We’ve looked at Facebook games that promote goodness before, and now we can WeTopia to that list. Instead of taking all those in-game purchases as profit WeTopia gives to charities that do real-world good.
Thanks Kathryn!
The Nicest Place on the Internet
Need a hug? Feel like the internet isn’t being nice today?
Go to the nicest place on the internet.
World Poverty Levels Falling
For the first time ever, the poverty level in each region of the world has fallen. According to the World Bank’s Development Research Group, the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day (at 2005 prices) was less in 2008 than it was in 2005. This report suggests that the biggest contributing region to the decline in poverty is Africa – its poverty level fell by five percentage points between 2005 and 2008.
The bank also has partial estimates for 2010. These show global poverty that year was half its 1990 level, implying the long-term rate of poverty reduction—slightly over one percentage point a year—continued unabated in 2008-10, despite the dual crisis.
The graphic below shows the data from 1981-2008: click on it to read the whole article at the Economist.
Diversity is Good for the Economy
The benefits of having a diverse workplace and a diverse community are obvious, but it always helps if some researchers back up these common-sense positions with helpful facts and demonstrated success. For those who champion diversity initiatives you’ll be pleased to know that a diverse workforce can mean $630 more per year per employee in a retail environment.
The study, co-authored by professors from Temple University, Rutgers University and Davidson College, studied 739 outlets of the U.S. department store J.C. Penney. According to the study, stores where the pool of employees mirrored the ethnic makeup of the communities they served earned an average of $94,000 more per year than stores in which staff wasn’t as representative of the wider community.
That figure averages out to $630 more per employee, and earned the company an extra $69 million last year, the study found.
Economy Down, Happiness Up
It seems like the world has its own life-work balance and thanks to the fact that we’re (on average) working less we are happier!
The second conclusion challenges the received notions of mankind’s moods. A tenet of political science is that happiness levels rise with wealth and then plateau, usually when a country’s national income per head reaches around $25,000 a year. “The richer a country gets,†argued Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in “The Spirit Levelâ€, an influential book of 2009, “the less getting still richer adds to the population’s happiness.†Many on the left have concluded that pursuing further economic growth is pointless. Even right-wing politicians such as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, have set up projects to study “gross national happinessâ€.
