Portal:Society

Sustainability is the capacity to endure through renewal, maintenance, and sustenance, or nourishment, in contrast to durability, the capacity to endure through unchanging resistance to change. For humans in social systems or ecosystems, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse, robust, and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other organisms. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems. Robust, diverse, productive ecosystems and environments provide vital resources and processes (known as "ecosystem services"). There are two major ways of managing human impact on ecosystem services. One approach is environmental management; this approach is based largely on information gained from educated professionals in earth science, environmental science, and conservation biology. Another approach is management of consumption of resources, which is based largely on information gained from educated professionals in economics.

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A United Nations vehicle patrols the streets of the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. An estimated three million people were affected by the earthquake, with an estimated 280,000 buildings severely damaged or destroyed.

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• ... that despite the presence of a minor basilica (pictured), Plaza Miranda in Manila is a center for fortune-telling and the sale of lucky charms and amulets?
• ... that the exploits of the Polish partisan People's Army were significantly exaggerated by the propaganda of the People's Republic of Poland?
• ... that the writer of The X-Files episode "Per Manum" has described it as being about "the way you perceive connections between people"?

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• 4 July 1963 - Federation of Malaya Red Cross Society received official recognition as an independent national society by the International Committee of the Red Cross
• 14 July 1904 - Incorporation of the Minnesota Society of Certified Public Accountants
• 22 July 1932 - Establishment of the Turkish Language Association
• 30 July 1982 - Chinese Society Halls on Maui (pictured) placed on the Hawaii State Register of Historic Places

“ Some people commit a crime for no other reason than to see their name in print. ” — Gustave Flaubert

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John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB, FBA (/ˈkeɪnz/ KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and informed the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern macroeconomics and the most influential economist of the 20th century.His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, as well as its various offshoots. In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. He advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes's ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies. During the 1950s and 1960s, the success of Keynesian economics resulted in almost all capitalist governments adopting its policy recommendations. Keynes's influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of problems that began to afflict the Anglo-American economies from the start of the decade, and partly because of critiques from Milton Friedman and other economists who were pessimistic about the ability of governments to regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy. (Full article...)

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