Category: Latin America

Florida in the Election

Editors

A French version of this article appears in L’Express.

Former mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced that he would spend as much as $100 million of his own money to help Vice-President Biden prevail in Florida on Election Day. This underscores once again the importance of Florida in this and every presidential contest.

Florida has a good track record of picking the winner in a presidential election. With the messy 2000 contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the state gained prominence as the ultimate prize and must-win battleground. To be sure, it is not a perfect track record, given that Florida favored George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Richard Nixon in 1960 over winners Bill Clinton and John Kennedy. If you go to earlier times, you also find that Floridians misfired with John Davis and James Cox in 1924 and 1920, two unknowns today except among aficionados of electoral history. But in sum, four misses out of 25 elections over a century can indeed be called a strong track record.

The stakes are high in 2020 given the state’s 29 Electoral College votes and the tightness of the race according to the polls. Vice President Biden is now nominally ahead by 1 to 3%, an insignificant gap that can easily close or widen in the remaining days of the campaign, depending on a slew of factors, not least the performance of each candidate in the upcoming debates.

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Soccer for Americans

Editors

Three rule changes to turn American soccer into a big money maker.

The experience of watching a soccer game rarely lives up to the anticipation. You go in hoping for a 4-3 cliff-hanger (as with Argentina vs. France recently) but too often you end up with 1-0 or worse, a draw, or much worse, a draw that is resolved through a penalty shootout. This chronic letdown explains why Americans prefer watching other sports.

soccer
Photo by Torsten Bolten.

Except for anxiety-ridden upper middle-class moms trying to steer their teenage sons away from (American) football practice, most Americans don’t really care about watching soccer. If this is changing, at about the pace of a glacier inching down an Alaskan ravine, it is mainly because the percentage of immigrants in the US population has been on the rise in recent decades. These immigrants or their parents often come from countries where soccer is the leading spectator sport. It follows then that with the current crackdown on immigration, the future of American soccer is looking as frail as ever. NFL bosses need not lose much sleep.
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Learning from Medellín with Alejandro Echeverri

Editors

“I think, if you want to write a new narrative at some specific moment in the story of a city, it is important that you have to feel the transformation and see the transformation. So the physical transformation is important but always there is more a spiritual thing, as happens with emotional connections and inspirational things.” ______Architect Alejandro Echeverri.

EcheverriPhotoIf you have an interest in Latin America or in urban matters, you will have read by now that the city of Medellín, Colombia has undergone a startling transformation in the past fifteen years. In the 1980s and 1990s, the name of Medellín evoked fearsome drug cartels, violence and terrorism.

But in the 2000s, Medellín took a dramatic turn for the better. In 2012, it was selected from 200 contenders as Innovative City of the Year in a survey organized by the Wall Street Journal and the Urban Land Institute. Today, it features regularly among lists of forward-looking cities and must-see destinations. Read more →

NIC: Global Trends 2030

Editors

The US NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE COUNCIL released a study GLOBAL TRENDS 2030: ALTERNATIVE WORLDS.  The talking points about demographics are as follows:

Rapid extensions of life expectancy likely: global deaths from communicable diseases projected to drop by more than 40 percent.

Some countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, will still have youthful populations, but demographic arc of instability will narrow on both east and west flanks.

“Aging” countries face the possibility of decline in economic growth. Increased migration will spread to emerging powers.

Urbanization set to grow to almost 60 percent.

Starting at page 20 of the FULL REPORT is Megatrend 3: Demographic Patterns.

On page 24 is a table on the ‘Demographic Window of Opportunity’ for various countries.

Nine Out of 10 Latin Americans Will Live in Cities by 2050

Editors

Region is already the world’s most urbanized, with 80 percent of the population living in cities. 

FROM FOX NEWS LATINO:

RIO DE JANEIRO –  Almost nine out of every 10 people in Latin America will live in a city by the year 2050, and the region should use this moment of economic stability and slower population growth to make those cities more equitable, said a UN report issued Tuesday.

The report by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme said the region is already the world’s most urbanized, with 80 percent of the population living in cities. This growth came at a cost: it was “traumatic and at times violent because of its speed, marked by the deterioration of the environment and above all, by a deep social inequality,” the report said.

“The main challenge is how to develop in a way that curbs the enormous inequalities that exist within cities,” said Erik Vittrup, the head of human settlements of UN-Habitat’s regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean. “There are other cities that have been through these urban transformations and don’t have this level of inequality. It goes against the economic model in Latin America. Cities didn’t grow more inclusive; the prosperity wasn’t for everyone.” READ MORE.