Thought du jour: public schooling and its critics It is a quirk of intellectual history that most "attacks" on public schooling are associated with "right-wing" thought-- most obviously Milton Friedman. But the most important influence on this paper is James Scott's _Seeing Like a State_ a brilliant, and decidedly "left-wing" description of how states have used supposedly neutral, technical, modernizing, benign, "developmentalist" language of extending "control" and "order" and "planning" to extend state control over society and citizen. I am not arguing that _social_ control of formal schooling is somehow illegitimate or undesirable, but that _state_ and _regime_ control of schooling unfettered by _social_ control of the state--not just electoral democracy but the deep, complicated, poorly understood, mechanisms that produce real social control and citizen accountability--can lead to educational disasters. Lant Pritchett, "'When Will They Ever Learn?' Why _All_ Governments Produce Schooling", BREAD Working Paper No. 031 (June 2003), p. 43. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: democracy and participation A working democracy is not a series of continuous referenda but a messy collection of institutions that allocate, delegate, and limit powers. .... [One democracy might choose] zero popular participation in the single most important macroeconomic decision-making body (e.g., the Federal Reserve) and direct community participation in schooling (e.g., autonomous local school boards). ... [Another might choose] the converse, with civil society (in the European sense) concordat to determine wage setting (and hence inflation) and schools with nationally controlled curricula and conditions. Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, "Solutions When _the_ Solution is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development", World Development, forthcoming, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: demographic consequences of male chauvinism The cultures in which women have stopped having children most completely are those of southern Europe and east Asia. Here women are emancipated if they remain childless, but imprisoned by traditional male attitudes if they do not. What is happening in Italy, Spain and Japan is the war of women against male chauvinism. Women are winning. If the men who dominate these countries do not surrender, they will soon not have much of a society left. Martin Wolf, "The trouble with living a longer, more fulfilled life", Financial Times, 7 January 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Joe Stiglitz on the failures of NAFTA When President Bill Clinton first asked the Council of Economic Advisers about the economic importance of Nafta, early in his administration, our response was that potential geopolitical benefits were far more important than the economic benefits. .... Unfortunately, much of the goodwill that the United States might have expected has been squandered. First, America attempted to use barriers to keep out Mexican products that began to make inroads in our markets -- from tomatoes to avocados to trucks to brooms. Despite the impressive efforts of workers' rights groups, efforts to ease the life of immigrants have stalled. Recent moves in California to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving driver's licenses and medical care have been a depressing sign that conditions for Mexican immigrants in this country are getting worse. Joseph E. Stiglitz, "The Broken Promise of Nafta", New York Times, 6 January 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Bush is all big stick and no soft speech President Theodore Roosevelt once recommended speaking softly and carrying a big stick. A century later, this Republican administration also believes in the big stick. Unfortunately, it believes in a loud voice. It has humiliated allies, undermined international institutions and projected a narrow vision of US interests. Martin Wolf, "Bush is all big stick and no soft speech", Financial Times, 24 December 2003. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: what is civil society (1)? The term 'civil society' has become almost as fashionable a buzzword in the social sciences as 'globalisation'. However, there is nothing even resembling a commonly agreed definition of this concept. .... One thing that helps to explain the present universal popularity of civil society is its very fuzziness--it can be all things to all men (people?). In particular, there is a conflation of an empirical category--often referred to as the voluntary or nonprofit sector--with a political project. In the first meaning, it is simply a label for something that is out there or a category that is both nonprofit and nongovernmental. .... The problem with [the second] purely normative definition of civil society is, however, that defending civil society as a 'good thing'--which these people do--becomes tautological: 'civil society is a good thing, because it espouses the values we hold. Anyone who fails to hold these values, is not part of civil society'. And whose values, anyway? Marlies Glasius, "Civil Society: A very brief history", Civil Society Briefing No. 1 (2001), London School of Economics and Political Science. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: What is civil society (2)? Many different definitions of civil society exist, and there is little agreement on its precise meaning .... Nonetheless, most analysts would probably agree with the statement that civil society is the sum of institutions, organisations, and individuals located between the family, the state and the market, in which people associate voluntarily to advance common interests. .... The intellectual history of the term is closely intertwined with the notion of citizenship, the limits of state power, and the foundation as well as the regulation of market economies. The prevailing modern view sees civil society as a sphere located between state and market--a buffer zone strong enough to keep both state and market in check, thereby preventing each from becoming too powerful and dominating. Helmut K Anheier and Lisa Carlson, "Civil Society: What it is, and how to measure it", Centre for Civil Society Briefing No. 3 (2002). www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CCS/pdf/Civil_Society_Measure.pdf [After reading this briefing, I am more confused than ever. I find it strange that it is felt that 'civil society' is needed to keep markets in check, for well-functioning markets prevent any one seller or buyer from exercising power. A tenants' association lobbying for rent ceilings or a producers' association lobbying for import tariffs and subsidies would, then, form part of civil society, working to make their members better off economically at the expense of the rest of society. And the rest of society may well be composed of unorganised persons who are economically less well off on average than members of these interest groups. -- LW] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: fuzzy words "Impenetrability! That's what I say!" "Would you tell me, please," said Alice "what that means?" "Now you talk like a reasonable child," said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. "I meant by 'impenetrability' that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life." "That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra." Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1872. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: old age pensions in Latin America [C]overage of [reformed] social security systems has stagnated at levels that seem to be unacceptable for many Latin Americans. A large portion of affiliates (over 30 percent in Chile according to our estimates) may not qualify for the minimum pension guarantee of PAYG or funded systems. These workers, together with those who are not even affiliated to any system, have generally only poorly targeted social assistance benefits to look forward to in old age. In Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico and Peru (for those born after 1945), governments do not even offer these means tested benefits. These are the voices often raised in protest of the pension privatization. .... To reiterate one of the main messages of this report, governments in the region would do well to pay more attention to their poverty prevention responsibilities in general, and for their elderly in particular. All but the poorest countries in the region seem to have the fiscal and administrative wherewithal to fulfill this function capably. Indermit S. Gill, Truman G. Packard and Juan Yermo, _Keeping the promise of old age income security in Latin America_ (World Bank, Washington, D.C., revised draft, November 2003), ch. 11, pages 215, 220. [I applaud the message of this report. It is gratifying to see emphasis placed on alleviation of poverty rather than development of financial markets. --LW] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: civil society and economic growth South Korea's economic miracle was built on the back of a repressed civil society, especially a besieged labor sector. Only in the 1980s, when the military regime felt it could afford to loosen up, was civil society given space to flourish. Unions, student groups, and religious organizations took full advantage of the opportunity and pressed bravely and effectively for democratization. Heroic as they were, these groups cannot be given credit for one of the fastest- growing economies to emerge in the last 50 years. By contrast, Bangladesh is rich in civil society, with thousands of NGOs, advocacy groups, and social service organizations operating at the national and local levels. Yet this wealth of ngos, by no means a new phenomenon in Bangladesh, has not translated into wealth for the people. Bangladesh remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita income of less than $350. Thomas Carothers, 'Think Again: Civil Society", Foreign Policy Magazine, Winter 1999-2000 edition. [Carothers argues convincingly that a thriving civil society is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for economic success, but this does not mean that suppression of civil liberties will produce economic growth, as the experience of Pakistan, North Korea and other nondemocratic countries clearly shows. --LW] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: civil society and democracy If a population increasingly perceives its government, politicians, and parties to be inefficient and unresponsive, diverting public energies and interest into secondary associations may only exacerbate the problem, fragment society, and weaken political cohesion further. American democracy would be better served if its problems were addressed directly rather than indirectly. Increased bird watching and league bowling, in other words, are unlikely to have positive effects unless the nation's political institutions are also revitalized. Sheri Berman, "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic", World Politics 49.3 (April 1997), pp. 427-428. [In this seminal paper, political scientist Sheri Berman shows (p. 402) how "Germans threw themselves into their clubs, voluntary associations, and professional organizations out of frustration with the failures of the national government and political parties, thereby helping to undermine the Weimar Republic and facilitate Hitler's rise to power." and argues "Had German civil society been weaker, the Nazis would never have been able to capture so many citizens for their cause or eviscerate their opponents so swiftly."] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the value of death Up to the present, all improvement in medicine has only enabled more people to live to be aged. The probability of living to be seventy is much greater today than it was a hundred years ago; the probability of living to be a hundred is no greater at all, and may even be less. Once we crack the aging barrier, however, there seems to be no reason why the process should not be slowed down indefinitely, and why man should not remain in full vigor for centuries. .... If you could have an operation for immortality, would you have it? How much would you pay for it? This frightening prospect now at least seems to be somewhere over the horizon. Under these circumstances, the business of departing from life would have to be a voluntary act, and we would at least begin to appreciate the enormous benefits which the institution of death has brought to mankind. "Kenneth Boulding on the possible consequences of increased life expectancy," Population and Development Review 29:3 (September 2003), pp. 495, 504. [This is a reprint of a 1965 paper of Kenneth Boulding (1910-93), a prolific and highly original economist born in England, educated at Oxford and Chicago, and professor at the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado and other North American schools.] _____________________________________________________________ thought du jour: intuition versus reasoning "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" Almost everyone reports an initial tendency to answer "10 cents" because the sum $1.10 separates naturally into $1 and 10 cents, and 10 cents is about the right magnitude. .... The surprisingly high rate of errors in this easy problem illustrates how lightly the output of effortless associative thinking [intuition] is monitored: people are not accustomed to thinking hard [reasoning], and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind. Remarkably, ... errors in this puzzle and in others of the same type were signicant predictors of high discount rates. Daniel Kahneman, "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics", American Economic Review, December 2003, p. 1450. [Professor Kahneman, who teaches psychology at Princeton University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. Individuals with high discount rates are myopic, short- sighted.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: biotechnology and ageing Laboratory experiments have already shown that switching off a gene that seems to dictate aging can treble the lifespan of worms and increase by 75 percent the lifespan of mice, which are mammals. (Worms, flies, and mice are used for age research because they live through their normal lifespans so quickly.) There appears no reason to assume genetically enhanced longevity will not at some point work for men and women too, though so far there have been no attempts to deactivate aging genes in people. But changes come with longer life. Worms and mice that are altered for extended lifespans become sterile, or barely reproduce. .... Imagine a reasonably near future in which the typical person lives two hundred or three hundred years, but the compensating demographic shift is that children become rarities, communities close most of their schools, college ceases to be a large industrial sector, you have got to drive a long way to find one of the few remaining Toys "R" Us, and everybody has been there, done that, regarding practically everything. .... The thought of a society that is almost entirely adult--in years if not in temperament, a distinction worth pondering-- is vaguely spooky. But then in 1900 the typical American lifespan was forty-six years; by 2000, it was seventy-seven years. Told that typical Americans would live to seventy- seven years, an analyst of 1900 might have worried about an enervated, geriatric nation collapsing under the weight of nursing-home costs. Instead the adjustment to an ever-larger cohort of seniors has been fairly smooth. Gregg Easterbrook , "Tolstoy and the Beltway", The New Republic, Post date 01.15.04 | Issue date 01.26.04. [Review of _Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness_, A Report by the President's Council on Bioethics, October 2003, which is available online at http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/beyondtherapy/ .I haven't yet read this 328 page report, which contains a chapter titled "ageless bodies" and another titled "happy souls". Easterbrook notes "Not too many presidential commissions suggest that men and women will experience life more fully if they know they must someday die." and adds "But then not too many presidential commissions are run by Leon Kass, a biologist and a moral philosopher who is not only an eminent conservative thinker but also one of the leading public intellectuals of our generation."] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: evidence that Hobbes remains relevant Sex trafficking isn't a poverty issue but a law-enforcement issue. You can only carry out this trade at significant levels with the cooperation of local law enforcement. In the developing world the police are not seen as a solution for anything. You don't run to the police; you run from the police. Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission, an organization based in Arlington, Va., that fights sexual exploitation in South Asia and Southeast Asia, quoted in Peter Landesman, "The Girls Next Door", New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004, p. 36. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25SEXTRAFFIC.html [This article is depressing to read, but it illustrates vividly the tragic consequences of greed and corruption. Landesman concludes that "the supply of cheap girls and young women to feed the global appetite appears to be limitless. And it's possible that the crimes committed against them in the U.S. cut deeper than elsewhere, precisely because so many of them are snared by the glittery promise of an America that turns out to be not their salvation but their place of destruction."] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: The Efficient Market Hypothesis Paulos points to a ... subtle problem.If everyone believed that all publicly available information were already reflected in security prices, nobody would bother to do any fundamental research; and the market would not be fed the information it requires for "efficiency.". Thus if the efficient market theory is true it is false; and if it is false it is true, rather like the paradox of Cretan who said all men were liars. He [Paulos] exaggerates, however, how many people are required to make markets approximately efficient .... Surely it requires only a few specialists who are not content to be free riders on the theory to set the ball rolling in the right direction. It reminds me of a seemingly innocent remark made by a Cambridge professor in what was supposed to be a revision class for the laggards. He asked if it was really necessary for people to go from shop to shop comparing prices to make competition work. He concluded that it would be enough if a few people behaved in this unattractive way and the rest of us were more laid back. Samuel Brittan, "Do as I say, not as I do", The Financial Times, 02/01/04. [Samuel Brittan is reviewing _A Mathematician Plays the Market_ by J A Paulos.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: investment strategies What investment strategy should a person follow who does not believe that he can beat the market? The conventional advice is to invest in a broadly spread indexed fund. .... Unfortunately even this modest advice is too optimistic. For it supposes that the only assets are equities and that these fluctuate around an upward trend. This feature dates back only to the 1950s when the cult of the ordinary share began. In the previous half century US equities, taking one decade with another, struggled to keep pace with inflation, and in the UK they fell well behind it. A genuinely diversified portfolio would cover not only equities but fixed interest securities, Treasury bills and much else, and would include a heavy loading of buildings and land which make up about half the national wealth. Indeed there is a question about how far it should be a national as distinct from a worldwide portfolio. Samuel Brittan, "Do as I say, not as I do", The Financial Times, 02/01/04. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: you pay as they go (1) Europe's state-administered pension systems are, for the most part, financed on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis. There is no huge pot out of which future obligations can be met. Those in work pay (via a tax on their current wages) for the pensions of those who have retired. .... Pay-as-you-go systems were introduced as long ago as 1889 by Otto von Bismarck, Germany's chancellor. They worked well for as long as the active workforce vastly outnumbered the retirees--as they did in Bismarck's day. The retirement age then was 70, and the average life expectancy was 48. "The crumbling pillars of old age", The Economist, Sep 25th 2003 [Germany defaulted on its government bonds, so transformed the explicit debt of the pension fund into an implicit debt of pension promises. The Economist has the history wrong: Bismarck did NOT introduce PAYG pensions.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: you pay as they go (2) The German pension system was the first formal pension system in the world, designed by Bismarck almost 120 years ago. .... [It] started as a fully funded system with a mandatory retirement age of 70 years when male life expectancy at birth was less than 45 years. Today, life expectancy for men is more than 75 years but average retirement age is less than 60 and even lower in East Germany. The system converted to a de facto pay-as-you-go system when most funds were invested in government bonds between the two world wars. After a long and arduous debate, the German Bundestag decided in 1957 to convert the system gradually to a pay-as-you-go scheme. The remainder of the capital stock was spent about 10 years later. Axel H. Börsch-Supan and Christina B. Wilke, "The German Public Pension System: How it Was, How it Will Be", unpublished paper, University of Mannheim, 25 August 2003. