Things are looking OK for Britain – which, though plagued by characteristic self-doubt about being in decline, emerges as a serious soft-power player, admired in fields from education to human rights, despite evidence of residual mistrust in the Muslim world.
Hong Kong appears anomalous, with a major crime decline emerging from the early 1980s.
The mechanisms underlying decreased thalamic grey matter volume should be considered; the decline emerges in several epilepsy syndromes (Yasuda et al., 2010), and appears to be, in part, independent of epilepsy severity, presence of MRI lesions, and duration (Keller et al., 2002).
When the task was so easy that older adults scored perfect (p = 1.0 or 100%) no age-related declines could emerge, whereas when the task was more difficult substantial age-related declines emerged.
For example, participants were listening to an experimenter saying "this is the end of the task" (ProM cue), doing nothing else, having all of their resources available to them, and yet large age-related declines emerged [21].
If the declines emerged as a result of age-dependent clutch size and productivity coupled with a shifting population age-structure, neither measure may be particularly amenable to management and there may be less concern about an ongoing recovery.
But even before those declines, emerging markets were underperforming relative to developed markets to an extent not seen since the Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s.
The IFS says similar declines emerge if you set the figure as low as 40% of median income – utterly refuting Nick Clegg's toxic line dismissing the threshold as just "poverty plus a pound".
Significant institutional reforms to address resource decline have emerged.
