Advice of the Day- Turkey's jewish business tycoon

ISHAK ALATON, a prominent member of Turkey’s tiny Jewish community, has a secret to living more intensely: He built his house next to a cemetery.

“You remember every day that you’re going to end up there,” he said.

Mr. Alaton is 81 and one of Turkey’s leading businessmen. He started with heating systems in the 1950s and expanded into construction, gyms and resorts. He has built roads in Kazakhstan, airports in Uzbekistan and a hospital in Moscow....

He also got some advice he never forgot from the father of a girlfriend at the time.

“I know you will be successful,” he recalled the man saying. “But don’t let your money muzzle you or stop you from expressing your thoughts.”...

As for worries that the current government is going to bring hard-line Islamic rule to Turkey, Mr. Alaton does not share them.

“We are too open a society for that,” he said. “They are using this to create a new scarecrow. Our history has been full of scarecrows.”

Turkey has been a democracy for years, and, unlike in Russia, which tried to erect the structures of democracy overnight after the Soviet Union’s collapse, cramming democracy down people’s throats in one painful gulp, the adjustment in Turkey has been much more gradual.

“We’ve been able to digest our democratic values,” he said. “You should be very hopeful.”

-A Businessman’s Enterprise: Cajoling Democracy Into Full Flower

Explainer on Turkey Crisis

So people can wear tank-tops to the universities?

Sure, no problem with that. When we talk about Turkish secularism it's almost a misnomer. It's not the secularism that we enjoy here in the United States, where people can wear whatever religious garb they want. In Turkey, the authorities are directly involved in controlling religion. The state is directly involved in engaging surveillance of the public sphere to ensure that religion doesn't enter the public sphere. And that's the difference. It's state control of religion to enforce this principle that religion shouldn't enter the public sphere.

Related;
Economic survey of Turkey 2008

The cult of Ataturk?

UK's foreign minister writes on blog;

The founder of the Turkish Republic Kemal Attaturk dominates every public building. His mausoleum which I visited yesterday is monumental. But he also said: "culture is the foundation of the Turkish Republic". Not a bad place to start.

I wonder whether present generation of Turks will agree with Ataturk.

Turkey and IMF

IMF`s Last Review of Turkey`s 3-Year Stand-By Arrangement

Turkey -- Letter of Intent, April 28, 2008

Photos of the Day- Istanbul

See more from the photographer- Neeka

Related;
Modernity or Tradition: Istanbul at a Crossroad Finds Its Own Way

Where to Stay in Istanbul

36 Hours in Istanbul

Istanbul: Memories and the City

Turkey Fact of the Day- Legal Aid

-Although legal aid is free, less than two percent of defendants made use of it during their trials.
-Approximately 75% of defendants who were sentenced to prison were never represented by a lawyer.
-Only in 7.3% of cases were lawyers present during police interrogations of suspects.

Alone in the Courtroom: Accessibility and Impact of Criminal Legal Aid before Istanbul Courts

Owners Manual to your Health

YOU: The Owner's Manual: An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger
by Michael F. Roizen , Mehmet Oz

Highly recommended the Charlie Rose interview;

• Two things that create stress; major life events and NUTS (Nagging Unfinished Tasks)
• Why is that most heart attacks happen on Monday mornings?
• For men- more sex means higher life expectancy (average person has sex once a week)
• For women it is the quality that matters
• Push to threshold in everything- in exercise, etc
• Women need less sleep than men?

Related;
A Guided Tour of Your Body

Your Skin From A To Z

Drs. Oz And Roizen Explain Why the Liver Is So Important

Galatasaray wins Turkish League

Şampiyon Galatasaray

What is Turkishness?

Reforming Article 301- Turkish people should thank European Union

Why Do Some Countries Remain Poor While Others Grow Rich?

Econ Talk of the Day- Dani Rodrik answers the question

Related;
Turkey Country Economic Memorandum

The twentieth-century experience: half empty or half full?

