note: I originally wrote this for the Dani Rodrik seminar. As it grew, though, it became apparent that it didn’t really have much to do with “One Economics, Many Recipes” and that it was thus a bit unfair to ask Dani to comment on it. On the other hand, I liked it too much to kill it altogether – dd
“One Economics, Many Recipes” makes a lot of useful and constructive suggestions about how to attack the central problems of economic development. However I don’t think it gives enough emphasis (fundamentally because I don’t think it’s possible to give enough emphasis) to international debt as a constraint on development. Nearly all of the success stories in the book relate to countries which started their periods of development without a large debt burden, and the presence or absence of large net external debt is certainly one characteristic which matches up well to the motivating stylised fact in the book – the distinction between those countries like Argentina which followed all the standard policy recommendations but didn’t develop and those like China which ignored them and did. In this essay, I’ll try and flesh out a few provocative views on the financial aspects of development policy, which in my view are just as important real-world constraints as the institutional real-economy factors that are the main subject matter of the book.
Actually, just as I don’t think it’s sensible to carry out international comparisons of crime rates without taking demographics and urbanisation into account, I don’t think that any kind of comparative analysis of developing economies can be carried out at all without conditioning on the debt burden. It’s that important. When you have a situation in which a country’s capital account is dominated by contractual flows payable in foreign exchange, that is far and away the most important fact about that country’s economy. This is because as long as the debt service constraint is binding (and I discuss what happens when it isn’t, below), then unless the country is receiving massive net transfers from abroad, the entire economic development program is going to end up being twisted toward a capital account constraint which almost certainly has nothing to do with a sensible locally-based development plan of the kind that Dani advocates. [click to continue…]
I’m really, truly, not going to talk about Jonah Goldberg. Instead, I’m going to talk about Cass Sunstein and his idea, reprised in Republic 2.0 that the Internet poses a threat to democracy by virtue of it’s capacity to allow us to
avoid information we don’t like. Conservatives are increasingly seeking only conservative views, liberals are seeking only liberal views, and never the twain shall meet.
Sunstein argues that the echo chamber effect tends to reinforce existing views and produce a poisonous partisan divide.
It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true. The partisan divide in the US is being reinforced because people are more exposed to the other side than before.
I know, I know. But I’m going to talk about it anyway. Here he is, today:
I tried to explain, for those whose feelings were so hurt they didn’t even crack the spine, that the title Liberal Fascism comes from a speech delivered by H. G. Wells, one of the most important and influential progressive and socialist intellectuals of the 20th century. He wanted to re-brand liberalism as “liberal fascism” and even “enlightened Nazism.” He believed these terms best described his own political views — views that deeply informed American progressivism and New Deal liberalism.
I happen to know a thing or two about this, through research on Wells’ work on his cinematic (Wells scripted, Korda produced, Menzies directed) good-bad boondoggle, the 1936 SF film, Things To Come [wikipedia].
I’ve posted about the film before on CT here. I wrote a really fun post about it at the Valve: how H.G. Wells prevented steampunk. [click to continue…]
bq. … who’s the most important … [American] historical figure about whom most people know nothing?
(I have edited the question slightly, because Ari is a historian and so writes 250-word blog posts that have five footnotes.) I don’t have many suggestions, because I am one of the “most people” in this case and ipso facto know nothing about potential contenders. But in the comments someone suggests Philo T. Farnsworth. This reminds me of a conversation I once had with an American historian and a Russian computer scientist. It went something like this:
American: … but that’s TV, I suppose. Philo Farnsworth didn’t know what he was getting us all into.
Irishman: Who?
Russian: Who?
American: Philo Farnsworth. He invented the television.
Irishman: No he didn’t. John Logie Baird invented the television!
Russian: Who are these people? Television was invented by Alexander Televishnevsky!
I forget the Russian inventor’s real name. As I recall, further discussion established that for many 20th century developments the Russians had a counterpart developer who, according to the schoolbooks, had just gotten there before. And while this may seem like a standard bit of Soviet-era oddness, the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery in science well-established, together with “Stigler’s law of eponymy.”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler’s_law_of_eponymy
British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, “defending proposals for 42-day detention”:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/controversial-new-terror-laws-unveiled-773317.html :
Ms Smith said the Government could not afford to “sit on our hands” in preparing for potential future risks – but denied she was legislating for a hypothetical situation.
