Chris Bertram

Doug Saunders has “a blog post”:http://dougsaunders.net/2011/01/china-inequality-hu-jintao-barack-obama/ about Branko Milanovic’s new book “The Haves and the Have-nots“:http://amzn.to/fpjxlu . I haven’t read the book, but, according to Saunders, it denies that there is a convergence in living standards between Western workers and the Chinese. Here’s the reasoning:

bq. “If the U.S. GDP per capita grows by 1 per cent, India’s will need to grow by 17 per cent, an almost impossible rate, and China’s by 8.6 per cent, just to keep absolute income differences from rising,” he observes. “As the saying goes, you have to run very, very fast just to stay in the same place. It is therefore not surprising that despite China’s (and India’s) remarkable success, the absolute income differences between the rich and poor countries have widened.”

bq. And they have: Even as the Chinese worker has gone from $525 per year to $5,000 in two decades, the average American worker has gone from $25,000 to $43,200 – meaning that the income gap has widened from about $25,000 to $38,000, and, he notes, “of course so has the absolute gap in welfare between the average American and the average Chinese.”

Spot the non-sequitur. Even if the dollar income gap has widened in absolute terms there’s no reason to believe that the welfare gap has similarly widened, for the simple, and obvious reason of the declining marginal utility of income. On any plausible picture, the $525 to $5,000 transition is life-changing, whereas the $25,000 to $38,000 change is merely nice (especially if enough other people get the same increase and much of the increase goes on bidding up the price of inherently scarce goods).

Saunders continues:

bq. You may think of the United States as a place of extremes of wealth and poverty, and it is. Nevertheless, at the moment, the very poorest people in America, the 5 per cent with the lowest incomes, have better lives and more purchasing power than the top 5 per cent of income earners in India and the top 10 per cent in China.

Well I won’t quibble with the “more purchasing power” point, but “better lives” is really pretty dubious, since we know that by many objective measures “poor black men in the US do worse than even some poor people in India”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/12/sens-development-as-freedom/.

In the UK we are being treated to “a rich and enjoyable series of programmes on Justice featuring Michael Sandel”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/seasons/justiceseason/ . No doubt there will be quibblers, but I think he’s done a great job so far. Last night’s episode discussed Bentham, Kant and Aristotle and, for my money, both utilitarians (in the shape of Peter Singer) and various German Kant-fans came across as slightly unhinged. The moment that most summed this up, however, was discussion of the German Constitutional Court’s Kant-inspired dismissal of a law that would allow the federal authorities to shoot down a hijacked airliner destined to crash into a city with catastrophic loss of life. “Judgement here”:http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rs20060215_1bvr035705en.html . According to these Kantians, even if the passengers are doomed to die in the next few minutes and shooting-down the plane will save many lives on the ground, to attack the airliner would show a lack of respect for their human diginity, purposiveness, endiness etc. and so is forbidden. For me, that looks like a reductio.

I’m almost reluctant to add to the hype, but the story is so unusual, and the pictures so good, that I think I’ll overcome that. In brief, then: Chicago is about to see the first exhibition of the photography of Vivian Maier, a recently-deceased, partly-French, nanny who seems to have neither sought nor received any exposure or recognition in her lifetime. Thousands of negatives were then bought by a real-estate agent at a flea market. Astonished at what he found, he’s now promoting her work, making a documentary film, putting a book together and so on. Well, I know, it all sounds too good to be true. But the pictures (at least the ones we’ve seen) are superb. I have some qualms about the ethics of developing unprocessed rolls of a photographer’s work. (Famously, Garry Winogrand had tons of these.) This is for the simple reason that the photographer may just have know that that roll contained crap. Unprinted negatives get you a bit closer to the finished article, but there too, there’s the matter of editing, selection, etc. So the world will never see the work the Maier would have chosen to represent herself, if she’d have wanted exhibiting at all. But, still, the pictures are wonderful.

Links: “New York Times”:http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street-photography-60-years-old/ (great slideshow – view it full screen); Blog post at “The Operable Window”:http://theoperablewindow.blogspot.com/2011/01/vivian-maier-chicago-street.html (with link to TV news item); Chicago “exhibition”:http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/event_landing/events/dca_tourism/FindingVivianMaier_ChicagoStreetPhotographer.html details; John Maloof’s “site”:http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/ (he’s the real-estate agent); “details of the documentary film”:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding-vivian-maier-a-feature-length-documentary (and scroll down for many more links).

I’ll be catching up on my sleep over the next few weeks, having spent many an evening up late in front of the telly followed by rising at six to see the last few overs. “A tremendous achievement”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/9343026.stm , almost without blemish, with records broken and many wonderful individual moments. One Australian I was drinking with last night claimed that the Ashes never meant much to them, because they could never take the urn home. Well, the fox who tried so hard reach the grapes claimed they were sour anyway. Open thead.

As mentioned in comments to a post the other day, Kodachrome is coming to an end on Thursday. The New York Times has a nice article about it. Of course this isn’t the end for film, or even of slide film (there’s still Velvia and a few other options). Kodachrome was always an unusual and capital intensive process. I was struck by the following sentence from the article: “At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome.” That’s a very very small number for the _peak_ . There are probably still many thousands of labs that will develop colour print (C41) film and probably dozens even in the UK that will handle the more common transparency process (E6). Still, RIP.

UPDATE! – “More from NYT”:http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/a-color-saturated-sun-sets-on-kodachrome/ , with pictures!