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: payroll taxes and social security [T]he payroll tax [has been] a travesty ever since 1983, when Alan Greenspan sold the public on the myth of paying for Social Security in advance. And the difference between the amount brought in through the payroll tax and the amount needed to pay benefits underwrote Reagan's tax cuts for the rich, while the government stuffed a "Trust Fund" with I.O.U.'s. But with what? Paying them off will require either more borrowing or a rise in taxes -- exactly as if the trust fund did not exist. Meanwhile, the $1.7 trillion in excess payroll taxes already paid would be enough to completely pay off all consumer debt in 2001. And we are told that there is a "crisis" because the Trust Fund will eventually "run dry." In fact, there's no need to cut the benefits for which soon- to- be-retired workers have been overcharged for decades, or to raise payroll taxes even more on the next generation. The only issue is whether wealthy Americans will pay any part of the bill. James K. Galbraith, "Nothing is certain but death", New York Times Book Review, 1 February 2004, p. 22. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: religion and growth Forget investment and savings rates, worker productivity and wage scales to determine which countries will become richer or poorer. What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife -- especially hell. At least that's what two Harvard scholars have found after analyzing data collected in 59 countries between 1981 and 1999. .... Oddly enough, the research also showed that at a certain point, increases in church, mosque and synagogue attendance tended to depress economic growth. Mr. Barro, a renowned economist, and Ms. McCleary, a lecturer in Harvard's government department, theorized that larger attendance figures could mean that religious institutions were using up a disproportionate share of resources. Felicia R. Lee, "Research Around the World Links Religion to Economic Development", New York Times, January 31, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the dark side of computers The computer has brought us convenience and amusement, but, like all technology, it's a mixed blessing. Far from smashing Big Brother, computers have given him more control over our lives. They have been a blessing for snoops, con artists and market manipulators. They have turned global communications into glitchy, virus-plagued networks. Along with some highly valuable resources, the World Wide Web has brought a time- wasting flood of trivia, trash, pornography and spam. We have burdened our children with the distractions of becoming computer literate before they are just plain old literate. Theodore Roszak, "Raging Against the Machine", Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the evolution of English IN 1896, William Jennings Bryan, a three-time candidate for the American presidency, gave a speech on a relatively dry financial topic, criticising the gold standard. But his rhetoric was for the ages: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" Just over a hundred years later Sam Brownback, arguing for war against Iraq in a speech to the American Senate, said, "We go at Iraq and it says to countries that support terrorists, there remain six in the world that are as our definition state sponsors of terrorists, you say to those countries: 'We are serious about terrorism, we're serious about you not supporting terrorism on your own soil'." What happened over the 20th century? Americans (and, to a lesser extent, Britons) no longer expect public figures, whether in oratory or in writing, to command the English language with skill and flair. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. "The evolution of English", The Economist, 31 January 2004, p. 82. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Samuel Brittan on civil society A few years ago the slogan was communitarism. When this was found to be pretty empty as a political doctrine, the label changed to civil society. It was a fig leaf so that those who adopted new labels could still carry on with their stock in trade of denigrating capitalism and all its works. But there is a still more fundamental difference. On one side there are those who take the individual as the primary unit and there are those who put their emphasis on the group, which is what Tony Blair claimed to do when he re-wrote Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution. Those who believe in genuinely voluntary civil associations are on the individualist side; but those who want to use state power to promote them or to twist their aims are the enemies of freedom. And if this sounds like old fashioned anti-communist language then so be it. Samuel Brittan, "Anti-Capitalism once again", address delivered at Foreign Policy Centre 30/01/04. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: collecting tax on internet sales Bleary-eyed taxpayers are likely to find an unwelcome surprise tucked away in this year's New York State income tax form. There, in line 56, is something known as a "sales or use tax," which is basically an attempt by the state to raise millions of dollars in uncollected revenue by taxing out-of- state retail sales, including those made over the Internet. .... State law has long required the payment of such sales taxes, but Michael Bucci, spokesman for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, acknowledged that many people may not have been aware that the state has begun a new effort to enforce the tax rule, and consequently may have thrown away their receipts. To help alleviate that problem, there is a provision on this year's form for taxpayers to estimate the amount they owe based on their income, Mr. Bucci said. .... Taxpayers are likely to be befuddled about how to respond to the new tax. Many people do not keep a detailed log of all the purchases they have made on the Internet. "Realistically, the governor's budget division is probably correct in saying that this is not going to take in a lot of revenue," said Robert B. Ward, director of research at the Public Policy Institute/Business Council of New York State. "This is part of a nationwide effort to bring in more revenue to government," he added, "and it is not going to be an easy process for the states." Marc Santora, "Forthrightness Put to the Test by a New Item on Tax Forms", New York Times, 5 Febr 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: attacking poverty An ideologically diverse group of scholars is putting forward sweeping proposals that, they say, would transform the low- wage labor market for the benefit of poor people and society at large. One plan would guarantee all citizens a small basic income; another would revive the New Deal model of a government-created job for anyone who wants one; still another would provide huge public subsidies to private employers in order to raise the wages of low-skilled workers. .... [A]ll of the proposals -- yes, even the guaranteed-job scheme -- are touted by their designers aaas miniimizing government bureaucracy and micromanagement of the economy. These plans are thoroughly postsocialist, these scholars say. We can provide much more to people at the bottom of the ladder and still allow the free market to do its thing. .... The most controversial of the plans is the universal basic income, whose best-known contemporary proponent is Philippe van Parijs, a professor of economic and moral philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. .... [This is also known as a 'negative income tax'. Milton Friedman was an early proponent. Universal 'citizens pensions', such as those in effect in Mauritius and New Zealand, applies this concept, but only to the elderly.] A very different set of reforms is offered by the economists L. Randall Wray and Mathew Forstater, both professors at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. They would like to bring back the New Deal model of government-guaranteed jobs for anyone willing and able to work. .... [Pinochet's government enacted such a programme in Chile, where it was known as 'empleo minimo'.] A third call for radical reform comes from someone well- respected within the realm of orthodox economics. Edmund S. Phelps, a professor emeritus at Columbia, has for more than a decade campaigned for a system of public subsidies to increase the wages of low-skilled workers. The fullest elaboration of his model appears in his 1997 book _Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise_ (Harvard University Press). .... In the view of many economists, all three proposals are deeply misguided. "If we go through the history of the United States," says Walter E. Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University, "it is a history of poor people coming to the United States without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, and still they've made it into the mainstream of American society. In the 1840s, when Irish people fleeing the potato famine landed in New York or Boston, there was no welfare program. [I suspect ... or at least hope ... that Professor Williams' view is a minority view in our profession.] David Glenn, "Lending a Lasting Hand", The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 January 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: bringing democracy to Iraq One must hope that American soldiers leave behind a functioning democracy in Iraq--rather than the dysfunctional autocracies and kleptocracies that were the legacy of US military occupations in the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Mexico. But it is likely that, if and when liberal democracy comes to the Muslim world in general and to the Arab world in particular, the gradual, largely bloodless transition will resemble those in Soviet Europe and Latin America and will not be the result of US military action or intimidation. Michael Lind, "A Tragedy of Errors", The Nation, 23 February 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: high and low prices for drugs Patents give drug companies monopolies over their products. The rational strategy for a monopolist is to price- discriminate, to charge more in places that can afford it and less in places that can't. .... [If pharmaceutical] companies can't charge more in developed nations, they won't charge less in developing nations. And if they won't charge less in developing nations, then, as UC Berkeley economist Brian Wright succinctly puts it, "millions will die." .... Politicians know that most voters understand squat about how monopolies work best. They also know that there won't be a rally on Capitol Hill in favor of price discrimination. It is therefore cheap to scold big pharma for the "windfall profits" made by charging so much more for drugs in the US than in other countries. Cheap, and criminal. This behavior by politicians simply denies medicine to those who need it most. If politicians don't like the logic of price discrimination, then let them fund pharmaceutical research in a different way. Abolish drug patents, and grant rewards for great inventions, or give huge subsidies to universities and companies to develop new medicines. There are many who believe that would be a less expensive, more effective system. And there are many who believe that patents in any case, and in every case, do more harm than good. Lawrence Lessig, "Stop Making Pills Political Prisoners", Wired, Issue 12.02 - February 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: female fertility and labor force participation The puzzle ... is that countries like Italy and Spain have relatively low female labor force participation rates--and the lowest fertility rates in the developed world--while the United States, which has relatively high female labor force participation rates, has the highest fertility rate in the developed world. The answer to this puzzle is not simply that the United States has relatively more immigrants or minorities. Even among its native born, white female population, the U.S. fertility rate is abnormally high by developed world standards. S.J. Schieber et al., _Living Happily Ever After: The Economic Implications of Aging Societies_ (World Economic Forum, Geneva, 2004), pp. 3-4. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: foreign aid and development It is easy for everyone to endorse the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which aim to satisfy basic human needs by 2015. (Unfortunately, the specific objectives are so limited that MDG ought to stand for the Minimum Development Goals.) .... [R]ich countries could easily afford to triple their aid budgets without running the remotest risk of the "nightmare" scenario [of equalized per capita income] coming true. They could channel money into health in Africa, into education, and into infrastructure and other necessities with little danger of any rapid catch-up. (Though why the World Bank still lends to China, with more than $350 billion in hard currency reserves and a space program to boot, is difficult to explain.) Gallons of aid money, such as what Northern Italy has poured into Southern Italy for almost 60 years, help assuage development’s growing pains, but progress rarely occurs quickly. Growth economics suggests that poor regions have a hard time closing the income gap on rich countries at a rate greater than 2 percent per year, even under the best of circumstances. Catch-up--when it happens at all--takes generations. Kenneth Rogoff, "A Development Nightmare", Foreign Policy, January/February 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: chimpanzees, the UN and violence Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist who has spent his life trying to understand violence in humans and other species, takes on the daunting problem of national conflict and the obstacles to world government. His amusing comparison of the "alpha-chimpanzee Goblin with a typical UN secretary general" is worth the price of admission, and it has a serious side. Until, like Goblin, the UN leader has the force to back up his authority, he will not be able to intervene as Goblin does to stop conflict among others. Boehm recognizes how daunting it is to try to stop international conflict, but sees the UN as the best path. This may be right, but only in the very long run, and some readers will doubt that this uneven institution, the majority of whose members are non- democratic governments- many frankly despotic-can become in any acceptable sense a democracy of nations. Melvin Konner, reviewing _Evolutionary Psychology and Violence_ edited by Richard W. Bloom and Nancy Dess (Praeger, 2003) in Evolutionary Psychology 2 (Febr. 2004), pp. 28-31. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: my day job [At the risk of boring you, I am sending a sample of work from my day job at the UN. Unless my tenure is extended through June, which is possible, this will be my last anonymous publication because I reach the mandatory retirement age of 60 next month. A fringe benefit of working for the UN is that I have been asked to research such arcane subjects as national accounts. I suspect that most economists do not understand the meaning(s) of "government consumption". At least, I did not! --LW] Government consumption is the most widely available, but also the least understood measure of government activity. .... Government consumption is poorly understood in part because the System of National Accounts (SNA) provides us with not one, but two definitions. One definition is narrow, the other much broader. .... The narrow definition of government consumption, known somewhat unhelpfully as actual final consumption of government, restricts it to expenditure by government on collective services that benefit all of society. .... Under this definition, government expenditure on health care and education is classified as private consumption because services are delivered to specific patients and students, not to society in any collective sense. The broad definition, known as government final consumption expenditure, is equal to actual final consumption of government (expenditure on collective services) plus government expenditure on individual consumption goods and services such as health care and education. This measure of government activity is much larger than that of the narrow definition. Nonetheless, it is smaller than government expenditure, for cash transfers are excluded, as are outlays for investment. Basic data on government expenditure and taxation. Report of the Secretariat (United Nations Economic and Social Council, New York, E/C.16/2004/7, February 2004), pp. 9-11. [Posted at http://www.unpan.org/statistical_database-publicsector.asp . Click on "INTRODUCTION" for the text of the report, and on specific tables and figures for the numbers.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: that 'giant sucking sound' once again Greg Mankiw, head of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, has been widely criticized for telling reporters the simple truth that "outsourcing" of jobs is beneficial to the United States economy (even though he hedged his comment with a "perhaps"). John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, described executives who import services -- such as using lower- paid workers in fooreign countries to handle customer- service calls and Internet queries from American consumers -- as "Benedict Arnold C.E.O.'s." In objecting to moving service jobs overseas, Senator Kerry['s] ... economics is faulty: the practice only adds to the overall economic pie and improves the competitiveness of American companies. In a world economy, firms that forgo cheaper supplies of services are doomed to lose markets, and hence production. And companies that die out, of course, do not employ people. .... [T]he issue is further confused by claims that American jobs are being "transferred" abroad. This is usually not the case. When I came to my university 25 years ago, I got a secretary. Today, the new hires get a computer instead. In India, where a secretary costs a small fraction of what one would in New York City but a computer costs more, any Indian professor who asked for a new laptop would probably get a secretary instead. It is simply a matter of economic reality in both places. The hiring of the secretary in India should not be seen as "transferring" a job out of New York. Jagdish Bhagwati, "Why Your Job Isn't Moving to Bangalore", New York Times Week in Review, 15 Febr. 2004, p. 11 (free for 7 days with registration at nytimes.com.) [I fear that Professor Bhagwati's op-ed, published in today's New York Times, will give support and comfort to critics of free trade such as John Kerry, who is beginning to sound like former candidate Ross Perot. Free trade _does_ destroy firms, and "companies that die out, of course, do not employ people", but other firms do, and this is the point of trade: not to create jobs but to change the composition of jobs to those in which the country has a comparative advantage. Robert Reich, Clinton's labor secretary, got it right. He is quoted on p. 3 of the same section of today's NY Times as saying "Outsourcing does not reduce the total number of jobs in America. If other countries can do something cheaper we ought to let them do it, and concentrate on what we do best." Bravo, Robert Reich for telling it like it is and not pandering to protectionist sentiments in the Democratic party. (No, such sentiments are unfortunately not lacking in the Republican party either.) Professor Bhagwati gives a beautiful example -- replacement of his secretary by a computer -- of how technical change destroys jobs, just as international trade does, but he spoils it by claiming "this should not be seen as 'transferring' a job out of New York". Of course it is. But it is equivalent to transferring a job to a piece of capital equipment--the PC.] [As usual, comments in square brackets are mine alone. Despite misgivings regarding today's op-ed, I remain a great fan of Professor Bhagwati --LW.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: direct democracy and happiness [R]ecent work by two Swiss economists provides strong evidence that a country's political system also plays a part in people's sense of contentment. In a book entitled "Happiness and Economics" published in 2002, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich examined the relationship between the satisfaction Swiss residents expressed with their lives and the amount of political control they were able to exercise. Switzerland provided the perfect laboratory because different cantons practise different degrees of direct democracy. The authors concluded that the more direct political power people have, the happier they seem to be. [Does] ... the rest of the world [have] anything to learn from Switzerland [?] So far as its political system is concerned, the answer is clearly yes. True, the Swiss sort of direct democracy takes many years of practice. It may also be more appropriate for smaller than for larger countries. But at a time when representative democracies everywhere are suffering from disillusionment with politics, it is well worth thinking about alternatives. Barbara Beck, "A special case: A survey of Switzerland", The Economist, 14 February 2004, p. 16. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: foreign "aid" for the USA Between the end of January 2002, when the dollar started to fall briskly, and last October, global foreign currency reserves rose by Dollars 831bn. Of this, Dollars 611bn was accumulated by Asian countries, with Japan's Dollars 219bn, China's Dollars 184bn and Taiwan's Dollars 73bn in the lead. The global accumulation of foreign currency reserves, predominantly invested in US official obligations, was some 2 1/4 per cent of the rest of the world's GDP and 4 1/2 per cent of US GDP over the 21 months in question. This must be the biggest "aid" programme of all time, relative to global GDP. It has allowed the US to enjoy both guns and butter, without needing to choose between the two. Martin Wolf, "A paper victory over the currency protectionists", Financial Times, 11 February 2004, p. 19. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Galileo I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei of Florence, being 70 years old [...], swear that I have always believed, believe now and, with God's help, will in the future believe all that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church doth hold, preach and teach. But since, after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the Universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the centre of the same and that it moves, and that I was neither to hold, defend, nor teach in any manner whatsoever, either orally or in writing, the said false doctrine; and after having received a notification that the said doctrine is contrary to Holy Writ, I wrote and published a book in which I treat this condemned doctrine and bring forward very persuasive arguments in its favour without answering them: I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, that is of having held and believed that the Sun is at the centre of the Universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not at the centre and that it moves. Therefore, wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith these errors and heresies, and I curse and detest them as well as any other error, heresy or sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. And I swear that for the future I shall neither say nor assert orally or in writing such things as may bring upon me similar suspicions; and if I know any heretic, or one suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place in which I may be. Abjuration of Galileo, 22 June 1633. Allow us to deplore certain mental attitudes ... derived from the lack of perception of the legitimate autonomy of science. Pope John Paul II, referring to Galileo in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 31 October 1992. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: attracting teachers to inner-city schools in the USA Big-city school districts are desperate to improve the quality of teacher recruits, yet they offer new teachers the worst possible deal: Come to work for us, and we will put you in the tough schools that experienced teachers avoid. You will work with other green teachers who are also struggling and with students and children who think that the school system has abandoned them. Your starting salary will be low, and it will grow only with seniority--regardless of how well you perform or how much your skills (e.g., in science or mathematics) are worth elsewhere. You will be required to join a union that protects senior teachers but does not do much for you. No wonder teaching is unattractive. No wonder that the ablest students in college avoid education majors, that the ablest education majors avoid teaching, and that the ablest new teachers are the most likely to quit. Paul T. Hill, "Attracting the Best Teachers", Hoover Institution Weekly Essay, March 1, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the "up or out" rule The foreign service and the military [in the USA] ... rotate young officers, paying special attention to the ablest. They also protect the possibility of rapid promotion by requiring senior officers to retire if they have not won in the competition for a higher rank. Officers can stay in one rank for just a few years, and only a fraction can be promoted. This "up or out" process guarantees opportunities for newcomers and quality at senior levels. That is why diplomatic and army careers, in which newcomers get very tough assignments, still attract the likes of former United Nations ambassador Donald McHenry and General Tommie Franks. Like the foreign service and the military, public education depends on quality people. But only the field of education protects incumbents and fails to create an open opportunity structure for capable newcomers. The results are obvious: education repels the most ambitious young people and disproportionately attracts those who prefer security and dread being judged on performance. Paul T. Hill, "Attracting the Best Teachers", Hoover Institution Weekly Essay, March 1, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: US allies In the Cold War the United States welcomed as allies Chiang Kai-shek, Salazar, Franco, Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee and the Korean generals, Greek colonels, military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey, Marcos, and Pinochet because these autocrats proved far more reliable than democratists like Nehru, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, and Pierre Trudeau. When it comes to wars that threaten us, hot or cold, we Americans are at one with Nietzsche, "A state, it is the coldest of all cold monsters." Patrick J. Buchanan, "No End to War", The American Conservative, March 1, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: pre-emptive war There are some in the world who are prematurely resigned to the inevitability of war. Among them are the advocates of the so-called "preventive war", who, in their resignation to war, wish merely to select their own time for initiating it. To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honourable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions which beget further war. Ralph Bunche, "Some Reflections on Peace in Our Time", Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1950. http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1950/bunche-lecture.html [Advocates of this type of war still exist. The idea is the same, even though the name has changed from preventive war to pre-emptive war.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: trade and jobs [E]ven politicians know that the ability of the US to produce twice as much manufactured output today as it did two decades ago, with even fewer workers, is a good thing. So why do they not celebrate increased trade, since it also permits a country to obtain goods and services more cheaply than it otherwise could, just as rising productivity does? Trade does, as critics stress, mean painful adjustment for those affected, as well as shifts in the rewards for different workers. Yet this is just as true of productivity. .... US legislators need to take a grip of themselves. Attacking cheap imports of services is no more logical than bewailing rising productivity. The US, they should remember, benefits hugely from both. Martin Wolf, "Why trade is not bad for the American job market", Financial Times, 25 February 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: consequences of direct democracy, US-style One of the incongruities of U.S.-style direct democracy is that it was consciously intended to _weaken_ parties. That is exactly what has happened (though there are many causal factors, not just direct democracy). The Democrats in particular have grown fragmented and undisciplined. When U.S. political parties were more united, propositions did not stand as much of a chance of making it to the ballot. Politicians saw citizen-enacted legislation as a threat to their control and took steps to head off ballot questions. Nowadays, party leaders often use the initiative and referendum process to gain partisan advantage. The poor seem to fare better under a less directly participatory, but more predicable, partisan system for establishing budget priorities. Arthur A. Goldsmith, "Plebiscites and the Public Purse: U.S. Experience With Direct Democracy", paper prepared for the Expert Group Meeting on Participation of Civil Society in Fiscal Policy, United Nations, New York, March 16-17, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: popular participation and pro-poor fiscal policy The successful cases of pro-poor spending that I outlined above were put in place when a pro-poor, left-of-center political party won power, and when it then used that power to negotiate a shift in priorities. Participation in the absence of the combined power and agenda of a committed political party may, as in the Irish case, have little impact on pro- poor spending. Participation can have other benefits. .... However, a sustainable shift in pro-poor spending, taxation, and macroeconomic policy is likely going to require the old fashioned tools of partisan politics, and the difficult negotiations over a sustainable, democratic, development strategy will require the inclusion, not the exclusion, of the business sector as well as the poor. Deborah A. Bräutigam, "The People’s Budget? Politics, Power, Popular Participation and Pro- Poor Economic Policy", paper prepared for the Expert Group Meeting on Participation of Civil Society in Fiscal Policy, United Nations, New York, March 16-17, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the people's budget The difficult technical aspects of budgeting, and by far the more interesting, have to do with the details of government programs and the best people to advise on this are those most intimately affected. Thus, social assistance spending and the rules governing it are enormously complicated ... but people relying on social assistance payments are generally all too familiar with the twists and turns involved. They should be the ones to advise on the technical aspects of proposed reforms in this area. Once more, the basic premise of alternative, participatory budgeting, is that ordinary people can understand and can contribute to much that is considered too technical for them. John Loxley, "Making and Disseminating Alternative Budgets", paper prepared for the Expert Group Meeting on Participation of Civil Society in Fiscal Policy, United Nations, New York, March 16-17, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: gay marriage So at last it is official: George Bush is in favour of unequal rights, big-government intrusiveness and federal power rather than devolution to the states. That is the implication of his announcement this week that he will support efforts to pass a constitutional amendment in America banning gay marriage. Some have sought to explain this action away simply as cynical politics, an effort to motivate his core conservative supporters to turn out to vote for him in November or to put his likely "Massachusetts liberal" opponent, John Kerry, in an awkward spot. Yet to call for a constitutional amendment is such a difficult, drastic and draconian move that cynicism is too weak an explanation. No, it must be worse than that: Mr Bush must actually believe in what he is doing. "The case for gay marriage", The Economist, 28 Febr. 2004, p.9. [The Economist endorsed George W. Bush in the last election. Its editors appear now to have regrets.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the USA as a free trade zone SUPPOSE we lived in an economic world with no borders, where goods, capital and people could move anywhere. We've all heard the dire predictions of what would happen. All the businesses and jobs would rush to the places with the lowest wages. The poor countries would get richer, but only by making rich countries poorer. .... We rarely realize that we already live in a version of that theoretical world. The United States is one giant free trade zone. .... Over the last century, ...rich and poor regions [of the country] have converged to about the same standard of living. But the results haven't been anything like the "race to the bottom" of protectionist imaginations. .... In fact, states like New York, California, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts have remained at the top of the list for more than a century. They've kept growing, though at a slower rate than poorer states. Virginia Postrel, ECONOMIC SCENE: "U.S. Is a Case Study in Free Trade", New York Times, 26 February 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/business/26scene.html [The article contains a very nice graph of per capita income by region, 1880-1980, showing nearly complete convergence.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: why Jews don't farm [T]he Jewish religion, unique among religions of the early Middle Ages, imposed an obligation to be literate. To be a good Jew you had to read the Torah four times a week at services: twice on the Sabbath, and once every Monday and Thursday morning. And to be a good Jewish parent you had to educate your children so that they could do the same. The literacy obligation ... meant that Jews were uniquely qualified to enter higher-paying urban occupations. Of course, anyone else who wanted to could have gone to school and become a moneylender, but school was so expensive that it made no sense. Jews, who had to go to school for religious reasons, naturally sought to earn at least some return on their investment. Only many centuries later did education start to make sense economically, and by then the Jews had become well established in banking, trade, and so forth. Steven E. Landsburg, "Why Jews Don't Farm", Slate, June 13, 2003. http://slate.msn.com/id/2084352 [Professor Landsburg in this delightful article draws on the work of two economic historians--Maristella Botticini (of Boston University and Universitá di Torino) and Zvi Eckstein (of Tel Aviv University and the University of Minnesota). His occasional column in Slate Magazine is titled "Everyday economics: How the dismal science applies to your life".] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Shakespeare and the Puritans Shakespeare's steady progress up the social scale wasn't at all bad for a theatrical profession whose members had been lumped by the law with whores and vagabonds only a few years earlier, and who could still suffer the odd cold blast of disfavor from the Puritan city fathers. The Puritans disliked the theater because they feared that it would spread immorality, public disorder and sickness. The latter was a real anxiety in an era of smallpox, malaria, bubonic plague and a positive rash (if that is the right word) of sexually transmitted diseases. As for immorality, the sight of beardless boys dressed as women making love to men in public was not considered especially desirable by the Elizabethan equivalents of Pat Robertson. Terry Eagleton, reviewing Frank Kermode's _The Age of Shakespeare_, The Nation, 1 March 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Milton Friedman on mandated pension schemes The economist Martin Feldstein, in a 1995 article in The Public Interest, argued that contributions must be mandatory for two reasons. "First, some individuals are too shortsighted to provide for their own retirement," he wrote. "Second, the alternative of a means-tested program for the aged might encourage some lower-income individuals to make no provision for their old age deliberately, knowing that they would receive the means-tested amount." The paternalism of the first reason and the reliance on extreme cases of the second are equally unattractive. More important, Professor Feldstein does not even refer to the clear injustice of a mandatory plan. The most obvious example is a person with AIDS who has a short life expectancy and limited financial means, yet would be required to use a significant fraction of his or her earnings to accumulate what is almost certain to prove a worthless asset. More generally, the fraction of a person's income that it is reasonable for him or her to set aside for retirement depends on that person's circumstances and values. It makes no more sense to specify a minimum fraction for all people than to mandate a minimum fraction of income that must be spent on housing or transportation. Our general presumption is that individuals can best judge for themselves how to use their resources. Mr. Feldstein simply asserts that in this particular case the Government knows better. In 1964, Barry Goldwater was much reviled for suggesting that participation in Social Security be voluntary. I thought that was a good idea then; I still think it is. Milton Friedman, "Social Security Chimeras", The New York Times, January 11, 1999. http://www.ioptout.org/articles/990111.asp _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: preserving the spotted Owl The focus of discussion in environmental policy has often been on developing appropriate national and international institutions. .... But along with this, interest has been growing in exploring the role of citizenship in achieving sustainable development. Just as institutions are needed to establish enforceable regulations and provide financial incentives, a stronger commitment to the responsibilities of citizenship may help to enhance environmental care. Amartya Sen, "Why We Should Preserve the Spotted Owl", London Review of Books, 5 February 2004. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n03/print/sen_01_.html Amartya Sen makes a coherent philosophical case for the incorporation of environmental responsibilities into concepts of citizenship (LRB, 5 February). But what would be the most effective mechanisms to persuade citizen-consumers to do anything about this remains unclear. Consumption is, for better and worse, an integral aspect of our status in post- industrial societies and often drives our actions far more than concepts of citizenship. Analysis of shopping trends suggests that while 30 per cent of shoppers say that ethical or environmental considerations inform their shopping, this only translates into 3 per cent of market share for products with demonstrable ethical/environmental benefits. Better information alone is not enough. European eco-labelling has enjoyed a very uneven history; and 'fair-trade' products have grown in number but remain limited to a small range of products .... John Sabapathy, letter to the editor of LRB, 4 March 2004. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n05/letters.html#6 [John Sabapathy is employed at AccountAbility, a London-based institute active in the field of social accountability. Amartya Sen has resigned as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and will be returning to Harvard.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: public administration in Nigeria The civil service [of Nigeria] absorbs most of the budget but delivers little in the way of services. Needless duplication breeds waste. Embezzlement is rife. And perhaps most dispiriting is a tendency among some bureaucrats to be pointlessly obstructive in the hope that someone will bribe them to lay off. .... There is hope for change. Last month, a new finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who used to work for the World Bank, promised that the civil service would be cut by 40%, and that top bureaucrats would have to pass exams to test their fitness for the job. Sacking people is hard, though, given Nigeria's tough labour laws, feisty unions and the culture of patronage that caused so many substandard civil servants to be hired in the first place. "Nigeria expels The Economist: A reporter's tale", The Economist,28 February 2004, p. 46. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the internet and socialisation The emergence of the internet has done much to legitimise ... withdrawal from the world. Once, the majority of people - even those with their nose permanently stuck in a book - were obliged, by practical necessity if nothing else, to risk venturing into the outside world every now and then. Now, this socialising experience is no longer necessarily the norm. Thanks to the internet, marginal obsessions can be indulged in at unlimited length, with like-minded people around the world. Rather than being integrated into society by being forced to take people as they come, the internet allows you to preselect whom you choose to fraternise with, based upon whether or not they share your specific interests. And if you dislike or disagree with someone you encounter in this faceless environment, then rather than go through the process of being forced to account for your worldview, you can simply retreat from confrontation. Such an environment breeds individuation and solipsism. Sandy Starr, "The geek shall inherit the Earth", Spiked (3 March 2004). http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA436.htm [Mr. Starr, a self-styled anorak/geek/nerd, uses uncommon words. From the Concise OED, fifth (1964) edition: individ'u ate, v.t. Individualize, form into an individual. So individu a'tion n. sol'·ip·sism, n. (metaphys.). View that the self is the only knowable, or the only existent, thing.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Austrian origins of the American shopping mall Planning and control were of ... great importance to Gruen. He was, after all, a socialist--and he was Viennese. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Vienna had demolished the walls and other fortifications that had ringed the city since medieval times, and in the resulting open space built the Ringstrasse--a meticulously articulated addition to the old city. Architects and urban planners solemnly outlined their ideas. There were apartment blocks, and public squares and government buildings, and shopping arcades, each executed in what was thought to be the historically appropriate style. The Rathaus was done in high Gothic; the Burgtheatre in early Baroque; the University was pure Renaissance; and the Parliament was classical Greek. It was all part of the official Viennese response to the populist uprisings of 1848 .... The walls that separated the élite of Vienna from the unwashed in the suburbs were torn down. And, most important, a ring road, or Ringstrasse--a grand mall--was built around the city, with wide sidewalks and expansive urban views, where Viennese of all backgrounds could mingle freely on their Sunday afternoon stroll. To the Viennese reformers of the time, the quality of civic life was a function of the quality of the built environment, and Gruen thought that principle applied just as clearly to the American suburbs. .... [L]ate in life, Gruen ... pronounced himself in "severe emotional shock." Malls, he said, had been disfigured by "the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking" around them. Developers were interested only in profit. "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments," he said in a speech in London, in 1978. He turned away from his adopted country. He had fixed up a country house outside of Vienna, and soon he moved back home for good. But what did he find when he got there? Just south of old Vienna, a mall had been built--in his anguished words, a "gigantic shopping machine." It was putting the beloved independent shopkeepers of Vienna out of business. It was crushing the life of his city. He was devastated. Victor Gruen invented the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He ended up making Vienna more like America. Malcolm Gladwell, "The Terrazzo Jungle", The New Yorker, Issue of 2004-03-15. http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040315fa_fact1 [The American shopping mall was inspired by the City of Vienna and invented by an Austrian immigrant! Victor Gruen emigrated to New York City in 1938 "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English". He built Southdale, the world's first enclosed shopping mall, 16 years later. The mall is located south of downtown Minneapolis and remains architecturally unchanged 50 years after its construction began.