“We need to legislate now for that risk in the future,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“It won’t be hypothetical if and when it occurs. We are not legislating now on the basis that we are bringing it in now for something that might happen in the future; we are bringing in a position for if it becomes unhypothetical.”
I’m reading David Frum, Comeback Conservatism [amazon]. So far, so mushy. But it does, at the very least, contain the third silliest argument I’ve encountered in the last 6 hours. (The top two contenders arrived, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg, in his bloggingheads exchange with Will Wilkinson.)
Here is Frum, protesting the notion that John Edwards is a friend of the poor, or in any sense an economic egalitarian:
Voters sense this truth. It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.
Take a look at a map of the state of Missouri. A recent study conducted by the state identified a dozen of the state’s 114 counties as “equality centers.” These equality centers were located on the outer fringes of St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, and Springfield. Every single one of these highly egalitarian areas of the state voted overwhelmingly Republican.
Meanwhile, the most unequal parts of Missouri, the cities and especially the city of St. Louis, voted heavily Democratic. Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality. After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity? Communities with lots of married families, lots of single-family homes, and low proportions of nonwhite minorities and single people – communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread” – are communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money. (p. 37)
The decision of the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by 0.75 per cent is as clear a sign of panic on the part of the monetary authorities as we’ve seen since the 1987 stock market crash. It’s not entirely coincidental that it followed a dreadful week on Wall Street, and a couple of awful days on world stock markets while the US was closed for the long weekend.
Still, stock markets have fluctuated quite a bit in the last 20 years without producing this kind of reaction. The really alarming events have been happening in bond markets and, in retrospect, the most alarming happened just over a month ago.*
bq. But for a long time I’ve observed the poor functionality of economics which often gets itself hung up on what’s in the textbooks, rather than trying to use the concepts, principles and techniques enunciated there as a _first jumping off point_ and a tool kit to try to solve problems keeping in mind that the solving of problems will almost always involve a high degree of (non-disciplinary) commonsense.
And here’s Tom:
bq. The common thread is that the big decisions and big ideas make less of an impact than the low-level, detailed specifics of each situation. … It’s a small step from there to saying that people at the top of large organizations (whether they be governments or countries) have surprisingly little influence and that we should not pay much attention to broad pronouncements and grand visions. It’s people dealing with everyday problems that we should pay attention to.
Jeremy picks up on this CNN talking point. It’s Race vs Gender and Black Women face a Tough Choice! As noted in the first comment in the thread, “this ‘race vs. gender’ construction, as if men have no gender and whites have no race, is driving a lot of people crazy.”
Richard Rothstein is speaking on Wednesday (23rd) in Madison. The title is Can Improved Schools Close the Achievement Gap? and he’ll be talking about his brilliant book Class and Schools, which is probably the best, and certainly the most accessible, evaluation of the various school improvement efforts addressing the gap in achievement between children from different socio-economic groups. (He’s speaking at Grainger Hall 2120, at 6pm — I strongly recommend our Madison readers to attend).
I was driving home from the office this evening (yeah, yeah, I know — I prefer to think of it as Arizona taxpayers getting good value for money) and I saw this enormous Ron Paul Revolution limousine thing go by. It was as long as a semi. Arizona is McCain country, but there are also plenty of libertarians out here, too, and many of them are even opposed to state-sponsored torture. So it makes sense that Paul is doing a bit of campaigning in the vicinity.
Naturally, there’s a website. Now that I look at the photo, it seems that it’s more a glorified pickup-truck camper attachment than a limo as such. It seems like there should be a joke there about Paul’s candidacy, or libertarianism, but it’d probably be too much of a — well, you know.
