on the U.S., Americans returned to the workforce in a flood not observed since June 2013. Labor force participation is a key indicator of both future economic growth and of optimism about that growth.

As more Americans believe job opportunities will be permanent, they have started looking for jobs again, and, in great measure, finding them.

Real average earnings grew throughout 2019 in the U.S. economy. On both an hourly and a weekly basis, wages outpaced the cost of living, resulting in a growth in workers take-home pay every month this year. (That had not happened since 2016.)

The value of output per American worker rose in every quarter of last year, continuing an unbroken trend of growth since the third quarter of 2016.

It has been a wonderful year!

Tom Campbell teaches economics, law and political science at Chapman University. He is the interim chairman of a new political party, the Common Sense Party, which he is helping to form in California.

Read the original post:
Celebrating the good things that happened in 2019: Tom Campbell - The Whittier Daily News

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