by Chris Bertram on May 29, 2005
As the French prepare to vote “non”, my friend Glyn Morgan has “a piece in the Independent about the constitution”:http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=642292 , the conservative nationalism of its opponents on both left and right, and the importance of enlargement. Unfortunately, he argues, faced with problems of demographic transition, immigration, international competition from India and China, and the unilateralism of the only global superpower, much of the left would prefer not to face facts:
bq. Befuddled by these challenges, many Europeans, particularly in France, have slipped their moorings from reality. Both the Eurosceptic left and the Eurosceptic right have reached for the security blanket – moth-holed and threadbare, though it is – of nationalism. The Eurosceptic left’s embrace of nationalism is particularly insidious, because it hides behind the language of social justice. Time was when the European left was outward-looking, internationalist, and concerned with the least well-off, no matter where they lived. In Europe today, the least well-off are to be found primarily in central and eastern Europe. European enlargement, one of the greatest achievements of post-war Europe, offers these victims of history a life-line into the modern democratic world. That’s the reason for admitting Turkey.
by Daniel on April 19, 2005
by Daniel on March 22, 2005
My favourite passage in Peter Griffiths’ book “The Economist’s Tale” is one where he ruminates on the nature of the job, and how it sometimes sends World Bank people a little bit batty.
“From time to time, I have to look a Minister in the eye and say something like; if you carry out this policy, I expect that 200,000 children will die in the city this year. However, as a result of the price mechanism put in place, I would expect that in four years’ time, 400,000 children of farmers will live who would otherwise have died. I do not have any conclusive evidence for this conclusion. The process by which I arrived at this estimate would
certainly not pass the peer review process of any Western economics journal. Nevertheless I strongly advise you to take this course of action. There is a kind of rush that comes with having this kind of power, and some people get addicted to it.
Since it would appear from this that the two insititutional hazards of the World Bank are a) arrogance and b) making big and important decisions based on not enough analysis, then you can sort of see how lots of people might think that Paul Wolfowitz, a man whose name does not exactly bring to mind the phrase “now there’s a humble chap who never makes absurdly optimistic projections with disastrous results”, would not be the right choice to lead it.
However, on careful consideration, I disagree (most of this already posted to the Progressive Economists’ Network, hullo lads, so subscribers to that list can stop reading and get on with finding more stuff for me to plagiarise on this blog).
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by Chris Bertram on December 1, 2004
I’ve been looking through the headlines on international AIDS day. The BBC discusses “the disproportionate impact on women in Africa”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4052531.stm . “India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV”:http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/01/china.india.aids.reut/ , and nobody really knows how many victims there are in China (CNN). “HIV and Aids are expected to kill 16 million farm workers in Southern Africa by 2010” reports the “South African Independent Online”:http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=vn20041201042230610C465958 . In Britain the “Guardian tells us”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1363277,00.html that a fifth of respondents to a poll blame the victims. In “Lebanon”:http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=10570 , only a quarter of victims receive any kind of treatment. In Uganda “a government minister warns the UN”:http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/11/113004uganda.htm not to give advice to gays on safe sex because homosexuality is illegal. Please add more links in comments throughout the day.
by John Q on August 25, 2004
In my previous post on US trade, I argued that if the current account deficit is to be stabilised at a sustainable level, the balance of trade on goods and services must return to surplus in the next decade or so. In this post, I’m going to ruIe out a soft option and argue that, while a smooth market-driven adjustment is not inconceivable, it’s unlikely.
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by John Q on August 23, 2004
by Daniel on May 26, 2004
Further to my comments last week on this subject, an update on Mr Wolfensohn’s progress toward the holy grail of Rights Based Lending. As of yesterday, China has a “winning formula” that the rest of the world ought to copy, while Israel can go screw itself. Something for everyone here, I think.
(The second of those two links is, IMO, disgraceful. Lord knows I’m not exactly a fan of the actions of the State of Israel in the territory it has annexed, but where the heck does Wolfensohn get off deciding to have a Middle East policy? Note that his comments appear to have no relevance to the action project involved; the Gaza Palestinians are just going to be made to wait for their new houses because of Wolfensohn’s amour propre, “as a Jew”. OTOH, it looks like he flip-flopped again shortly after that Ma’ariv interview and the discussions are still live after all. Lord, what a clown show)
by Daniel on April 23, 2004
I realise that this is about the fourth time I’ve had a hit-and-run shot at an Airmiles column, while crying off doing the proper Globollocks analysis for lack of time. I am a bit short of time at the moment, but the real reason is thatit’s so dispiriting; the general miasma of Globollocks overwhelms any specific instance. Check out today’s example.
Friedman believes that it would be a danger to the USA on a par with global terrorism if someone in India working for a US-owned firm were to invent something useful. Think I’m joking? Read the bugger. He actually uses the phrase “war for innovation”.
Apparently the USA isn’t bringing through enough research scientists. What’s the solution? Presumably the rush to global competition of the free market. Nope, sorry, wrong, the solution is massive amounts of government money. In the Airmiles world, agricultural subsidies are terrible, awful anticompetitive, protectionist. But massive subsidies to the science industry are imperative, because of globalisation or something.
