I’m woefully ignorant about the geopolitics of Asia, so I’m not going to offer any opinions of my own here. Harry at Harry's Place has been linking to a piece in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash which expresses relief at the EU’s decision to postpone the lifting of the arms embargo on China. In Garton Ash’s piece, China is cast as the bad guy. A different view is put in a fascinating article by Chalmers Johnson which sees American concern about democracy as being merely window-dressing for a policy which is basically about preventing the emergence of geopolitical rivals. Johnson also warns about US encouragement for the remilitarization of Japan as a counterweight to China.
From the category archives:
World Economy
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).
Friday’s Australian Financial ReView section (subscription only) runs my review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book. CT readers won’t be surprised to find a lot of criticisms of the Copenhagen Consensus project that produced the book. But I found a fair bit to praise as well. The review, pretty lengthy, is over the fold. Comments appreciated.
This is by way of a followup to Chris’s comment on Nick Cohen’s article on the pointlessness of providing disaster relief to governments who don’t care about their citizens. I’ve never been a big fan of Sen’s dictum that “democracies don’t have famines” – I’ve always regarded it as being a slogan on a par with “no two countries which have a McDonalds have ever gone to war with each other”. I was originally just going to point out that the only African country which has managed to stay clear of famines entirely since independence is Kenya, which has not been a democracy and leave it at that, but I ended up looking up the original quote from Sen’s “Development as Freedom” and this ended up expanding somewhat into a more general piece on the subject of democracies and developmental states. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to Sen on most of the issues he writes about, and I hope readers will bear that in mind, because it is more or less impossible to resist making a few harsh remarks when you find out that the original quote, from page 16 of the paperback edition of Development as Freedom is, verbatim:
“It is not surprising that no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy – be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in postindependence India, or Botswana or Zimbabwe)”
Nick Cohen has a very good column in today's Observer about the way in which natural disasters play very differently depending on whether or not governments are genuinely responsive to their peoples via democratic institutions. There’s much to think about in what he writes. He rightly gives due credit to Amartya Sen for this key insight and excoriates Mao Zedong — who inexplicably still continues to be admired in some quarters — as the vicious Stalinist butcher that he was.
Via Norm , I see that the United Nations Human Development Report 2004 is out. Most of the headline coverage is about various country rankings in the Human Development Index. Oil-rich Norway comes top, the US is 8th, the UK 12th, and France has slipped to 16th with Germany down at 19th. But, for the high-income nations, this is not particularly meaningful. As the report warns:
bq. The HDI in this Report is constructed to compare country achievements across all levels of human development. The indicators currently used in the HDI yield very small differences among the top HDI countries, and thus the top of the HDI rankings often reflects only the very small differences in these underlying indicators. For these high-income countries an alternative index—the human poverty index (shown in indicator table 4 and discussed in Statistical feature 1, The state of human development)—can better reflect the extent of human deprivation that still exists among these populations and help direct the focus of public policies. (p. 138)
So what rankings (p. 151) do we get for high-income countries on the human poverty index?
bq. 1 Sweden
2 Norway
3 Netherlands
4 Finland
5 Denmark
6 Germany
7 Luxembourg
8 France
9 Spain
10 Japan
11 Italy
12 Canada
13 Belgium
14 Australia
15 United Kingdom
16 Ireland
17 United States
Cold comfort for the advocates of the “anglosphere”, “anglo-saxon capitalism” etc etc. one would have thought. No doubt they’ll be posting shrill comments: “It just isn’t trooo!” etc.
If I were to criticise James Wolfensohn as a World Bank President, then I’d say that if he has a failing, it’s probably that he errs on the side of being a worthless globetrotter far more adept at schmoozing politicians than getting his hands dirty with policy issues, blaming his staff for failures while taking personal credit for successes and that his nine years at the WB have been associated with a general slump in morale that would make Field-Marshall Haig look like Anthony Robbins. Apart from that, he’s pretty much sucked.
So when I saw his name in the story linked above, I thought to myself “I wonder if this might possibly be a plausible-sounding think tank idea which pushes a lot of currently popular political hot-buttons but which is regarded by anyone who knows a bit about the subject area with abject terror?”. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you the concept of “Rights-Based Lending”.
The deaths of nineteen Chinese illegal workers 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 . 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 , 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 (Word format) that is on the programme of the UCL’s School for Policy Studies for this Wednesday, they recount Sen’s examples:
I’ve just finished watching Sorious Samura’s documentary Living with Hunger on the UK’s Channel 4 . It seems to be screening worldwide over the next few days including on CBC in Canada and repeatedly on Discovery/Times in the US. It is an extremely vivid portrait of how some of the world’s poorest people live, how hard they work, and their dignity in conditions tougher than most of us will ever face. Highly recommended.