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: nudity in advertising Abercrombie & Fitch, a 112-year-old clothes retailer with almost 700 stores across America, has recently kept its quarterly catalogue light on its sweaters, chinos and shirts and heavy on nudity, hoping to appeal to its target audience of college-age youngsters. The pre-Christmas 2003 issue went even further, accompanying a photograph of attractive young people in the buff with the suggestion that group masturbation makes "a pleasant and super-safe alternative" to group fornication. Parents were deeply offended, which was just what the company was aiming for. But the youngsters seem to have been offended too, perhaps not by the content but by the blatant attempt to manipulate them. The company's December sales were 13% down on a year earlier, and a chastened Abercrombie & Fitch decided to stop publishing its catalogue. John Andrews, "Rags and riches: A survey of fashion", supplement to The Economist, 6 March 2004, p. 12. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Easter Island as metaphor for spaceship Earth Why were Easter Islanders so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them? This is a key question that nags everyone who wonders about self-inflicted environmental damage. I have often asked myself, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Like modern loggers, did he shout "Jobs, not trees!"? Or: "Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood"? Or: "We need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature"? .... The parallels between Easter Island and the modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter's eleven clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, or to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future. Jared Diamond, "Twilight at Easter", The New York Review of Books, 25 March 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the "lump of income" fallacy Surely there is no more commanding moral imperative for people in the West than to urge each other, and their governments, to bring relief to the world's poorest. And what a tragedy it is, therefore, that many of the kind souls who respond most eagerly to this imperative bring to the issue an analytical mindset that is almost wholly counterproductive. They are quite right, these champions of the world's poor, that poverty in an age of plenty is shameful and disgusting. But they are quite wrong to suppose, as so many of them do, that the rich enjoy their privileges at the expense of the poor--that poverty, in other words, is inseparable from a system, capitalism, that thrives on injustice. This way of thinking is not just false. It entrenches the very problem it purports to address. .... The preoccupation bordering on obsession with economic equality that one so often encounters at gatherings of anti- globalists, in the corridors of aid agencies and in socialist redoubts in backward parts of the world reflects a "lump of income" fallacy. This remarkably tenacious misconception is that there is only so much global income to go around. If the United States is consuming $10 trillion worth of goods and services each year, that is $10 trillion worth of goods and services that Africa cannot consume. "A question of justice?" The Economist, 13 March 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the Citizen's Pension in New Zealand ...the ability to retire in a degree of personal comfort, without worry and with dignity, is the least that citizens can expect in a modern, developed economy....it is also most they can expect. They cannot expect the state to maintain in retirement the incomes people became accustomed to during their working lives. Speech by Hon Dr. Michael Cullen, New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance to a Retirement Commission Symposium 13 June 2003, cited in Alison O'Connell, Citizen's Pension: Lessons from New Zealand (Pensions Policy Institute, March 2004). http://www.pensionspolicyinstitute.org.uk/ [New Zealand provides all residents at age 65 with a flat pension, financed from general tax revenue. There are no mandated contributions to pension schemes, nor are there tax breaks for pension saving. The individual is free to save in any desired way to top up the state pension in old age.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Thomas Paine on intergenerational accounts Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791-1792), Part The First. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1776-1800/paine/ROM/rofm04.htm [What a radical statement: only the living have rights. With this view, neither public debt nor pay-as-you-go pensions are allowable. I learned of this quote reading Christopher Higgins' review of a new edition of Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", published in the April 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly and posted online at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/04/hitchens.htm .] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the right and wrong way to wage war If war is necessary, a model of the right way to go about it is the way George Bush senior carefully and patiently gathered his coalition together to attack Iraq and free Kuwait. His son's necessary intervention in Afghanistan met the standards of legitimacy. The wrong way was amply illustrated by the current Iraq war that began a year ago, and the United States is paying a heavy price for its mistakes. H.D.S. Greenway, "The right mix of hard and soft power", Boston Globe, 19 March 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: sex and academic research My old friend Steve Zucker (now a math professor at Johns Hopkins) used to say that sex and academic research complement each other nicely, since you can do either one while thinking about the other. Steven E. Landsburg, "The Economics of Faking Orgasm. No, really", Slate Magazine, posted Friday, March 19, 2004. http://slate.msn.com//id/2097396 [One of Landsburg's occasional columns on "everyday economics: How the dismal science applies to your life". Great fun, and worth reading in its entirety.] Thought du jour: the other US war The United States is transforming itself into a nation of ex- convicts. This country imprisons people at 14 times the rate of Japan, eight times the rate of France and six times the rate of Canada. .... ''Thirteen million people have been convicted of a felony and spent some time locked up,'' Jennifer Gonnerman writes in ''Life on the Outside.'' ''That's almost 7 percent of U.S. adult residents." .... Ex-cons ... are commonly denied the right to vote, parental rights, drivers' licenses, student loans and residency in public housing -- the only housing that marginal, jobless people can afford. The most severe sanctions are reserved for former drug offenders, who have been treated worse than murderers since the start of the so-called war on drugs. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996, for example, imposed a lifetime ban on food stamp and welfare eligibility for people convicted of even a single drug felony. The states can opt out of the prohibition, but where it remains intact it cannot be lifted even for ex-prisoners who live model, crime-free lives. Brent Staples, "'Life on the Outside': The Other Lockup", New York Times Book Review, 21 March 2004, p. 7. Thought du jour: early retirement via a 'disability' pension The risk of a working-age individual not being able to earn an income due to disability is relatively moderate. ... [I] nsuring against this contingency via universal coverage of workers is highly desirable, and providing these benefits through the government makes eminent sense, because it eliminates the commercial costs associated with market mechanisms. In many developed countries, however, the problem is that their national disability programs have become early retirement vehicles for workers who become unemployed late in their careers. Unless the rules for qualification are tightened up and enforced more stringently, this situation will increasingly strain already stretched resources as populations age. S.J. Schieber et al., _Living Happily Ever After: The Economic Implications of Aging Societies_ (World Economic Forum, Geneva, 2004), p. 75. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: offshore outsourcing [B]elieving that offshore outsourcing causes unemployment is the economic equivalent of believing that the sun revolves around the earth: intuitively compelling but clearly wrong. Daniel W. Drezner, "The Outsourcing Bogeyman", Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83301/daniel-w- drezner/the-outsourcing-bogeyman.html?mode=print [Daniel W. Drezner is assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and keeps a daily weblog at www.danieldrezner.com. In 1990 he entered a Ph.D. program in economics at Stanford University, but transfered to political science in 1992 because he discovered, in his words, "while I am interested in economics, I have no desire to study it for the rest of my life".] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: left and right in politics Given Singer’s willingness to challenge established views, I was a little surprised that he still talks in terms of the left and right, particularly as it seems his conception of the left is a long way from any traditional view. Singer characterises the left as being concerned with eliminating the sufferings of others and of the oppressed. A lot of people on the left would consider that quite a diluted view of the left, which is generally thought to have something to do with common ownership. I wondered if it was useful to maintain the label ‘the left’. "The label’s kind of there to stay," replies Singer. "It’s been there so long. We’re not about to get rid of it. You would have to be rather far on the left now to think that a lot of common ownership is a good idea, beyond some major utilities. I wouldn’t say the left ought to be committed to common ownership. Common Ownership is possibly a means to achieving the goals of the left. That debate should continue. But I wouldn’t say it was a prerequisite for being part of the left." Julian Baggini, "Claiming Darwin for the Left: an interview with Peter Singer", The Philosophers' Magazine -- Issue 4 (Autumn 1998). http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=11 [Singer is author of _Animal Liberation_.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: new technologies and older workers The move toward a knowledge-based economy may prove to be the greatest boon since the invention of eyeglasses. Landis MacKellar, referring to the job prospects of older workers who master digital technologies. Quoted by Frances Cairncross, "Forever young: A survey of retirement", The Economist, 27 March 2004, p.16. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: provide fish or teach people how to fish? Teaching people to fish rather than providing fish is great if it works, but this method works only if the donor knows more about fishing in the local area than the people who live there, and only if the donor can transfer this knowledge. Yet it is difficult for outsiders to understand how institutions, politics and societies function, let alone how to influence them in a way that does not create unforeseen consequences. Even if a hypothetical planner could target foreign assistance so as to change communities and institutions for the better, the principal-agent problems involved in foreign assistance make it hard to do this in practice. It is difficult enough to monitor aid workers handing out fish, since they are not subject to market pressures, nor held democratically accountable to the people who they are charged with serving. However, at least one can determine whether fish have reached the intended recipients, and presume that if so, the recipients are better off. In contrast, it is much more difficult to determine whether training sessions for leaders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working with the local fishermen have in fact made anyone better off. Foreign aid workers may provide encouraging anecdotes, but given their incentive to select among anecdotes, it is difficult to know whether donors would have been better off simply handing out fish. Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel, "The Illusion of Sustainability", NBER Working Paper No. w10324, February 2004. http://papers.nber.org/papers/w10324 [The authors analysis a public health project designed to reduce intestinal worm infections among Kenyan school children and find that periodic deworming, which costs only $3.50 per extra year of school participation, is far more cost-effective than health education, latrine construction or water provision.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: why Europeans are getting taller and taller-- and Americans aren’t In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese--once the shortest industrialized people on earth-- have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising. The average American man is only five feet nine and a half-- less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. .... [The explanation may well be differences in diet.] In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed nineteen-forties-style wartime rations such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet. Burkhard Bilger, "The Height Gap: Why Europeans are getting taller and taller--and Americans aren’t", The New Yorker, 2004-04-05. [Two recipients of this select list asked whether immigration of shorter Asians and Latin Americans might explain the growing height gap between the US and Europe. Good possibility, but apparently not true. I add two more paragraphs and encourage you to read this fascinating article, which is can be downloaded on-line from the current issue of The New Yorker.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: immigration and the height gap The obvious answer [to the growing gap in height between Americans and Europeans] would seem to be immigration. The more Mexicans and Chinese there are in the United States, the shorter the American population becomes. But the height statistics that Komlos cites include only native-born Americans who speak English at home, and he is careful to screen out people of Asian and Hispanic descent. In any case, according to Richard Steckel, who has also analyzed American heights, the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity with Northern Europe. In the nineteenth century, when Americans were the tallest people in the world, the country took in floods of immigrants. And those Europeans, too, were small compared with native-born Americans. Malnourishment in a mother can cause a child not to grow as tall as it would otherwise. But after three generations or so the immigrants catch up. Around the world, well-fed children differ in height by less than half an inch. In a few, rare cases, an entire people may share the same growth disorder. African Pygmies, for instance, produce too few growth hormones and the proteins that bind them to tissues, so they can’t break five feet even on the best of diets. By and large, though, any population can grow as tall as any other. Burkhard Bilger, "The Height Gap: Why Europeans are getting taller and taller--and Americans aren’t", The New Yorker, 2004-04-05. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: pay or pray? Tax subsidies have the advantage, I argue, that they vary in ways that are exogenous to both giving and religiosity, providing an independent instrument for identifying the substitutability or complementarity of these two behaviors. And, in fact, I find using this approach that giving and religious participation are strong substitutes [in the U.S.]. Larger tax subsidies to charitable giving lead both to more giving and to less religious participation. Indeed, my estimates imply that each one percent rise in religious giving leads to as much as a 0.92% decline in religious attendance. These results have two implications. First, they serve to validate the economic model of religion, and suggest the utility of further investigations into the determinants of religiosity. Despite innovative studies by a handful of economists, the study of religion remains almost the exclusive purview of other fields such as sociology. .... Second, they suggest that further expansions in the subsidy to charitable giving would increase the level of giving, but would also lower the level of religious participation in the U.S. A key question is the welfare implications of this change in religious participation. Jonathan Gruber, "Pay or Pray? The Impact of Charitable Subsidies on Religious Attendance", NBER Working Paper No. W10374 (March 2004), p. 27. [President G.W. Bush favours increasing the tax subsidies-- income tax deductions--allowed for charitable giving. NBER papers can be downloaded at www.nber.org. There is a fee if your library does not subscribe to the series...most academic libraries do.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Ross Perot and the giant sucking sound There is nobody in America who in the early 1990s worried more about the impact of trade on the wages of Americans in industries that came under pressure from foreign competition than H. Ross Perot. In his political career as advocate of deficit reduction and foe of NAFTA, there was nobody who clearly and visibly cared more about the long-run economic destiny of average Americans than H. Ross Perot. Yet on February 7, 2004, the Times of India reported that Perot Systems is going to double its employment in Asia from 3,500 to 7,000--which will then be half of Perot Systems' worldwide employment. Remember how H. Ross Perot used to talk about the "giant sucking sound" of U.S. jobs going to Mexico? It's not giant, but it is a sucking sound as people working for Perot Systems process medical bills and design software for other outsourcing operations in India. If the economic logic of "outsourcing" is the overwhelmingly powerful consideration for H. Ross Perot, for what American businesses will it not prove irresistible? Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, "Our Outsourced Future", Draft 1.3, 2 April 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Martin Feldstein on IMF performance [The current issue of the IMF's quarterly publication "Finance and Development" contains a four-page, wide-ranging interview with Martin Feldstein, head of Harvard's economics department, president of the NBER and chairman of Regan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. Here is a brief excerpt.] During the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, he [Feldstein] was a severe critic of the performance of the IMF. He accused the IMF of applying to the Asian case "old policies designed for different problems." The IMF’s traditional "devalue and deflate" prescription was not suitable for countries that had substantial debt denominated in foreign currencies, Feldstein argued. The devaluation automatically deflated demand by raising the value of the international debt; to deflate demand further through tight monetary and fiscal policies caused, in his view, "unnecessary pain and damage in the early stage of the crisis." Feldstein also disapproved of the IMF’s insistence on structural reforms as a condition for its loans. He regarded such reforms as not central to the resolution of the crisis and an intrusion on national sovereignty. "People in Economics: Prakash Loungani profiles Professor Martin Feldstein", Finance and Development (March 2004), p. 7. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2004/03/pdf/people. pdf [Discussion question: How do the views of Martin Feldstein, a Reagan Republican, differ on this issue from those of Joseph Stiglitz, a Clinton Democrat?] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: how trade destroys (some) jobs We got accustomed over the twentieth century to the spectacle of industrial workers or agricultural workers losing their jobs to foreign competitors, who could produce more cheaply abroad and then export. Malaysia could produce rubber more cheaply than Brazil (which, as the home of the rubber plant, had lots of pests and parasites that had evolved to eat rubber plants). Illinois could grow wheat more cheaply than Prussia could grow rye. And, in the 1970s and 1980s, we learned that Yokohama could make better and cheaper cars than Detroit. Now the first half of the twenty-first century is seeing a transformation quite as great. The trans-oceanic fiber optic cable, the communications satellite, and the internet are making much of white-collar service work as potentially tradeable as anything else. Broadband cables and satellites can connect India or China or Bulgaria to the US instantly, seamlessly--and almost costlessly. A huge, new swatch of our jobs will become vulnerable to foreign competition over the next years. Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, "Our Outsourced Future", Draft 1.3, 2 April 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: in defense of globalization Perhaps the best reason to pick up this book is Bhagwati’s inimitable writing style. The book is laced with amusing vignettes and turns of phrase. In mentioning the lack of openness and accountability of nongovernmental organizations, Bhagwati argues that "halos should not be shields" against public scrutiny.Writing about the tendency to blame corporations for both bypassing countries and harming those not bypassed, he recalls the movie _Manhattan_ when "Woody Allen’s character talks about the hotel where the food was dreadful and there was not enough of it either!" Douglas Irwin, reviewing Jagdish Bhagwati's book _In Defense of Globalization_ (Oxford University Press, 2004) in the March 2004 issue of Finance and Development. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: outsourcing and unemployment [I]t is a truth universally acknowledged (except in campaigning seasons) that the level of employment in the United States is not set by levels of imports and exports, but by whether the Federal Reserve's monetary policy manages to tune the level of aggregate demand to that sweet spot where there is neither high unemployment nor accelerating inflation. (And whether the Federal Reserve is properly supported by fiscal stimulus in those rare occasions--like today--where it finds itself out of ammunition.) "Outsourcing" is neither cause nor cure for the large gap between the number of Americans who have jobs and the number who want jobs. And as that gap closes over the next several years, concern over outsourcing will diminish. Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, "Our Outsourced Future", Draft 1.3, 2 April 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: e-democracy [T]he Internet ... fosters a kind of anarchy ... [that] empowers individual members of a political movement, rather than the movement as a whole. Opposition members can offer dissenting opinions at will, thus undermining the leadership and potentially splintering the organization. In combating an authoritarian regime, in other words, there's such a thing as too much democracy. Two of the most successful opposition movements of the last few decades--the South African opposition led by Nelson Mandela and the Burmese resistance led by Aung San Suu Kyi--relied upon charismatic, almost authoritarian leaders to set a message followed by the rest of the movement. The anti-globalization movement, by contrast, has been a prime example of the anarchy that can develop when groups utilize the Web to organize. .... Even beyond its failure to live up to democratizers' dreams, the Web may actually be helping to keep some dictatorships in power. Asian dissidents have told me that the Web has made it easier for authoritarian regimes to monitor citizens. In Singapore, ... the government previously had to employ many security agents and spend a lot of time to monitor activists who were meeting with each other in person. But, with the advent of the Web, security agents can easily use government- linked servers to track the activities of activists and dissidents. In fact, ... in recent years opposition groups in Singapore have moved away from communicating online and returned to exchanging information face-to-face, in order to avoid surveillance. In China, the Web has similarly empowered the authorities. .... "The real problem with groups trying to use the Internet is that you are actually more easily monitored if you use online forms of communication than if you just meet in person in secret," one specialist in Chinese Internet usage told me. Joshua Kurlantzick, "The Web Won't Topple Tyranny", The New Republic, 5 April 2004. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=jgCdPjAtBLxsTJFQNN21CQ%3D%3D Governments are not helpless when it comes to regulation of the Internet, and it is very possible that they will be more successful in this endeavour than they were in the past in regulating the printing of books, pamphlets and newspapers, and their distribution through the postal systems. In fact, the Internet provides new tools for governments that are willing to use them, tools that can increase the cost of access to certain types of information and tools that make it difficult for citizens to hide their activities from government. Larry Willmore, Government Policies toward Information and Communication Technologies: A Historical Perspective", DESA Discussion Paper No. 21 (October 2001), pp. 7-8. http://www.un.org/esa/esa01dp21.pdf _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: affirmative action [W]e like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more -- it might require us to give up our money. WALTER BENN MICHAELS, Diversity's False Solace, New York Times Magazine, 11 April 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/11ESSAY.html Governments find preferences attractive because they do not require increased taxation or expenditure. It is much easier to impose quotas than to attack the underlying causes of de facto inequality between groups, including discrimination, poverty, poor education, malnutrition and geographical isolation. United Nations, Report on the World Social Situation (Sales No. E97.IV.1, 1997), p. 168, para 106 [from a section drafted anonymously by L. Willmore]. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the Crusades Early Christians had been pacifists. Then, in the fourth century, they allied with the Roman empire, the world's foremost military power, and so they had to do some quick rethinking about God's opinion of armies and official violence. Yet even then they thought of war as at best a deplorable necessity, and tried to draw up careful restrictions on when and how it should be fought, producing the first forms of religious "just war" theory. The 11th-century papacy moved on from this. Now it asserted that wars were exactly what God demanded, if directed against God's enemies: anyone fighting their way to victory against non-Christians would win enough divine brownie-points to guarantee a place in heaven. Islam had previously used the same principle in a rather less precise form: jihad, now renamed on behalf of the cross rather than the crescent. Diarmaid MacCulloch, reviewing two books on the Crusades, in The Guardian, 3 April 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Fidel I have wondered how it became necessary, even obligatory, for the left to excuse Fidel anything: megalomania at the highest levels, informers on every city block, re-education camps for homosexuals, quarantine for aids patients, and the suicide of such revolutionary comrades as Haydée Santamaría and Osvaldo Dorticós. In the arts community, toadyism; among the journalists, self-censorship and despair; in prison or exile, Carlos Franqui, Herberto Padilla, Guillermo Cabrera Infante. John Leonard, reviewing Oliver Stone's new movie "Looking for Fidel" which aired on HBO yesterday, April 14, 2004, in New York Magazine (19 April 2004), pp. 70-71. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: direct democracy (1) The fundamental paradigm that dominates our politics is the shift from representational (Madisonian) to direct (Jeffersonian) democracy. Voters want to run the show directly and are impatient with all forms of intermediaries between their opinions and public policy. This basic shift stems from a profusion of information on the one hand, and a determined distrust of institutions and politicians on the other. Dick Morris, The New Prince: Machiavelli Updated for the Twenty-First Century (Renaissance Books, Los Angeles, 1999). [Dick Morris was adviser to former President Bill Clinton. This is the opening paragraph of the first chapter of his book.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: direct democracy (2) Since the greatest popular support for direct democracy is located among citizens at the periphery of politics--the less interested, the less informed, and the adherents of extreme parties--these reforms might encourage the nativist and populist tendencies that exist in Europe today. Aspects of the Swiss and American experiences suggest that direct democracy can provide a tool for majority action against unpopular minorities. Russell J. Dalton, Wilhelm Bürklin, and Andrew Drummond, "Public opinion and direct democracy", Journal of Democracy 12:4 (October 2001), pp. 150-151. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: noble dogs When mistreated, dogs forgive. When ignored, they still love. When abandoned, they remain loyal. When neglected, they don't judge. They want for one thing only. To hear their human's voice, feel their human's touch, revel in the nearness of the person they love so unconditionally. Without prejudice, bias or discrimination, our canine companions epitomize the best of human nature. Or what human nature should be. All of which leads me to believe there's a reason why it's often pointed out that dog is "God" spelled backward. Because both deity and dog have traits we human beings should all aspire to resemble. Eileen Mitchell, "A worthy aspiration for most humans: To be like your own dog", San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, May 8, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: does information technology matter? Asking whether information technology matters is like asking whether electricity matters. In one sense it certainly does - without electricity, commerce would grind to a halt. But skill in the management of electricity isn't particularly useful to most companies, since electricity is now so cheap and so commonplace that it can't really be a source of competitive advantage to anyone. Profit comes from scarcity. Companies that can provide products or services that others can't provide can charge premium prices. As more and more companies are able to supply something, competition works its magic and forces prices down. Hal Varian, Economic Scene: How Much Does Information Technology Matter?, New York Times, May 6, 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: sovietologists and the collapse of communism In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system." Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn’t Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you’re sorry. Glenn Garvin reviewing _In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage_, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 300 pages, $25.95), Reason Online, April 2004. http://www.reason.com/0404/cr.gg.fools.shtml _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: prospects for Arab unification I think it [a unified Arab state] grows less and less likely, because many of these states were quite artificial when they were created. But they are now quite old, relatively speaking, and each of them has developed a strong group of interests, a sort of intersecting network of careers and interests. I mean, if you have twenty Arab states, you will have twenty embassies in Washington. If you have only one state, you will have only one embassy. Think of all those diplomats out of a job. .... Each time two or more Arab states tried to unify, they fell apart. So it seems to me that the prospects for a united Arab state are about as good as the prospect for a united Latin America. Bernard Lewis, Interview, Atlantic Unbound, April 29, 2004. [Interviewed by Elizabeth Wasserman on April 15.] http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-04-29.h tm _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Islam and strangers Islam as a political ideology consists of a set of ideas and values that has proved extremely successful at building cohesion in societies under stress at a crucial period in their history. For several centuries Islamic societies led the world in culture and military strength. Some Islamic centres were models of tolerance and - yes - liberalism that have rarely been equalled since. Islam evolved a response to the challenge of a world populated with strangers, though one that has proved fragile under the stresses of more recent centuries. That fragility is not accidental, though. The fact that Islam rapidly acquired impressive military and political strength within a few years of its foundation meant that - unlike Christianity - it never had to develop a philosophy of compromise with secular authorities and could indulge the ambition of a comprehensive regulation of social life. Its periods of tolerance were therefore the product of vast self- confidence and the absence of internal challenge rather than an ideology that had adapted to the permanent presence of strangers. Paul Seabright, "Liberals and strangers", Prospect Magazine, May 2004. http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?P_Article= 12560 _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the UNU definition of civil society In turning to a discussion of civil society disenfranchisement, the definition of who comprises civil society must be clear. Though there are widely differing definitions of civil society, in this report, the term here refers to "a self-organised citizenry". This definition includes both civil society groups--such as non-governmental organisations, transnational advocacy networks, grassroots groups and issue coalitions--as well as actors not affiliated with a specific organisation, such as protesters.8/ (p.8) footnote 8/ [S]o-called "business groups" which often represent certain business interests ... are not included in this definition of civil society. Moreover, this definition will sidestep ... so-called "uncivil society", and focus only on those groups who mission is to promote the goals of sustainable development. (p. 24) UNU-IAS Report. _Engaging the Disenfranchised: Developing Countries and Civil Society in International Governance for Sustainable Development. An Agenda for Research_ (United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies, Tokyo, Japan, February 2004). [Let me see if I have this right. Civil society is "self- organised citizenry". Private business firms, though "self- organised", are _excluded_, as are groups that support them. Unorganised citizens are _included_ provided they actively promote sustainable development. All citizens--organised or unorganised--are excluded if they are "uncivil", i.e. do not support our cause. In a nutshell, the definition seems to come down to "those outside of government who share our policy agenda". It has nothing to do with the organised/unorganised dichotomy.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: fish medicine ''I have no doubt fish medicine will become mainstream much like bird medicine did in the 80's,'' said Dr. David Scarfe, assistant director of scientific activities at the American Veterinary Medical Association. ''It's actually happening far more rapidly than I'd imagined.'' According to the A.V.M.A., almost 2,000 vets currently practice fish medicine. That number is steadily growing, and the market seems solid: 13.9 million households have fish and spend several billions of dollars annually on fish supplies alone .... Fish diagnostics range from a basic exam ($40), blood work ($60) and X-rays ($55) to the advanced: ultrasound ($175), CAT scans ($250). Veterinarians tube-feed fish. They give fish enemas, fix broken bones with plates and screws, remove impacted eggs, treat scoliosis and even do fish plastic surgery -- anything from glass-eye implantation to ''surgical pattern improvement,'' with scale transplantation, scale tattooing or unsightly-scale removal. .... When I tell people I'm writing about fish medicine, their reaction is almost always the same: why not flush the sick fish and get a new one? Actually, for several reasons, ... [such as] people who gasp if you mention flushing because they swear their fish have personalities so big they win hearts. Rebecca Skloot, "Fixing Nemo", New York Times Magazine, 2 May 2004, p. 60. [This article can be accessed free of charge, for one week only, at www.nytimes.com. Ten years ago I was surprised to learn that vets were giving CAT scans to cats in New York City. But CAT scans of goldfish? Incredible! Proof that the USA is, indeed, a wealthy country.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: explanations in physics and in biology [In science] the sharpest divisions are not within disciplines but between them. One difference is the sheer amount of explaining necessary. Physicists have it easy. The unities within the subject mean they only have to explain things once - seen one electron, seen them all. And thhere is somehow less going on at very large and very small scales. "There is a real sense in which a star is simpler than an insect", according to the Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees. Move down the scale, and the world is full of particularities. Jon Turney, "Telling it like it is", The Guardian, 22 April 2004. http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/lastword/story/0,13228,1197545 ,00.html _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: trade reform and poverty While many pro-poor policies are administratively complex and expensive to implement, the most important bits of trade reform--tariff reductions and uniformity, and the abolition of nontariff barriers--are easy to do and will frequently save resources. Thus trade reform may be one of the most cost effective anti-poverty policies available to governments. Certainly the evidence suggests that, with care, trade liberalization can be an important component of a "pro-poor" development strategy. L. Alan Winters, Neil Mcculloch, and Andrew Mckay, "Trade Liberalization and Poverty: The Evidence So Far", Journal of Economic Literature (March 2004) p. 108. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: multiple selves The concept of "economic man," which is at the basis of mainstream economics, implies a self-interested, rational and temporally-stable individual. A person who is made up of multiple subselves may, at first glance, run counter to this concept. But small groups often make better decisions than individuals acting alone, and thus a mind that is a multiplicity of selves who function much like a small group may make better decisions than a mind which is a unified, single self. David Lester, "Comment on 'The self as a problem': alternative conceptions of the multiple self", Journal of Socio-Economics 32 (2003), p. 502. [London (UK)-born David Lester is Professor of Psychology at Stockton College of New Jersey. The complete article is on pp. 499-502.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Richard Dawkins on writing for lay readers Einstein said: "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." Any fool can oversimplify. Far from talking down, flatter your reader. Don't apologise for elitism, encourage your reader to join the elite. Don't shrink from choosing the exact word that says it best, even if it drives your reader to the dictionary. A dictionary never harmed anyone, and a word can excite by its very unfamiliarity. Richard Dawkins, "Next Step, A Nobel Prize for Literature?" EDGE 137 (4.27.04). http://www.edge.org/ [Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and author of THE SELFISH GENE.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the public school model Suppose the federal government had used the public school model when Social Security was established in the 1930s. The government would have levied the necessary taxes and then established homes in which senior citizens would have had to reside to receive the program's benefits. Those preferring to live independently would not receive federal funds and would have to support themselves. .... Actually, the public school model is similar to the way social services were often at least partially based in the past. There was a time when the penniless were sent to "poor houses" to receive public assistance. Those needing medical services but unable to pay for them had to go to a pauper's hospital. .... While this approach isn't totally absent today - witness the large public housing projects - the trend has been toward rent subsidies, individual assistance grants, for Medicare, Medicaid, public assistance allotments, food stamps, and the like, whereby individuals can make some personal choices. David W. Kirkpatrick, "Tuition Vouchers: An Old Story", April 22, 2004. http://www.freedomfoundation.us/ _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: retirement in France Some older French people would like to work and are unable to find jobs. .... But retirement is mostly welcomed and made possible by generous state benefits. While 12 per cent of American men over 70 work, Jacques Chirac, the president, is almost the only Frenchman of that age in regular employment. John Kay, "For all its faults, France is the place to be", Financial Times, Mar 31, 2004, pg. 19. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: civil society in Bolivia [T]he recent boom in associations in Third World countries is not unrelated to the international funding opportunities the donor community has made available. A lot of civil society organisations (especially NGOs) are donor-bred and fed, hence the strength of organised civil society may be to that extent artificial and not embedded/rooted in the society in question. Even when certain organisations are the emanation of endogenous associational forces, it might still be that civil society is part of the problem rather than the solution. Voice and civicness are not necessarily related. Civil society might well produce and reproduce the 'uncivic' mechanisms of clientelism and patronage. (p. 152) Nadia Molenaers and Robrecht Renard, "The World Bank, participation and PRSP: the Bolivian case revisited", The European Journal of Development Research 15:2 (December 2003), pp. 133-161. [PRSP, for those unfamiliar with World Bank jargon, stands for "Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper". Donors insist that civil society organisations become involved in formulation of the PRSP, and the participatory process is widely believed to have been a great success in Bolivia. Political scientist Molenaers and economist Renard show that such a belief is not warranted, even though "Bolivia already has a very vibrant civil society and estensive experience with participation" (p. 135).] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the World Bank on civil society The World Bank’s partnership with civil society is built upon the recognition that civil society organizations often have closer contact with the poor and can offer valuable insights and perspectives that differ from other stakeholders. CSOs may be better able than government or official actors to help the poor .... The World Bank is committed to helping civil society and governments ... effectively engage each other ... [and] has increased its own capacity to engage civil society .... World Bank, Working Together: The World Bank’s Partnership with Civil Society (World Bank, NGO and Civil Society Unit, Washington, D.C., 2000), p. 8. [This is a fair statement of World Bank views from the 1980s and 1990s.] Experience with participatory processes suggests that the poor and the marginalized, even when invited to express their views, have no institutional outlet through which to follow up. In these circumstances, elected institutions have a key role to play in providing the vehicle through which their views are represented. Ad-hoc consultations can often be seen as little more than a justification for governments to validate their pre-set priorities. .... [W]ithout a clear and transparent link to elected institutions, [they] should not be encouraged. World Bank, Comprehensive Development Framework. Meeting the Promise? Early Experience and Emerging Issues (The World Bank, CDF Secretariat, September 17, 2001), p. 4. [What a change! The Bank now feels that the needs of the poor can be better met by elected representatives than by NGOs and CSOs.