Brad DeLong has just posted “a couple of links”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/rebound-redux-have-we-moved-past-jevons-on-efficiency-the-great-energy-challenge.html to articles that attack “an article by David Owen in the New Yorker [subscription required]”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_owen. Owen’s article relied heavily on the claim that increased energy efficiency doesn’t really deliver the hoped-for environmental benefits, because of something called the “rebound effect”. Here’s an explanation of that effect “by James Barrett”:http://www.greatenergychallengeblog.com/2010/12/rebounds-gone-wild/ in one of the linked pieces:

bq. In essence the rebound effect is the fact that as energy efficiency goes up, using energy consuming products becomes less expensive, which in turn leads us to consume more energy. Jevons’ claim was that this rebound effect would be so large that increasing energy efficiency would not decrease energy use….

Owen’s critics say that although the rebound effect is real, whether it is large enough to have the effects Owen claims is an empirical matter, and they are sceptical. Basically, they argue that the increase in energy consumption is not just down to lower prices but also to greater wealth, house size, etc. and so without greater efficiency, we might be consuming a whole lot more energy than we actually are. Basically: it all depends on the facts, and the jury’s out.

Ok, so now let’s do a little substitution in that sentence quoted earlier.
[click to continue…]

The ever-ludicrous home of the British “decent left”, _Harry’s Place_ , carries the motto on its banner “Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” No surprise then that they’ve devoted much of their recent coverage to increasingly hysterical guilt-by-association denunciations of Wikileaks. One of their marginally saner bloggers, “Gene”, has now posted “a long comparison”:http://hurryupharry.org/2010/12/10/historical-echoes/ between Chinese Nobel-prizewinner Liu Xiaobo and his German predecessor Carl von Ossietzky. Von Ossietzky was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 for publishing details of German rearmament in contravention of the Versailles treaty, a verdict that was upheld in 1992 by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice. The 1992 ruling, “according to Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Ossietzky , reads:

bq. According to the case law of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, the illegality of covertly conducted actions did not cancel out the principle of secrecy. According to the opinion of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, every citizen owes his Fatherland a duty of allegiance regarding information, and endeavours towards the enforcement of existing laws may be implemented only through the utilization of responsible domestic state organs, and never by appealing to foreign governments.

Carl von Ossietzky, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange ….?

So, the vote to triple university tuition fees in the UK was won by the government, albeit with a reduced majority (21), thousands of young people demonstrated outside Parliament, and the Prince of Wales’s car got bricked as people chanted “off with their heads!” What now? People seem to be anticipating three things: more disorder on the streets as the coalition pushes though its cuts programme; the destruction of the Liberal Democrats; and a massive slump in popularity for the Coalition. Good news for the left then? I’m not so sure.
[click to continue…]

I’ve been reading Doug Saunders’s excellent _Arrival City_ this week. Full of interesting and enlightening facts about migration, about how cities work, about international development. One page, however, brought me up short, so this is a bleg aimed at economists and especially at labour-market economists. Saunders argues (pp.88-9 for those who have a copy) that increased migration of unskilled labour will be a persistent feature in Western economies “during this decade and throughout the century” because of the demographic pressures in those ageing societies. With reproduction rates falling below 2.1 and the proportion of elderly people in the population rising, immigrants can compensate for labour shortages. “… while immigration is not a mandatory solution to labour shortages, the combination of cash-starved governments and higher demographic costs will make it the least painful and most voter-friendly solution.” He then reels off a series of labour-shortage estimates (US to require 35 million extra workers by 2030, Japan 17 million by 2050, the EU 80 million be 2050, Canada 1 million short “by the end of this decade.”)
[click to continue…]

If you aren’t reading “Glenn Greenwald”:http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html on this, you should be. The latest turn of the screw is that “Visa have said”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11938320 they are suspending payments. The good news is that, at least for Europe, this will take time to implement. The Wikileaks donations page is currently “here”:http://213.251.145.96/support.html

Tomorrow sees a vote in the House of Commons on the principle of whether to triple the fees charged to undergraduate students at UK universities and to completely withdraw state funding from all subjects except science, medicine and engineering. That’s the headline proposal, the reality is somewhat more complex since the changes are accompanied by a government-sponsored student loan scheme under which those who fail to secure reasonably paid jobs will not be required to pay and will eventually be forgiven their debt (so some of the cost will end up falling to the taxpayer). The other uncertainty surrounds the level of the permitted fee: government has said that it will only allow a £9000 charge if universities do certain as-yet unspecified things to widen access, but £6000 will usually be inadequate to cover costs.

Whether the changes are distributively regressive or progressive (compared to the status quo) is a matter of some controversy, but the assumption that is is progressive depends on assumptions about future government behaviour (around the adjustment of thresholds for repayment) that are perhaps optimistic. Most of the early evidence suggests that prospective students from low-income figures will be deterred from higher education by the headline figure of the debt they will face (perhaps many many times their current family income) even though the reality is not as scary as that scary scary figure. I’ve been arguing with some other philosophers on “a comments thread at Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/yet-more-on-student-unrest-in-the-uk-over-the-attack-on-higher-education-funding.html , some of what is below recapitulates that, and some of it is a bit rantish. Apologies for that.
[click to continue…]

Frank Field, the Joe Lieberman of British politics, “has been advising the ConDem government”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/03/frank-field-welfare-sacred-cows on welfare reform. Here’s a sentence to contemplate:

bq. This goal of changing the distribution of income will be achieved by ensuring that poorer children in the future have the range of abilities necessary to secure better paid, higher skilled jobs.

Of course, I can see a way in which that might work. The newly educated poorer children, frustrated at the stultifying low-wage jobs on offer to them, rise up and change the income distribution by expropriating the expropriators. I doubt that’s the mechanism that Field has in mind though.

Via @leninology

One method of getting a psychological assessment of the national character of potential antagonists would be to go to a local bar and ask people, any people. A few glasses of scotch would be a lot cheaper than the cost of intelligence and diplomatic services, and would doubtless come up with similar “results”:http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/1979/08/79TEHRAN8980.html .