Goldberg excerpts an “eminently fair and gracious and typically thoughtful” Weekly Standard review of his book. I’ll excerpt the excerpt:
Perhaps Goldberg has rehabilitated fascism a bit too much, in hopes of blunting the visceral and unreflective, but inevitable, liberal rejection of his unwelcome parallels. Goldberg goes out of his way to offer exoneration to liberals by reference to their good intentions. On the one hand, he makes clear the totalitarian temptation of liberal fascism: Hillary Clinton’s “politics of meaning” speech, for example, “is in many respects the most thoroughly totalitarian conception of politics offered by a leading American political figure in the last half century.” But he is quick to add that “Hillary is no Führer, and her notion of ‘the common good’ doesn’t involve racial purity or concentration camps. .  .  . When I say that Hillary Clinton’s ideas in general are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil.”
This effort at balance and reasonableness may, in part, be designed to set him and the book’s inflammatory title apart from the sensational, sales-oriented polemics of other conservative bestsellers of recent years.
Yes, it does seem a pity that, merely for the sake of blunting unreflective responses, Goldberg drew back from claiming that Hillary is Adolph himself. “Hillary is no Führer, and her notion of ‘the common good’ doesn’t involve involves racial purity or concentration camps.”
Now can we get back to the serious business of admitting each side probably has a point? One side says that fascism was an anti-liberal, right-wing political ideology. The other says that Hillary Clinton is Adolph Hitler. Goldberg, bending over backwards to exonerate liberals, is somewhere in the middle. Can’t we all just get along?
I suspect most have already seen the famous episode of the Miss Teen USA South Carolina contestant’s answer to a geography-related question . (By the way, amazing performance by the host holding the microphone. Could you keep a straight face through that?)
This one seems a bit less well known (if you can say that about a clip that’s been watched 4 million times on YouTube):
The host here is much less impressive (note his commentary in general, and pronunciation of a certain country name in particular). The little boy looks adorable though.
So I did a “bloggingheads”:http://www.bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/8080 a few days ago with Dan Drezner, where we discussed the Jonah Goldberg liberofascism book, and whether or not it was fair to dismiss it without having read it (my answer was emphatically yes: when the dude stops “pretending to do research”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/10/off_in_bizarrow.html perhaps I’ll start pretending to take him seriously; then again, given his past form, my limited time resources etc, perhaps not). But in retrospect, maybe this was the wrong question to debate. I’m intrigued by the question of precisely why Goldberg apparently expects this book to be given sober consideration as an important intellectual contribution to debate between the left and the right etc. [click to continue…]
A few years ago, I was quite pleased that no one in Ireland seemed too bothered that our married but separated prime minister Bertie Aherne lived with his mistress/girlfriend/partner and even brought her on foreign trips. Bertie hasn’t given me a lot of joy overall, but it was nice to think that the Irish public had better things to do than worry about his marital status. (A couple of years previously, a government front-bencher had been apprehended by the police in a park at night, in an area popular with rent boys and their clients. The media unsuccessfully tried to whip up a moral panic, and within 24 hours most callers to talk radio shows were expressing sympathy to the man’s family but saying the issue wasn’t of enormous public interest.)
My idea of our newfound sophistication was punctured by a couple of Brussels diplomats. The French were particularly annoyed as they felt everyone should understand the mistress’s carefully delineated position. It was just gauche, they thought, to bring one’s mistress to an official dinner and expect other people’s wives to sit down beside her. Soon enough, Bertie dumped poor Celia – and the press did take a great interest in that – and began to go to official functions by himself.
But now the French are hoisted on their own petard! Sarkozy’s man-eating girlfriend, who happens to be the spit of his recent ex-wife, might accompany him on a state visit to India next week. And because the Indians are particularly conservative when it comes to recognising non-marital relations, they don’t know where to seat Ms. Bruni for dinner or where she should sleep. It really is a bit rude to put your hosts in such a quandary. So much for Sarko being anything but gauche.
[amazon]. So far, so mushy. But it does, at the very least, contain the third silliest argument I’ve encountered in the last 6 hours. (The top two contenders arrived, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg, in his 
, which is probably the best, and certainly the most accessible, evaluation of the various school improvement efforts addressing the gap in achievement between children from different socio-economic groups. (He’s speaking at Grainger Hall 2120, at 6pm — I strongly recommend our Madison readers to attend).