Wretched analysis. Someone has told Airmiles that “basic research” is a phrase meaning “science that it’s OK to want a subsidy for”. And he’s taken it as the intellectual equivalent of a Sapphire Class Admiral’s Club pass to support the contention that we need to incentivise domestic private research to keep its facilities onshore. What about “Susie Smith at the pillow factory?”, who would also presumably like a say in how this tax-funded largesse is to be distributed? Scrwe her, apparently; her role in Friedman’s weightless globalised world is a source of funds and a punchline to jokes. What a piece of work.
by Daniel on April 5, 2004
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has another attractively barking column up (potted summary: There’s nothing wrong with Mexico that couldn’t be cured with a combination of “real leadership” and vast amounts of money from America. Well I suppose it worked for Chile). But once more, he salts the sauce with plenty of good old Globollocks. Due to time constraints, I haven’t been able to carry out a full Globollocks analysis. But I picked up this gem, which will serve as an indicator of the sort of thing the New York Times will print these days.
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by Daniel on April 1, 2004
Oh bloody hell he’s annoying me now. In the course of an insanely annoying piece of Globollocks (summary: Mexico went through hell to get ready for NAFTA and ended up hardly benefiting, so now what it needs is more neo-liberalism and what a shame it is that they aren’t able to impose it from above like the Chinese!), Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman[1] manages to come up with this gem.
“While China and India each send tens of thousands of students to be educated abroad every year in science and engineering, particularly in the U.S., Mexico sends just 10,000”
Could anyone tell me why this might be the case? Anyone? Bueller?
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by Maria on February 18, 2004
These days, US fears of offshore outsourcing are echoed by European worries about an influx of poor Eastern Europeans when the accession countries join on 1st May. White House economists are pilloried for publicly stating The Bleedin Obvious, and the Daily Mail is convinced Britain will be overrun by Roma. What links these two issues? Fear of competition. Or, as our friends in literary theory might have it, dread of The Other. Suddenly, after 50 odd years of dispensing aid and the omni-prescription of market-opening commitments, liberalisation, harmonisation, free flow of capital, government investment in education and training and all the rest of it, the worst has happened. It worked. (Albeit at great cost, in a limited way, and for the chosen few.)
But instead of gratitude and docility from semi-developed countries like Thailand, India, and the Ukraine, the payback is more competition. They take our jobs whether they emigrate or stay at home. Apocalyptic flows of people and jobs are predicted, all in the ‘wrong’ direction. The cry goes up; ‘something must be done.’ But the real displacement going on is not of people, but of issues.
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by Chris Bertram on February 10, 2004
In partial reply to “Brian Leiter’s (statisticallly supported) claim”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000797.html that people are better off living in social democratic nations (Western Europe, Canada …) than in the United States, “David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy writes”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_08_volokh_archive.html#107635122273206108 :
bq. I don’t recall any American I’ve met in my entire life permanently settling in Europe….
Well those I know aren’t dead yet — so it may depend on what you mean by “permanently” — but it wasn’t hard for me to get into double figures from people I know reasonably well here in the UK, some of whom have been resident for over thirty years.
by Chris Bertram on February 8, 2004
The deaths of “nineteen Chinese illegal workers”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/3464203.stm who were cockling on the treacherous sands of Morecambe bay has generated much comment in the British press. Much of that comment has focused on their illegality, the exploitation of such workers by gangmasters, the need or otherwise for tighter immigration controls, globalization and so on. Indeed. There was a similar burst of indignation when “some immigrant workers were hit by a train back in July”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000204.html . But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals. In his “Development as Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385720270/junius-20 , Amartya Sen discusses two examples where workers, in order to assure basic capablities (such as nutrition and housing) for themselves and their families, have to expose themselves to the risk of injury or death. Jo Wolff and Avner de-Shalit have “a paper on this theme”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/download/seminars/Wolff_De-Shalit_disadvantage.doc (Word format) that is on the “programme”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/seminars/seminars_2004.php of the UCL’s School for Policy Studies for this Wednesday, they recount Sen’s examples:
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by Daniel on January 26, 2004
From Thomas “Even More Airmiles” Friedman’s column today:
“Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo remarked to me: “I don’t think I would have been successful in political reform without the decent economic growth we had [spurred by Nafta] from 1996 to 2000. Those five years, we had average growth of 5 percent.”
Who can tell me what might be considered by harsh judges to be perhaps a leetle bit misleading about this quotation?
Answer below the fold.
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by Daniel on January 16, 2004
Thanks very much to Michael Pollak, whose comments on the last Globollocks piece spurred me to make a few changes to this rather tiresome feature. Below, I score this piece by Nicholas “Airmiles” Kristof in the New York Times. The new scoring system is fairly self-explanatory; it’s based on the original Globollocks list, but it’s a bit more subjective rather than box-ticking, and you can now win points back for writing things that aren’t Globollocks.
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