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Adam Smith on direct democracy The idea of representation was unknown in ancient times. When the people of one state were admitted to the right of citizenship in another, they had no other means of exercising that right but by coming in a body to vote and deliberate with the people of that other state. The admission of the greater part of the inhabitants of Italy to the privileges of Roman citizens completely ruined the Roman republic. It was no longer possible to distinguish between who was and who was not a Roman citizen. No tribe could know its own members. A rabble of any kind could be introduced into the assemblies of the people, could drive out the real citizens, and decide upon the affairs of the republic as if they themselves had been such. But though America were to send fifty or sixty new representatives to parliament, the doorkeeper of the house of commons could not find any great difficulty in distinguishing between who was and who was not a member. .... The assembly which deliberates and decides concerning the affairs of every part of the empire, in order to be properly informed, ought certainly to have representatives from every part of it. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, Ch.7, "Of Colonies" in paragraph IV.7.163. [One of the complaints of the American colonists was 'taxation without representation'. Adam Smith argued that representation was both possible and desirable, but direct democracy was unworkable in the British Empire.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: market failures and government failures If we wish to make our world a better place, we must look not at the failures of the market economy, but at the hypocrisy, greed and stupidity that so often mar our politics. Martin Wolf, from an extract of the last chapter of his forthcoming book "Why Globalization Works" (Yale University Press) published in the Financial Times, 10 May 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: computers as teachers Many attempts have been made to use computers as teachers. My grandchildren now spend long hours sitting in Computer Labs at school and working their way through packages of educational software at home. The educational software has certainly helped them to learn reading and typing and elementary arithmetic. But they did not learn these skills noticeably faster than their parents who learned them from books such as The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. At a more advanced level, the advent of educational software has signally failed to produce a generation of teen-agers more attuned to scientific and mathematical thinking than their parents. In spite of massive efforts to make science and mathematics attractive with interactive programs and elegant graphics, the majority of our students remain scientifically and mathematically illiterate. The minority who assimilate the intellectual riches that computers have to offer are similar to the minority who in earlier times became addicted to science by building radios or collecting beetles. Freeman Dyson, responding to "ARISTOTLE" (THE KNOWLEDGE WEB) by W. Daniel Hillis, Edge 138 (May 6, 2004). http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge138.html [Freeman Dyson is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: cyber economics Edward Castronova had hit bottom. Three years ago, the thirty- eight-year-old economist was, by his own account, an academic failure. He had chosen an unpopular field -- welfare research -- and published only a handful of papers that, as far as he could tell, "had never influenced anybody." He'd scraped together a professorship at the Fullerton campus of California State University, a school that did not even grant Ph.D.s. He lived in a lunar, vacant suburb. .... To fill his evenings, Castronova did what he'd always done: he played video games. In April, 2001, he paid a $10 monthly fee to a multiplayer on-line game called EverQuest. .... Soon, Castronova was playing EverQuest several hours a night. Then he noticed something curious: EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play, often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it. The longer they play, the more powerful they get -- but everyone starts the game at Level 1, barely strong enough to kill rats or bunnies and harvest their fur. Castronova would sell his fur to other characters who'd pay him with "platinum pieces," the artificial currency inside the game. .... Things got even more interesting when Castronova learned about the "player auctions." EverQuest players would sometimes tire of the game, and decide to sell off their characters or virtual possessions at an on-line auction site such as eBay. .... As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual "platinum pieces"; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest's economy actually had real-world value. He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. -- higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game -- the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled. Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist. Castronova sat back in his chair in his cramped home office, and the weird enormity of his findings dawned on him. Many economists define their careers by studying a country. He had discovered one. .... His own voyage had a good ending. A few months ago, the communications department at Indiana University in Bloomington called. They had read his work and wanted to talk. Weeks later, they offered him a fully tenured position in a new department. Clive Thompson, "Game Theories", The Walrus Magazine, June 2004. http://www.walrusmagazine.com/index.pl?section= currentissuetoc [There is much more in this fascinating article, including activities of the Sim Mafia, creation of a chain of cyber- brothels, and a currency crisis caused by a virtual counterfeiting ring ("Inflation soared, and for weeks, players would log in each day to find their assets worth less and less").] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the effects of framing The states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey both offer drivers a choice between an insurance policy that allows an unconstrained right to sue, and a less expensive policy that restricts the right to sue. The unconstrained right to sue is the default in Pennsylvania, the opposite is the default in New Jersey, and the takeup of full coverage is 79 percent and 30 percent in the two states, respectively. ... Pennsylvania drivers spend [an estimated] 450 million dollars annually on full coverage that they would not purchase if their choice were framed as it is for New Jersey drivers. Daniel Kahneman, "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics", American Economic Review, December 2003, p. 1459. [Professor Kahneman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, credits the work of Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein of Columbia University as his source for this information.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: relative versus absolute well-being One representative English study of infant mortality reported deaths per 1,000 in 1900 that ranged from 247 for the poorest working class groups to 94 for the most fortunate, a ratio of about 2.5 to 1. That ratio has not changed in 100 years, but by 2000 the top to bottom ratio had gone from 8.1 to 3.1 per thousand. Why worry about the persistence of inequality in the face of massive improvement for individuals across the entire income spectrum? Yet ... there are doubters .... One theory, which I think is more fashionable than sound, stresses the importance of relative preferences. Stated in a nutshell, the proposition is that people care less about their absolute sense of well- being and more about how their personal position compares with that of their peers. Misery is not so bad when there is company. .... But would anyone really rather have overall infant mortality rates of 94 (the best cohort in 1900) or the current skew of 8.1 to 3.1 that we have today? Richard Epstein, "Defining Social Welfare--and Achieving It" Hoover Digest 2 (Spring 2004). http://www- hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/042/epstein.html _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: relative versus absolute wage levels In ordinary business, managers must always cope with massive income disparities within their workforce. Yet most Microsoft employees do not get terribly upset that Bill Gates is richer than they are. They live happy and rewarding lives even knowing that someone out there is worth north of $80 billion (much of which is devoted to charitable purposes in any event). On the other hand, if the good-for-nothing in the next cubicle earns five dollars more an hour than you do, that could be the source of great indignation, uneasiness, and unhappiness. What’s going on? Are people crazy? Not at all. Most of the concerns with relative preferences in economic performance do not turn on simple differences in wealth but on the perception of free-loading in cooperative ventures. If two persons get the same salaries for performing like work and one does not deliver, then the other is forced to carry more than his fair share of the load. It is that perception of a forced cross-subsidy in a cooperative setting that is treated as a form of theft, which in fact it is. Setting the right pay differentials and promotion structure enhances the productivity of the firm. .... Unfair burdens lead to low morale, the departure of the ablest workers, and fewer widgets. Richard Epstein, "Defining Social Welfare--and Achieving It" Hoover Digest 2 (Spring 2004). http://www- hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/042/epstein.html _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: attribution of authorship I recently learned a disagreeable fact: there are influential scientists in the habit of putting their names to publications in whose composition they have played no part. Apparently some senior scientists claim joint authorship of a paper when all that hey have contributed is bench space, grant money and an editorial read-through of the manuscript. For all I know, entire scientific reputations may have been built on the work of students and colleagues! I don't know what can be done to combat this dishonesty. Perhaps journal editors should require signed testimony of what each author contributed. Richard Dawkings, preface to the 1989 edition of _The Selfish Gene_ (Oxford University Press, 1976, 1989). _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: hawks and doves Suppose there are only to sorts of fighting strategy in a population of a particular species, named _hawk_ and _dove_. (The names refer to conventional human usage and have no connection with the habits of the birds from whom the names are derived: doves are in fact rather aggressive birds.) Richard Dawkings, _The Selfish Gene_ (Oxford University Press, 1976, 1989), pp. 69-70. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: gay Muslims? Ten years ago, the words ‘gay’ and ‘Muslim’ seemed like polar opposites, and an out gay Muslim seemed as probable as a black member of the Ku Klux Klan. All of the seven countries that treat homosexuality as a crime punishable by death are Muslim. Of the 82 countries where being gay is a crime, 36 are predominantly Muslim. Even in democratic societies, Islam remains overwhelmingly anti-gay. .... Sheikh Sharkhawy, a cleric at the prestigious London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, compares homosexuality to a "cancer tumour." He argues "we must burn all gays to prevent paedophilia and the spread of AIDS" .... And then came Al-Fatiha. With seven branches across the United States and offices in London, Johannesburg and Toronto, these gay Muslims ain’t going to shut up or scuttle away. They are here and they are fighting. .... Marianne Duddy, executive director of Dignity/USA, the oldest and largest gay Catholic organisation, explains, "In many ways, Al-Fatiha and the first wave of gay Muslims exactly parallel where gay Catholics were 25 to 30 years ago. Our first five years were just about putting the words ‘gay’ and ‘Catholic’ in the same sentence. I pray they have a very deep faith." And even now, the Catholic Church is hardly a model of tolerance. The Pope describes gay marriage as "evil", calls on gay people to be celibate, and has acted at the United Nations to block protection of the human rights of gay people. Johann Hari, "Outcast heroes: the story of gay Muslims", Attitude, 20/05/2004. http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=395 _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: life and death Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman. http://levity.com/digaland/celestial/whitman/song.html _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: what is social capital? [T]he term social capital has spread throughout the social sciences and has spawned a huge literature that runs across disciplines. Despite the immense amount of research on it, however, the definition of social capital has remained elusive. From a historical perspective, one could argue that social capital is not a concept but a praxis, a code word used to federate disparate but interrelated research interests .... The success of social capital as a federating concept may result from the fact that no social science has managed to impose a definition of the term that captures what different researchers mean by it within a discipline, let alone across fields. While conceptual vagueness may have promoted the use of the term among the social sciences, it also has been an impediment to both theoretical and empirical research of phenomena in which social capital may play a role. Steven N. Durlauf and Marcel Fafchamps, "Social capital", NBER Working Paper 10485, May 2004, p. 3. [Precisely the same could be said of the term 'civil society'.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: what is civil society? (continued) Terms such as _civil society_ and _community_ are sometimes used too casually. People differ in beliefs, hopes, values, identities, and capabilities. Civil society is often not civil at all; many "communities" have little in common. Individuals and households may disagree about collective objectives and work to promote their own views, both individually and through associations, sometimes at the direct expense of others. World Bank, World Development Report 2004, p. 49. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: trade and development This week, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a new report on the world's least developed countries (LDCs). It is badly written, of course: no UN document is complete without pious entreaties that "development complementarities be strengthened". But what is most annoying is the effort it wastes on bayoneting a straw man. It is an illusion, we are told, "to think that mass poverty found in most of the LDCs can be reduced through global integration and trade expansion alone". Well, yes, it would be foolish to rely on trade liberalisation alone to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. But no one is suggesting that once a country has lowered trade barriers, it can relax and play golf. Free trade is not much use if you have nothing to sell, and the least developed countries, by definition, produce little that the rest of mankind wishes to buy. It is far from simple to create an environment in which people can become more productive. If it were, even the inhabitants of Chad would be rich. "Nothing to sell", The Economist, 29 May 2004, pp. 73-74. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: PhDs in business Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor at Stanford, says: "Good Ph.D. students are extreme in their creativity and self-motivation. Master's students are equally smart but do not have the same drive to create something new." The master's takes you where others have been; the doctorate, where no one has gone before. Until recently, when computer science students completed their long Ph.D. training and stepped into daylight, they were treated warily by industry employers. American business has had to overcome its longtime suspicion of intellect. "Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men," an article published in the 1920's in the American magazine, is a typical specimen of an earlier era. In modern times, computer scientists are hired, but a doctorate can still be viewed as the sign of a character defect, its holder best isolated in an aerie. …. “We're not heavy into Ph.D. recruiting," explains Kristen Roby, Microsoft's director of recruiting at colleges in the United States. "We're huge believers in hiring potential." Google, however, prefers those who have been trained for the maximum time setting on the university's dial and who have experience in organizing their own research agenda. The company has not released data about its Ph.D's for two years, but based on its history, the number is probably more than 100. …. When the cone of silence is lifted, ask anyone at Google, starting with the chief executive: Eric Schmidt, Ph.D., computer science. Randall, Stross, “What's Google's Secret Weapon? An Army of Ph.D.'s”, New York Times, 6 June 2004, Sunday Business, p. 3. [The chief executive of Microsoft, as everyone knows, is a college dropout.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: civil society and empowerment of poor people [S]trong civil society organizations can promote the political empowerment of poor people, pressuring the state to better serve their interests and increasing the effectiveness of antipoverty programs. Case studies in the Indian state of Kerala and elsewhere show that a highly engaged civil society contributes to better outcomes in health and education. What is needed is an enabling institutional environment for civil society to develop and thicken. World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty (Oxford University Press, New York), p. 114. Terms such as civil society and community are sometimes used too casually. People differ in beliefs, hopes, values, identities, and capabilities. Civil society is often not civil at all; many "communities" have little in common. Individuals and households may disagree about collective objectives and work to promote their own views, both individually and through associations, sometimes at the direct expense of others. World Bank, World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People (Oxford University Press, New York), p. 49. [What a difference four years makes!] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Milton Friedman on government spending There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40% of our national income. Milton Friedman, interviewed by David Asman, Fox News, Friday, May 21, 2004. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120578,00.html _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: HIV treatment and risky sexual behaviour Recent breakthroughs in the treatment of HIV have coincided with an increase in infection rates and an eventual slowing of reductions in HIV mortality. These trends may be causally related, if treatment improves the health and functional status of HIV+ individuals and allows them to engage in more sexual risk-taking. We examine this hypothesis empirically [and] find that treatment results in more sexual risk-taking by HIV+ adults, and possibly more of other risky behaviors like drug abuse. Dana P. Goldman, Darius Lakdawalla and Neeraj Sood, "HIV Breakthroughs and Risky Sexual Behavior", NBER Working Paper No. W10516, May 2004. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: politics and politicians It is the rare politician who can always say, in every situation, what he really believes or behave as he really is, and that politician is unlikely to get elected president. Politics makes it difficult for even the most secure and grounded people to feel integrated in mind, body and soul. David Maraniss, "The Places Beyond A Biographer's Reach" Washington Post, Sunday, July 4, 2004, Page B01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/articles/A24989-2004Jul3.html Maraniss, author of the 1995 biography, "First in His Class," is reviewing Bill Clinton's autobiography "My Life". _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: anti-globalism in Trinidadian Calypso 'The Duke of Normandy' announced the master of ceremonies. Up climbed a coal-black youth, and with an expression on his face of the most touching seriousness began to sing a [Calypso] song, of which the opening lines ran as follows: Oh, wouldn't it be-ee A good thing if we-ee Supported lo-cull industree! At the end of every stanza came a refrain in the form of a question: Why shouldn' de products of dis island Support de popula- ashun? This appeal for Trinidadian autarchy was warmly applauded. The idiocies of the greater world have penetrated even into the recesses of the Caribbean. Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay (London, 1974 [1934]), p. 20. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Joseph Schumpeter on Adam Smith Few facts and no details are needed about the man and his sheltered and uneventful life. . . a fact which I cannot help considering relevant, not for his pure economics of course, but all the more for his understanding of human nature -- that no woman, excepting his mother, ever played a role in his existence: in this and in other respects the glamours and passions of life were just literature to him. History of Economic Analysis, p 182. [Schumpeter, the famous Austrian economist, was reputed to be quite a ladies' man. He was no fan of Adam Smith.