This and That

The Political Economy of Carbon Trading

Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank;

Wolfowitz has an abiding interest in the Islamic world. His father, Jacob, an eminent mathematician who taught at Columbia and Cornell, was a fervent Zionist, and Wolfowitz’s elder sister, Laura, lives in Israel. Wolfowitz’s critics sometimes portray him as an unquestioning defender of the Israeli government, and yet he has publicly expressed sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, and some Arab reformers regard him as a friend. Since separating from his wife of more than thirty years, Clare Selgin Wolfowitz, in 2001, he has dated a secular Muslim woman in her fifties, Shaha Ali Riza. A British national from a Libyan family who grew up in Saudi Arabia, Riza is a longtime advocate of democracy in Arab countries.

On a wall of the mosque was some ornate writing in Arabic. “Is that the Fatiha?” Wolfowitz asked, referring to a passage in the Koran. No, the imam replied, explaining that the writing was from another passage. Wolfowitz taught himself Arabic in the nineteen-eighties, when he was working at the State Department. (He also speaks French, German, Hebrew, and Indonesian.) Last year, during a visit to a mosque in eastern China, he recited a prayer from the Koran in Arabic. This time, as he was leaving the mosque, he encountered a dozen or so news photographers who had gathered to document his visit. Bending down to change back into his shoes, Wolfowitz removed a slipper, revealing a large hole in the toe of one gray wool sock. Then he removed the other slipper, exposing another hole. Shigeo Katsu, the World Bank’s vice-president for Europe and Central Asia, tried to step between Wolfowitz and the photographers, but it was too late. The camera shutters clicked."

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Why Economists Can't See the Economy

Free for All - review of Radicals for Capitalism by Doherty;

MOST troubling, Doherty merely catalogs the movement’s failings rather than grappling with them. He relates that Rand “notoriously testified” before the big-brotherly House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, when the committee was investigating Hollywood, where Rand had worked as a screenwriter, but the episode receives only two paragraphs. He skates over other questionable matters, too: for instance, that Friedman advised the murderous Pinochet regime in Chile; that Merwin Hart “infected his free-market thought with anti-Semitism”; and that Rothbard supported Strom Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for president in 1948 (because, Doherty casually observes, “he admired Thurmond’s states’ rights position”). The book fails to ask why people who claim to love freedom have so often had a soft spot for those who would deny it to others. Libertarianism has now arrived at an interesting juncture. The moment for its grandest ambitions seems to have passed. President Bush is no longer talking about privatizing Social Security, and his free-market approach to rebuilding Iraq has proven disastrous. The libertarians at the Cato Institute, meanwhile, are struggling to persuade people that global warming — the archetypal free-market failure — is a hoax. Yet in an irony worthy of Rand’s collective, the solution to climate change will probably have a libertarian tinge. The global warming debate is coalescing around a “cap and trade” solution in which energy-efficient companies would be rewarded by the market. In fact, across a range of major issues — energy policy, health care, retirement savings — a hybrid form of laissez-faire capitalism and collectivism seems to be ascendant. The market will be allowed to work its efficient magic, but government will step in to correct the market’s failures. “Libertarian paternalism” is the name two University of Chicago professors, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, have devised for one version of this philosophy.

Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic ;

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

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In the Schumpeter Wing ;

Now, nearly 60 years after his death, a full-scale biography by a professional historian has arrived, tending to endorse Drucker's earlier judgment and to expand upon it considerably. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas C. McCraw, rescues the great man from playground battles over the role of the public sector in either slackening or quickening the rate of economic growth (or both) and places him on a plane where he truly can be compared as a public figure to his rival. Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of Keynes (Hopes Betrayed, The Economist as Savior, Fighting for Freedom) tips the scale at close to ten pounds and some two thousand pages. But McCraw, with nearly 700 pages of his own, makes a plausible case that the Austrian savant was in touch with some pretty ultimate truths, too.

There are several reasons this book will be widely read. McCraw, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his 1984 book, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adam, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis and Alfred E. Kahn, frames his narrative confidently and writes beautifully, with all the charm and self-assurance of a celebrated lecturer at the Harvard Business School whose courses in business history have been among the school's most popular electives for many years.(He recently retired.) The ample resources of the Harvard University Press are behind the book as well.

Old Church Becomes Mosque in Uneasy Britain