Dilemmas for Politicians in Financial Crisis

Kemal Dervis writes;

The events leading to the Turkish crisis of 2001 include a similar story of “surge and drought.” At the beginning of 2000, Turkey embarked on a new IMF-supported program featuring a preannounced crawling peg exchange rate regime that would give way to a more flexible “widening band” regime after 18 months. The objective was to defeat chronically high inflation, which had averaged close to 70 percent in the 1990s, and to regain debt sustainability that was threatened by the very high real interest rates that had prevailed for years. The program got off to a good start, as markets “believed” the preannounced path of the nominal exchange rate would be followed, at least for a while. With risk premia declining, short-term capital flowed into Turkey, taking advantage of th large exchange rate depreciation-adjusted interest rate differentials. The current account deficit widened dramatically by the summer of 2000 without much worry in the financial markets, for inflation was indeed declining rapidly, although not rapidly enough to avoid a significant appreciation of the real exchange rate. The Turkish economy could possibly have digested the real appreciation, at least during the 18-month period for which the exchange rate path was to remain rigid and preannounced, had it not been for serious weaknesses in the banking system translating into large contingent liabilities for the government. The combination of the large current account deficit and the underlying fiscal weakness led to attacks on the Turkish lira first in November 2000 and then again in February 2001. Just as some Asian countries had to give in to overwhelming market pressure, Turkey too had to abandon the exchange rate regime and let the lira float, leading to a massive devaluation in the early spring of 2001. Private short-term capital that had provided an inflow of about 5 percent of GDP in 2000 changed direction, with outflows totaling about 7 percent of GDP in 2001!...

Many policymakers have contemplated imposing higher taxes on wealth or high incomes when confronted with the need to “find” another 1 or 2 percent of GDP to meet a “strengthened” primary surplus target at the onset of a macroeconomic crisis triggered by debt event fears. I lived through a typical example of this in Turkey at the peak of the 2001 crisis. We had agreed with the IMF in March 2001 on a new and more ambitious primary surplus target of 5.5 percent of GDP and were trying to put together a revised budget that would meet this target. The distribution of income in Turkey is highly unequal, and the pending decline in GDP and employment due to the crisis was going to hurt the poor and threaten many jobs. It would have been very desirable, for equity and social cohesion, to derive greater tax revenue from the rich. The problem is that, in a crisis situation, one needs revenue quickly and cannot wait for the results of a comprehensive tax reform. We considered an income tax surcharge, a tax on liquid wealth, and a windfall gains tax, because many investors that had held foreign exchange before the onset of the crisis had made spectacular gains due to the collapse of the Turkish currency. In the end, we decided reluctantly, however, that any significant measure of that type would accelerate capital flight and increase the degree of panic that was already our biggest problem. We did try, using an amendment added to a bill in Parliament around midnight, to increase the deposit insurance “tax” received on deposits in the banking system, but we failed even at that because of the defection of a group of government deputies during the midnight vote. In the end, there was an increase in the value added tax, increases in taxes on tobacco, alcohol and fuel, and many increases in administered prices. The budget targets had to be met, as usual, by increasing the effective tax burden on the middle- and lower income groups. We tried to compensate this by direct income support programs to the poorest sections of the population. The 2002 data published by the State Institute of Statistics suggest that we had some success. But we could not impose new taxes on the rich at the height of the crisis. It would have led to a further acceleration of capital flight and would have ended up hurting the country and the poor through a deepening of the crisis.

Related;
How to Save Globalization from its Cheerleaders, Dani Rodrik

Links on Turkish Economy

Turkish Economy in Crisis

Turkish Economy Blog

Turkey and the IMF

Economics of Inflation & Disinflation

Turkey Economy Watch

Turkey- Oxford Business Group

Turkey- Roubini

A conversation with Orhan Pamuk

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too. In my novel, My Name is Red, when I wrote about the old Persian miniaturists who had drawn the same horse with the same passion for so many years, memorising each stroke, that they could recreate that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew I was talking about the writing profession, and my own life. If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art – this craft – he must first have been given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favours the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

-Nobel Lecture

Related;
Orhan Pamuk

Structural Reforms in crisis times

Any attempt to deal with the full range of structural changes while also trying to manage a short-term recovery from the crisis put severe strains on government competence that made economic recovery and foreign debt negotiations more difficult.

-Martin Feldstein critiquing IMF on response to the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997

Assorted Kemal Dervis

"Perspectives on the United Nations and Development," A discussion with Kemal Dervis, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme.

