James Fletcher
speaker
208 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2014
last heard Sep 2014
James Fletcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Anything that can help us predict the severity of lightning has got to be useful.
Something like 24,000 people a year worldwide get killed by lightning.
24,000 a year?
Good Lord.
It's a major hazard, yes.
Yes, Tim, it is fascinating, even if it does sound a bit like a tedious piece of geekery.
But it's a piece of tedious geekery that's changing the way we understand the world.
For example, when these ICP numbers came out, some researchers in a Washington DC think tank did what they're paid for and started thinking and calculating.
And pretty soon they produced this headline.
That's Justin Sandefur.
He works for the Centre for Global Development, and he and his colleagues have come up with some rough and ready calculations, suggesting that the number of extremely poor people is much lower than previously thought.
To find out how many people across different countries earn less than $1.25, data on incomes and prices have to be converted to dollars, but not to ordinary dollars.
Instead, they're converted to an artificial type of dollar, which reflects the purchasing power of money in any given country.
Imagine there are two friends from the United States.
Sarah.
And Jane.
Sarah goes to Bureau de Change in the United States and gets US dollars.
And Sarah is relatively happy with her new purchase.
That is, until she hears about Jane.
This shows you that if you just convert a country's currency using conventional exchange rates, it hides the fact that the same amount of money has different purchasing power.
Showing 161–180 of 208 · page 9 of 11
← Previous
Next →