The US administration defends the rights of its citizens to be untroubled by discomforting information. Why? Do they think people will listen to WHO? Question for those who know more about this than I do: does obesity cost governments money all things considered, or does it save them money by causing earlier death resulting in lower claims on social security/pensions etc?
I’ve just reached Amartya Sen’s chapter “Famines and Other Crises” in Development as Freedom . He has some discussion of the great famines that depopulated Ireland from 1845 onwards. The potato blight had destroyed the crop but the Irish peasantry lacked the resources to buy alternative foodstuffs which continued to be exported:
bq. ship after ship — laden with wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter — sailed down the Shannon bound for well-fed England from famine-stricken Ireland. (p.172)
Marko Attila Hoare has a review essay in the latest Bosnia Report on books on the left about the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. I won’t attempt a crisp summary here (Hoare’s judgements won’t secure everyone’s agreement though I largely concur with them). One passage was of particular interest to me though:
bq. The journal _New Left Review_ (NLR) commissioned the present author in October 2000 to travel to Belgrade to write an article on the popular rebellion against MiloÅ¡ević that was then taking place. NLR paid my air-fare and I arrived in Belgrade on the day that MiloÅ¡ević fell. But when I produced my report NLR refused to publish it: editor Susan Watkins [that’s Mrs Tariq Ali by the way – CB] explained to me that the editorial board objected to my article’s implied support for the Hague Tribunal and for Serbia’s integration into European institutions – these views were considered politically unacceptable. I was reminded of this some months later while reading Michael Parenti’s _To kill a nation: The attack on Yugoslavia_ , published by NLR’s sister organization, the publishing house Verso. The book is simply an outright apologia for MiloÅ¡ević and his regime. Period. Thus while it would appear that supporting the prosecution of war-criminals at the Hague Tribunal is unacceptable to NLR/Verso, actually supporting the principal war-criminal himself – orchestrator of the worst acts of imperialist aggression and racial mass-murder in Europe since the death of Stalin – is entirely acceptable. Lest any reader believes I am exaggerating Parenti’s views, his book recently appeared in Serbian translation (Majkl Parenti, _Ubiti Naciju: Napad na Jugoslaviju_ , Mediagraf, Belgrade 2002) – with a foreword by none other than Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević himself.
Full disclosure here: I’m a former member of the NLR editoral committee and resigned along with Hoare’s parents and blogger Norman Geras (and most of the rest of the EC) following an office coup in 1993. I’m also a former employee of Verso. Our resignation statement, heavily self-censored for legal reasons, is here (the full story might get disclosed to people buying me enough beer in the right circumstances).
I’ve been reading Amartya Sen’s magnificent Development as Freedom this week. A more bloggable books would be hard to find: startling facts and insights jostle one another on every page. Even when you already know something, Sen is pretty good at reminding, underlining and making you think further about it. So this, for example on the life prospects of African Americans:
bq. Even though the per capita income of African Americans in the United States is considerably lower than that of the white population, African Americans are very much richer in income terms than the people of China or Kerala (even after correcting for cost-of-living differences). In this context, the comparison of survival prospects of African Americans vis-a-vis those of the very much poorer Chinese or Indians in Kerala, is of particular interest. African Americans tend to do better in terms of survival at low age groups (especially in terms of infant mortality), but the picture changes over the years.
bq. In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than then even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from _relative_ deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also _absolutely_ more deprived than low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.
Shocking, for the strongest economy on earth to create these outcomes (which, as Sen reminds us, are even worse for the black male populations of particular US cities).
UPDATE: Thanks to Noumenon for a link to this item . I closed the comments thread because I didn’t want to spend my weekend fighting trolls. But email suggests that there are some people who have worthwhile things to say so I’m opening it again (though I won’t be participating myself).
Time for another “Globollocks Watch piece, surveying Doug Henwood‘s piece in The Nation, which appears to have been taken by some among the neoliberal axis as evidence of a climbdown by a once-proud supporter of the Seattle rioters
Full disclosure: Although DH and I have never met, we’ve corresponded for quite a while and I consider him a mate. For this reason, I’ve decided that integrity requires me to be extra harsh in applying the patent Crooked Timber “Globollocks Scale”. I repeat my earlier point that the Globollocks ratings apply to individual pieces, not to entire ouevres and certainly not to people. The purpose of the scale is at least partly to point out how difficult it is for anyone, no matter how solid their command of the issues, to write anything short about neoliberal policy which doesn’t end up materially oversimplifying. Since I’ve never knowingly lit a candle while cursing the darkness was an option, don’t expect me to subject any of my own work to this scale any time soon.