Kemal Dervis: Turkey: Return from the Brink, Attempt at Systemic Change and Structural Reform

OED Conference on Effectiveness of Policies and Reforms - Closing Remarks

Learning from Clients - Focus on ECA and MENA

Contribution of Human and Social Development to Poverty Reduction

Business UNusual: Facilitating United Nations Reforms through Partnerships

General equilibrium models for development policy

A general equilibrium analysis of foreign exchange shortages in a developing economy

The foreign exchange gap, growth and industrial strategy in Turkey : 1973-1983

A Better Globalization: Legitimacy, Governance, and Reform

Kemal Dervis: The Development Challenge Five Years After the Millennium Summit

Development and Democratic Governance: Some Key Issues

Philosophy and Economics Blog

Homo Phileconomicus

Request for information

-Can someone suggest some good readings on the Turkey economic crisis of 1994 and 2000.
-And what are the best Turkish economics blogs

New Turkey 's Challenges

From Davos Forum

Getting emotional over a head scarf

“This decision will bring further pressure on women,” said Nesrin Baytok, a deputy from the opposition secular party, during the debate in parliament. “It will ultimately bring us Hezbollah terror, Al Qaeda terror, and fundamentalism.”

Another deputy from that party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, said the group would take the amendments to Turkey’s Constitutional Court, a pro-secular institution that is likely to rule against Mr. Erdogan. It must wait until the changes are approved by the president and published in the official state newspaper, a process of as many as two weeks.

The head scarf ban, and the attempt to repeal it by Mr. Erdogan’s governing party, has become one of the most emotional issues in Turkey. Though the terms of the debate revolve around religion, at its heart it is a struggle for power between a rising, increasingly wealthy middle class of observant Turks, on one side, and a secular elite, backed by the military and judiciary, on the other. The head scarf is their battleground.

“It’s all about power,” said Jenny B. White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University who has been writing about Turkey since the 1970’s. “It’s about who gets to decide what Turkey’s image and emblematic lifestyle will be. Islam is the lightening rod for all the fears and concerns.”

-Turkey’s Parliament Votes to Lift Head Scarf Ban

Science Podcast of the Day- The Inner Eye of the Blind Artist

The Blind Brain
A completely blind artist paints perfect replicas of the world he's never seen. An Indian child born with cataracts miraculously gains full visual capacity at age 12. People born blind experience their 'seeing' mind in different ways, and are helping scientists challenge the dogma of a brain rigidly hard-wired for vision. And, Zoltan Torey, blinded 56 years ago in an industrial accident, shares his own wildly vivid experience of an 'inner eye'.

Related;
Artist Eşref Armağan: painting an unseen world

"They took me to Italy. The place we were seemed like a city square. There was a chair and a table. They brought an object made out of cardboard and placed it in front of me. I didn't know what it was.

It turned out to be a model of the building next to us. 'You have five minutes. Take a moment to examine it, and then draw it', a professor said to me. I picked up the model and looked at it. And then I heard another professor's voice speaking. This one said 'Take a glance from overhead, then a glance from in front and last of all, imagine you are standing next to the building and then draw it from the bottom up, just as you saw it'. I made my first drawing and no one said anything. I finished the second one, still no sound. After I finished my third drawing, I was scared by the sound of a professor crying."

The above words are from painter Eşref Armağan, who was born with a visual impairment. Yes, Armağan cannot see, but he has made beautiful paintings. Armağan never received an education; he learned how to read and write much later in life. His hands became his whole world. As he says: "I have 10 fingers. With five of them I look and with five of them I draw." He does not miss even the slightest details in his drawings; they include perspective, shadowing and movement. Armağan even achieves the "three-point perspective" in his paintings that some professional painters have a difficult time capturing. Of course, he does this with his own particular methods. He puts what he has learned as raised relief on the canvases he uses. First he makes raised shapes with a material like paste, which stiffens in 15 minutes, and then he draws his pictures. He explains why it is he uses this raised paste: "I have blind friends who come to my exhibitions. Because these pictures reflect my world, they don't understand what they are. When I make paintings that are raised relief, they can touch them and understand."

See for yourself