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: enemies of liberalism in the 1930s The Nazi movement is a rebellion against Western civilization. In order to consolidate this rebellion, its leaders are doing their best to transform modern German society into the likeness of a primitive tribe. Homogeneity is being forced on a people that was enjoying the blessings of variety. Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay (London, 1974 [1934]), pp. 179-180. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: a cloud over civilisation The US and Britain are in the bitter aftermath of a war in Iraq. We are accepting programmed death for the young and random slaughter for men and women of all ages. So it was in the first and second world wars, and is still so in Iraq. Civilised life, as it is called, is a great white tower celebrating human achievements, but at the top there is permanently a large black cloud. Human progress dominated by unimaginable cruelty and death. JK Galbraith, "A cloud over civilisation", The Guardian, Thursday July 15, 200. http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1261593,00.html _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: ECLAC’s legacy in Latin America When I first went there [to Latin America] in 1962, the continent was in one of its periodic moods of expansive economic confidence, articulated by the Economic Commission for Latin America of the UN, an all-continental brains trust located in Santiago de Chile under an Argentine banker, which recommended a policy of planned, state-sponsored and largely state-owned industrialization and economic growth through import substitution. It seemed to work, at least for giant, inflation-plagued but booming Brazil. Eric Hobsbawn, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (Pantheon Books, NY, 2002), p. 368. [Hobsbawm obviously approves. It is strange that he describes Raul Prebisch as a banker: Prebisch was in the Central Bank of Argentina before moving to ECLAC, but a central bank economist is rather different from a banker.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: destinations of choice for Latin American political refugees The generals took over Brazil in 1964 and by the mid-seventies the military ruled all over South America, except for the states bordering the Caribbean. .... A diaspora of Latin American political refugees concentrated in the few countries of the hemisphere providing refuge -- Mexico and, until 1973, Chile -- and scattered across North America and Europe: the Brazilians to France and Britain, the Argentinians to Spain, the Chileans everywhere. (Although many Latin American intellectuals continued to visit Cuba, very few actually chose it as their place of exile.) Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (Pantheon Books, NY, 2002), p. 378. [Why did Latin American leftists not choose socialist Cuba rather than capitalist countries as a place of refuge? Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm does not ask this question, much less answer it.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: mobile capital and immobile labour A world dedicated to the free global movement of all profit- making factors of production is also a world dedicated to stop the one form of globalization that is unquestionably desired by the poor, namely finding better-paid work in rich countries. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (Pantheon Books, NY, 2002), p. 363. [Free movement of labour is unquestionably good for the poor who live in poor countries (alas, not those who live in wealthy countries), but the migration of capital from rich to poor countries also improves the prospects of the poor in poor countries to find better-paid work at home. Hobsbawm seems to imply that these poor desire the opportunity to emigrate, but not the opportunity to work in foreign-owned factories. ] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Joan Robinson on exploitation As we see nowadays in South-East Asia or the Caribbean, the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. Joan Robinson, _Economic Philosophy: an essay on the progress of economic thought_ (New York, 1962), p. 45. [This remark of Joan Robinson applies today with even greater force to sub-Saharan Africa, where the tragedy is not that workers are exploited, but rather that they are not exploited at all.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: "survival of the fittest" or "survival of the surviving" ? That unfortunate phrase "survival of the fittest," which gave rise to so many false analogies, is almost devoid of content, for, in this context [biological evolution], by "fittest" we mean merely fit to survive. Therefore, all the phrase means is the survival of the surviving, which does not tell us very much. Kenneth Boulding, A Primer on Social Dynamics (The Free Press, NY, 1970), p. 43. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: sources of economic growth We do not get economic development by simply piling up stocks of old things. We do not get it, for instance, by simply accumulating big piles of wheat in warehouses. Rather, it consists in the development of new machines, tools, habits of behaviour, and social organizations, all of which derive essentially from changes in knowledge. Kenneth Boulding, A Primer on Social Dynamics (The Free Press, NY, 1970), p. 67. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: global civil society [W]orld views in the strict sense emerged only after the military defeats suffered by Islam, in early modern Europe. They included the forceful global acquisition of territory, resources and subjects in the name of empire; the efforts of Christendom to pick-a-back on imperial ventures for the purpose of bringing spiritual salvation to earth; and the will to unify the world through the totalitarian violence of fascism and Marxism-Leninism. Each … failed to accomplish its mission. In our times, against the backdrop of these failures, the image of ourselves as one involved in another great human adventure, one carried out on a global scale, is again on the rise. A new world-view, radically different from any that has existed before, has been born and is currently enjoying a growth spurt: it is called global civil society. John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 1. [Keane is optimistic regarding this new world-view, but it is an optimism that springs in no small measure from his definition of civil society. He includes only those who are nonviolent and promote peace, and excludes 'uncivil' organisations such as the National Rifle Association, the Ku Klux Klan and Al Qaeda. John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster in the UK, and is an entertaining writer.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: international society and world society A ... key distinction ... is between "international society," which is about the nature of relations among states ... and "world society," which takes individuals, nonstate organizations, and ultimately the global population as a whole as the focus of global societal identities and arrangements. (pp. 336-337) [M]odern ... international society is anarchic, [based on] ... sovereignty of states .... The political structure of a potential world society is ambiguous. It could be a hierarchy (world government); it could continue to be international anarchy; or it could be primal anarchy at the individual level .... [T]he very idea of a global society based on individuals presupposes rather high levels of interaction capacity. Only on a densely networked and interactive planet--some version of Marshall McLuhan's global village--could a shared identity and common norms develop at the individual level across the system. (p. 339) Barry Buzan, "From international system to international society", International Organization 47:3 (Summer 1993), pp. 327-352. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the legacy of Marx Marx is one of the people after whom the world is never quite the same again. Nevertheless, the human misery which has been caused, however indirectly, by Marxism is so enormous and the tyranny which it has fostered is so monstrous, the corruption of not only art and literature, architecture and even science which Marxist society suffered is so painful; and what is even worse the corruption of simple human friendship and all the ordinary decencies of life which is so typical of communism is so terrifying, that one wonders how a movement which originated from a genuine and deep moral protest and from a deeply moral man could possibly have led to so much misery. Kenneth Boulding, A Primer on Social Dynamics (The Free Press, NY, 1970), p. 92. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: mathematics and science This is the remarkable paradox of mathematics: no matter how determinedly its practitioners ignore the world, they consistently produce the best tools for understanding it. John Tierney, quoted by Mark Buchanan in _Small World_ (Phoenix Paperback, London, 2003), p. 42. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: what is social capital? Coleman ... wants to establish social capital by analogy with physical and human capital. It is different, because the usual idea of a capital [good] in economics [is] a thing which results from a decision, as Arrow (1999, p. 4) puts it, “a deliberate sacrifice in the present for future benefit”. But with Coleman, social capital does not result from such (or any) decision: “most forms of social capital are created or destroyed as by-products of other activities” (Coleman, 1988, p. S118). So social capital is not produced; rather, it “happens”, a byproduct of other activities. In an economic sense, it is not a capital [good], but an externality; and the fact that such an externality, in facilitating the actions of actors, might have positive outcomes does not make it a capital [good]. Sophie Ponthieux, "The concept of social capital: a critical review", paper prepared for the 10th ACN Conference - Paris (21-23 January 2004), p. 4. [The quotes are from J.K. Arrow (1999), Observations on social capital, in Dasgupta & Serageldin (eds) Social capital :a multifaceted perspective, World Bank., pp 3-5 and James Coleman (1988), Social capital in the creation of human capital, American J. of Sociology 94: S95-S120. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: what is social capital? (continued) [T]he theory [of social capital] is mostly a tautology, assessing that groups of individuals who have a high propensity to cooperate, or a high propensity to trust each other, will achieve common goals more easily than those who are not gifted with these skills. Beyond the emptiness of the assessment, the conceptualization doesn’t explain how what works on a small scale (that of a group) works also at on a larger scale (that of several groups). So what makes social capital so attractive? ... [It] may have appeared as a miracle remedy to solve deep social problems, and ease the experts’ charitable minds, particularly since it is apparently costless (and firstly, not requiring higher taxes). .... In the end, social capital does not contribute to a better understanding of what it pretends to explain, and leads only to a single, and useless, prescription. Sophie Ponthieux, "The concept of social capital: a critical review", paper prepared for the 10th ACN Conference - Paris (21-23 January 2004), pp. 19, 21. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: a simple solution to Europe's pension crisis If contributors to [public] pensions are treated as purchasers of government debt, most fiscal problems and problems of intergenerational equity disappear. If workers want to retire with more income than is provided by the Samuelson-Aaron return on their PAYG contributions, they have a number of options. They can save voluntarily, they can lobby for government to mandate contributions to pre-funded pensions (additional to current obligations), or they can retire at an older age. It is important for government to provide proper incentives, to avoid facilitating early retirement via disability pensions or penalizing those who choose to postpone retirement and save for old age. With these policy changes, Europeans can relax and enjoy their longer, healthier lives and increasing per capita incomes. Larry Willmore, "Population Ageing and Pay-As-You-Go Pensions", AGEING HORIZONS - OXFORD INSTITUTE OF AGEING, Issue 1, June 2004, p. 10. http://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk/ageinghorizons/about_ageing_horizon s.htm _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Internet becomes 'internet' at Wired News Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet. At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was. True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It's Capitalized, It Must Be Important. In German, where all nouns are capitalized, it makes sense. It makes no sense in English. So until we become Die Wired Nachrichten, we'll just follow customary English-language usage. Tony Long, "It's Just the 'internet' Now", Wired News, 16 August 2004. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64596,00.html _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: global civil society as utopia [When] the term global civil society is cleansed of the muck of markets, it is ... turned into a normative utopia. ... [I]t becomes a 'pure' concept -- synonymous with 'equity, equality and public welfare', an unadulterated 'good', like a sparkling coveted diamond that all would want to prize, especially if offered it on a soft velvet cushion of fine words. [This] ... normative reasoning is tempting -- who but curmudgeons, ideologists and crooks could be ethically opposed to civil society in [t]his sense? John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 75. [The term is often cleansed not only of profit-making enterprises, but also those associations who do not promote peace or respect the environment, in short, those groups we in 'civil' society do not approve of. 'Civil society is good' thus becomes a tautology ... true by definition!] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: global corporatism Global corporatism is an idea whose time has come. But global corporatism is also a dangerous idea. .... [I]t is doubtful that close cooperation between essentially unrepresentative organizations--international organizations, unaccountable NGOs, and large transnational corporations--will do much to ensure better protection for, and better representation of, the interests of populations affected by global policies. .... Conceptually, corporatism is a system that gives a variety of functional interest groups--most prominently business organizations and labor unions--direct representation in the political system, defusing conflict among them and creating instead broad consensus on policies. Corporatism is thus an answer--not necessarily a good one--to the question of democratic participation. .... In the most extreme forms it assumed in the fascist regimes, it was an attempt to replace representative democracy based on universal participation by individuals in free multi-party elections with so-called participatory democracy based on compulsive membership in corporate groups over which individuals had no say. Essentially, the government picked the corporate groups deserving representation as well as the organizations and individuals speaking for them. Marina Ottaway, "Corporatism goes global: international organizations, nongovernmental organization networks, and transnational business", Global Governance 7:3 (2001), p. 266, 268-269. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: NGOs, AGOs, GRINGOs and GONGOs [G]lobal civil society should not be thought of as the natural enemy of political institutions. The vast mosaic of groups, organisations and initiatives that comprise global civil society are variously related to governmental structures at the local, national regional and supranational levels. Some sectors of social activity, the so-called anti-government organisations (AGOs), are openly hostile to the funding and regulatory powers of state institutions. .... In other sectors of global civil society, for instance those in which the acronym NGO means rather (according to the South African joke) 'next government official', relations between social organisations and political power are openly collaborative. Civil society organisations either serve as willing contractors for governments or bodies like the World Bank, or aim at dissolving themselves into governmental structures. Still other NGOs (so-called GRINGOs or GONGOs, like the International Air Transport Association and the World Conservation Union) are dependent creations of state authorities. In between these two extremes stand those social actors (e.g. Médecins San Frontières, Oxfam, Greenpeace) who slalom between self-reliance and legal and political dependency. John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 108, 109. [GRINGO is a Government-run/initiated NGO and GONGO refers to a Government Organized NGO.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: donor funding of civil society organisations Donor funding can and does overwhelm or distort the goal of creating a civil society. It tends to create local organisations that are excessively self-centred and blessed with power that is publicly unaccountable, partly because they are so heavily dependent on their donors; and partly because the staff of these NGOs (as the South African joke has it) En- J-Oy all sorts of privileges otherwise denied those living in misery around them. John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 160. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: civil society at the United Nations The early NGOs with consultative status at ECOSOC [Economic and Social Council of the United Nations] were mostly top-down organizations involved in helping people rather than representing them. By the 1990s, however, new organizations had come into existence that saw themselves as representative of "civil society." An obscure concept long relegated to the writings of Marxist scholars, the term _civil society_ by this time had replaced the term _the people_ as the choice word in the language of democracy. Marina Ottaway, "Corporatism goes global: international organizations, nongovernmental organization networks, and transnational business", Global Governance 7:3 (2001), p. 275. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Adam Smith on civil society People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, ch 10, para I.10.82. [The full searchable text of this and other classics is availble online at http://www.econlib.org/library/classics.html.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the poor quality of data in developing countries The news ... is dismal. National income and growth comparisons across countries are plagued by conceptual index number problems, and by immense practical difficulties. Many frequently used data from LDCs are of poor quality, or only pretend to exist, having their only reality in the mind of bureaucrats in New York or Washington. .... What then should be done? Researchers should obviously be encouraged to be critical of the data, and to take every opportunity to explore the consequences of measurement error for their analysis. However, when the data are of such low quality that it is difficult to establish any results -- as with much of the official macroeconomic data for Africa -- it is difficult to pinpoint specific problems, or to know where to press for improvement. .... There have been questions as to whether the international organizations have any real interest in improving data collection. Skeptics have argued that the World Bank (or at least its loan staff) is interested in the _quantity_ of loans, not ultimately in their _quality_, and that without an interest in the latter, there is little chance that the necessary resources will be committed .... In defense, it must be remembered that international organizations are responsible to their members, and in many cases are limited in the extent to which they can correct, question, or criticize the data that are provided by the member countries. Angus Deaton, "Data and econometric tools for development analysis", Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 3A (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 1814-1815. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Fukuyama on social capital and civil society It is ... possible to have too much of a good thing. One person's civic engagement is another's rent-seeking; much of what constitutes civil society can be described as interest groups trying to divert public resources to their favored causes, whether sugar-beet farming, women's health care, or the protection of biodiversity. .... There is no guarantee that self-styled public interest NGOs actually represent real public interests. It is entirely possible that too active an NGO sector may represent an excessive politicization of public life, which can either distort public policy or lead to deadlock. Despite the possibility that a society has [sic] have too much social capital, it is doubtless worse to have too little. Francis Fukuyama, "Social capital and civil society", paper prepared for the IMF Conference on Second Generational Reforms (1 October 1999). [Is 'social capital' always a good thing? Fukuyama notes early in this essay: "Both the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia achieve cooperative ends on the basis of shared norms, and therefore have social capital, but they also produce abundant negative externalities for the larger society in which they are embedded." These examples of social capital are harmful in any dose, as is the rent seeking described in the passage above. Surely type matters more the amount of social capital. This point is implicit in Fukuyama's essay, and makes one question the wisdom of his policy advice in the concluding section, titled "How Can We Increase the Stock of Social Capital?". --LW] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the United Nations Forum on Forests The UNFF has a higher status and a larger membership than any previous UN institution dedicated solely to forests. .... However, after two sessions, the UNFF is continuing in the mould set by the IPF and the IFF: it represents a collective need on behalf of states that they should be doing something, while confining itself largely to issuing statements and declarations urging the need for action, while failing to take or oversee any meaningful action. David Humphreys, "The United Nations Forum on Forests: anatomy of a stalled international process", Global Environmental Change 13:4 (December 2003), p. 322. [All members of the UN General Assembly are members of UNFF, the United Nations Forum on Forests, which reports directly to ECOSOC (the Economic and Social Council of the UN). UNFF was created in 2001 and will hold its final meeting in 2005. IPF is the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (1995-1997), created as a sub-group of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). IFF is the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (1997-2000), which replaced the IPF as a sub-group of the CSD. A former colleague describes the activity of such fora and panels as that of a "global blabocracy" --LW. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: global governance and accountability The dialogue was chaired by Professor Jan Pronk, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy to the Johannesburg Summit, who is also a former minister of environment in the Netherlands and a visiting professor at the UNU-IAS. In his keynote address, Professor Pronk expressed a deep concern regarding the lack of progress in the governance of sustainable development since the 1960s .... With the global environmental situation worsening, there is an urgent need for a change in the current paradigm of sustainable development governance. .... With a view to what might be done to improve systems of global governance, the Panel discussed a number of possibilities, but was unable to agree on any overall solutions. However, it made the following observations. First, the Panel noted that much more needs to be done before the objectives of Agenda 21 of Sustainable Development can be realised. .... In essence, in order to initiate reforms ..., it might be necessary to convene a conference similar to that held in San Francisco at which the idea to set up the United Nations was originally put forward. Second, the Panel suggested that restoring accountability to the system of global governance requires the engagement of civil society and business stakeholders in the global decision-making processes. [The Report lists two additional observations that are difficult to summarize.] Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) and United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS), Summary Report of the High Level Dialogue on Trade, Biotechnology and Sustainable Development, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 21 February 2004. http://env.asef.org/ [The panel spoke of "restoring accountability to the system of global governance". For discussion: In what way and to whom was global governance accountable in the past? To whom are civil society organisations and business stakeholders accountable today?] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: why international organisations are under funded [D]espite the force of patriotism, the appeal of national ideology, the bond of a common culture, and the indispensability of the system of law and order, no major state in modern history has been able to support itself through voluntary dues or contributions. Philanthropic contributions are not even a significant source of revenue for most countries. Taxes, _compulsory_ payments by definition, are needed. .... The reason the state cannot survive on voluntary dues or payments, but must rely on taxation, is that the most fundamental services a nation-state provides ... must be available to everyone if they are available to anyone. .... It would obviously not be feasible, if indeed it were possible, to deny the protection provided by the military services, the police, and the courts to those who did not voluntarily pay their share of the costs of government, and taxation is accordingly necessary. Mancur Olson, _The logic of collective action: public goods and the theory of groups_ (Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 13-14. [There is no world government, so funding of international organisations is essentially voluntary. World government would solve many problems of global governance, but at a very high cost. Citizens now have the option of escaping an oppressive regime 'voting with their feet', i.e. becoming exiles or refugees in another country. There would be no possibility of escape from an oppressive world government.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: women's work Women worked in the past just as they work today, but they didn’t always work in paid labor markets. If we go back a hundred years, the reported labor force participation rate of white married women was low. But if we went into the homes of these women, they would be working all the time—unless they had household help, unless they were relatively well-to-do. It isn’t that they were just doing household labor. They were running boarding houses. They were taking in laundry, sewing on piece-rates. But they weren’t telling the census taker that they were doing it full time either because it wasn’t full time or there was a social stigma associated with such labor. "Interview with Claudia Goldin", The Region, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, September 2004. http://www.minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/04-09/goldin.cfm [Claudia Goldin, the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's economics department, is author of _Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women_ (Oxford University Press, 1992).] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: global civil society defined Global civil society is not populated simply by politically progressive organizations that concentrate on issues such as human rights, environmental protection, and peace issues, as many analysts implicitly suggest. Rather, it includes all [nongovernmental] organizations that operate across state boundaries. DuPont is as much an actor in global civil society as the Catholic Church; the transnational group Aryan Nations is as much as part of it as Greenpeace. Paul Wapner, "Governance in global civil society", in _Global Governance_, edited by Oran R. Young (MIT Press, 1997), p. 76. [This seems right. Why exclude Microsoft from civil society, while including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: wages and the marginal product of labour Lawyers are almost invariably the highest-earning occupational group in Western societies, and a belief that people are paid their marginal product surely implies that we should be expanding the numbers of lawyers as a major economic priority. I do not know anyone who believes this, but once you start admitting that earnings are not a good indicator of marginal product for significant social groups, the whole case for using earnings as an unbiased indicator for society at whole is surely at risk. .... A government which assumes that [private] returns to education are bound to be accurate signals of individual productivity, or of future returns to more of the same, is [therefore] likely to make seriously bad decisions. Alison Wolf, "Education and economic performance: simplistic theories and their policy consequences", Oxford Review of Economic Policy 20:2 (Summer 2004), p. 319, 320. [Alison Wolf is a statistician, not an economist. Perhaps that is why she writes so clearly about economics.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Martin Wolf on global governance Daniel Esty argues that "public support cannot be founded on government authority. Individual acceptance is what matters. The organization must therefore demonstrate that it has genuine connections to the citizens of the world and that its decisions reflect the will of the people across the planet. Non-governmental organizations represent an important mechanism by which the WTO can reach out to citizens and build the requisite bridge to global civil society." Yet how is the 'will of the people across the planet' to be defined and assessed, other than through elected governments? There is no reason to accept that a collection of NGOs, dominated by the relatively well-resourced institutions of the North, represents the 'will of the people across the planet'. Martin Wolf, "Globalization and global economic governance", Oxford Review of Economic Policy 20:1 (Spring 2004), pp. 76-77. {The Esty quote is from "Environmental governance at the WTO: outreach to civil society", in G.P. Sampson and W.B. Chambers (eds.), _Trade, Environment and the Millenium_ (UN University, Tokyo, 1999), pp. 97-98.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Martin Wolf on the IMF It is said that the IMF stands for 'it's mostly fiscal'. Unfortunately, it mostly is. As even Stiglitz admits, countries must live within their means. The right criticism of the Fund is that it is a hedgehog pretending to be a fox. But what the hedgehog knows is right: usually it _is_ mostly fiscal. Countries with solid fiscal positions rarely experience serious economic crises. In the Asian crisis of 1997 and 1998, countries with apparently sound public finances turned out to have a mountain of off-balance sheet liabilities. More frequently, the lack of fiscal sustainability is evident. Beggars, so the saying goes, cannot be choosers. Countries that have to turn to the IMF _are_ beggars. They cannot choose but adjust. The only question is how. Martin Wolf, "Globalization and global economic governance", Oxford Review of Economic Policy 20:1 (Spring 2004), p. 79. [This article, the author notes, is drawn largely from his latest book, _Why Globalisation Works_ (Yale University Press, 2004), a book that is high on my reading list.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: mismanagement in the United Nations [The] self-inflicted, long-lasting mismanagement [of the United Nations], damaging to the Organization's work and image, is probably the result of a lack of interest on the part of the first five Secretaries-General, more concerned with and interested in international diplomacy and relations with member states than with internal management. The absence of effective recruitment and promotion policies and practices, the lack of professionalism and authority of the central Office of Personnel, then Office of Human Resources Management (OHRM), combined with a lack of support by top management, the easy acceptance by senior UN officials of political pressures by governments in favour of unqualified candidates under the guise of 'equitable geographical distribution', created a vicious circle leading to a lowering of quality of selected candidates and uneven performance. Candidates were hired to managerial positions without specific management training or managerial experience. Poor performance was ignored, misconduct did not lead to sanctions, merit was not rewarded. Yves Beigbeder, "The United Nations Secretariat: reform in progress", in P. Taylor and A.J.R. Groom (eds.), _The United Nations at the Millennium: The Principal Organs_ (Continuum, London, 2000), pp. 205-206. [I suspect that mismanagement has deeper roots and that serious reform requires more than a change of Secretary- General. Yves Beigbeder was a personnel officer for FAO from 1951 to 1955 and for WHO from 1955 to 1984. He is author of _The Internal Management of United Nations Organizations: The Long Quest for Reform_ (St. Martins's Press, 1997). Francis Fukuyama, writing in Foreign Affairs, July/ August 1997, complained "The book offers relatively modest reform proposals and does not consider more radical forms of surgery that should be on the table such as the elimination of entire agencies." Fukuyama's criticism applies equally to this, more recent essay.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: population ageing It seems possible that a society in which the proportion of young people is diminishing will become dangerously unprogressive, falling behind other communities not only in technical efficiency and economic welfare, but in intellectual and artistic achievement as well. Extract from Report of the Royal Commission on Population, United Kingdom, 1949, quoted in IMF, World Economic Outlook: The Global Demographic Transition, September 2004, chapter III. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2004/02/ _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Stiglitz on the effects of airline deregulation Today, views concerning a smaller and more limited government which were held so strongly in the early 1980s are coming under question, at least within the US. Deregulation is no longer viewed as an unmitigated success. After an initial flurry of entry, the airline industry has, for instance, begun to settle down to the kind of oligopolistic practices, characterized by high prices, which economic theory -- at least the theories of those not completely indoctrinated in the competitive religion -- predicted. Joseph Stiglitz, "On the economic role of the state", in _The Economic Role of the State_, ed. A. Heertje (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989), p. 20. [This assessment now seems premature: 15 years after Stiglitz wrote these words, air travel is still a bargain. I recently purchased a Miami-Costa Rica-Miami ticket for US$129 plus taxes, the lowest fare I have seen on this route. Anything can happen in theory, but the industry is not likely to be "characterized by high prices", at least in the foreseeable future.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Stiglitz on the death of socialism Socialism as an economic doctrine -- the belief that simply by changing the nominal ownership of the means of production, or the means of production in certain vital industries, economic efficiency and broader social goals will be attained -- is now dead. Joseph Stiglitz, "On the economic role of the state", in _The Economic Role of the State_, ed. A. Heertje (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989), p. 57. [In this essay, remarkable for its clarity, Stiglitz expresses the view that services such as health and education ought to be produced privately, but publicly funded, for example with vouchers. In fact, in the USA, "medicare, medical care for the aged, is almost exclusively provided by private vendors" (p. 41). This is not true for education, finance of which is restricted almost exclusively to government-owned schools.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: North on Stiglitz on the economic role of the State Throughout most of history the State has not provided a framework conducive to economic growth. Indeed the Mafia would be a more accurate characterization of the State in the past than an organization concerned with "the public good." .... Economists (such as Professor Stiglitz) ordinarily take for granted a state that has created a set of rules of the game that are broadly conducive to economic growth. But not only are such rules still the exception, there is no guarantee that they will be perpetual even in the developed world, as the modern history of Argentina attests. Indeed I contend that the central and most difficult role of the State is to establish and enforce a set of rules of the game that broadly encourage the creative economic participation of all its citizens. Douglass C. North, "Comment" [on the essay of Joseph Stiglitz], in _The Economic Role of the State_, ed. A. Heertje (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989), p. 108, 109. [The words in parenthesis are those of Professor North.] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: privatisation of public pensions I don't think the Bush administration itself knows why it is in favor of Social Security privatization. It only knows that it is. Nonetheless, ... most of the good arguments for privatization are simply not accessible to people on the right: they are inconsistent with their view of the world. Brad DeLong, "Are There Reasons to Be in Favor of Social Security Privatization?", 29 September 2004. http://www.j-bradford- delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000269.html [The whole idea of compulsory saving for old age ought to be anathema to libertarians at the Cato Institute, but somehow it is not. I suspect, though, that neo-conservatives in the Bush administration have few qualms about using government power in thiss and other ways. --LW] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Douglass North on political institutions [The US Constitution] is still held up as the basic cause of US well-being and long-term success. But is it? Latin American countries imbued with the same ideas of liberty as their northern cousins became independent of Spain in the early nineteenth century and adopted US style constitutions; but they had radically different results. There is, then, more to institutions than formal rules. There are also the effectiveness of enforcement and norms of behavior - that is, informal constraints that supplement and modify formal rules. Douglass C. North, "Comment" [on the essay of Stiglitz],in _The Economic Role of the State_, ed. A. Heertje (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989), pp. 112-113. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: the ten commandments as foundation for market economies [W]hile Adam Smith's "Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" has been the bible for generations of economists, signs indicate that some older sacred texts matter to them as well. In December 2002, when Vernon L. Smith, a pioneer in experimental economics, accepted the Nobel in economic science, he ... cited Benjamin Franklin, the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume and several of the Ten Commandments. The strictures against stealing or coveting a neighbor's possessions, he noted, "provide the property-right foundations for markets." And the prohibition against murder, adultery and bearing false witness "provide the foundations for cohesive social exchange." Daniel Gross, "Economic View: Thou Shalt Not Increase G.D.P.", New York Times, 3 October 2004. [Daniel Gross in this column also discusses joint research of Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary, "a husband-and-wife team based at Harvard", who are analyzing the effects of religion on economic growth. One of their more interesting findings: "belief in hell proved to be a more significant economic factor than belief in heaven". In the words of Professor Barro, "The stick of punishment may be more powerful compared with the carrot," ] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: native, indigenous or autochthon? Once upon a time the older English word for a place’s original inhabitants, native, might have been part of the title [International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples], but this came to be considered pejorative: it has long been replaced in UN-speak by a word of French origin, and ‘indigenous’ is now the approved term. But there’s no pleasing everyone. In Spanish indígena is acceptable. Yet in French, because indigène is politically incorrect in that country, it has been replaced by autochthon, a word that comes from Greek. Perhaps it might be a good idea if we all used the Greek word, since autochthon sounds in English even grander than indigenous. .... Members of the Sioux or Cherokee or Navajo tribes might even find the new label of autochthonous-Americans rather appealing. But there’s one serious disadvantage: most English speakers would have to look the word up—and the Oxford English Dictionary contains unwelcome news. The first recorded use of autochthon was by Sir Thomas Browne writing in 1646 and he stoutly declared: “There was therefore never any Autochthon, or man arising from the earth but Adam.” Needless to say, this is not the UN’s view. Gerald Vouga, "The UN: Mother of political correctness", [circa September 2004]. http://www.culturecult.com/spiked.htm _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: death is nothing at all Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whoever we were to each other we are still. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me the easy way you always did. Put no difference into your tone, wear no forced air or solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be forever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was, absolutely unbroken continuity. What is death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of my mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner." Written by Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), read by Larry King on his CNN show, 27 September 2004. [The famous English actor was burdened by cancer and other ailments for more than a decade before his death, but never stopped working. For details of his life and work, visit his official web site at http://www.laurenceolivier.com/ .] _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: on death and dying The entire medical profession is trained to keep people alive, rather than keeping people comfortable so that they can die with dignity. You see, to a doctor or a nurse, death is failure. To a friend or relative, death is disaster. Only to the soul is death a relief -- a release. The greatest gift you can give the dying is to let them die in peace -- not thinking that they must "hang on," or continue to suffer, or worry about you at this most crucial passage in their life. Neale Donald Walsch, _Conversations with God_ (Book 1, Putnam's, 1996), pp. 80-81. _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Adam Smith on progressive taxation The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expence of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V, ch. 2, paragraph 71. Online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Smith.html _____________________________________________________________ Thought du jour: Adam Smith on the hypocrisy of those who govern It is the highest impertinence and presumption ... in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the œconomy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book II, ch. 3, paragraph 36. Online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Smith.html _____________________________________________________________