Are political assasinations pointless?

“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”
- Benjamin Disraeli, 1865, on the death of Abraham Lincoln

On the eve of the current Iraq war the US government actively sought to kill Saddam Hussein through targeted bombing- would it be any different if US managed to kill Saddam then? . A new working paper addresses political assasinations and its success- Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War” by Benjamin Jones, Northwestern University, and Benjamin Olken;

Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination's effects. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history

The Economist also covered the paper;

The bad news for would-be Lee Harvey Oswalds is that the success rate is pretty poor. Only 59 of the 298 attempts resulted in the target's death, a hit rate of one in five. If you are planning to knock off a leader, it is far better to use a gun. Assassination attempts using firearms had a kill rate of around 30%, whereas those using bombs or other explosive devices worked only 7% of the time (but often harmed bystanders).

The good news for political leaders is that their chance of surviving office is improving. While the annual number of assassination attempts has been increasing (currently around one every two years), there are a lot more countries (and thus more leaders) than there were in the early 20th century. In the 1910s, a given leader had a 1% chance of being killed in any given year; today, the probability is around 0.3%.

Killing leaders does make a difference, but only in certain circumstances. Democracies seem to be able to cope with the loss of a president or prime minister. But in autocracies, a successful assassination was 13 percentage points more likely than a failed attempt to result in a transition to democracy. The “beneficial” impact of an autocrat's removal was still observable ten years later. However, given the low success rate of assassins, the gamble might not be worth it; autocrats who survived an attack tended to tighten their grip.

When it comes to wars, the effects are more subtle. Assassinations tend to hasten the end of intense wars (those with more than 1,000 battle deaths) but, prior to the second world war, made small-scale conflicts more intense. As for initiating conflicts, the academics find assassinations are irrelevant. So even if Franz Ferdinand had dodged the bullet, the first world war might have happened anyway

Excerpt from the conclusion;

In sum, these results show that assassinations affect political institutions and conflict. Whether or not assassinations change “the history of the world” in Disraeli’s words, they do appear to change the history of individual countries. Our tests provide evidence that small elements of randomness - the path of a bullet, the timing of an explosion, small shifts in a leader’s schedule - can result in substantial changes in national outcomes. The findings lend support to theoretical models of conflict that feature leadership and further suggest that individual autocrats appear to be cornerstones of national institutions, complementing the literature on institutional origins by showing an important component of institutional change that lies not in distant history but in contemporary hands.

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Politics of fear makes Come back

Irene Khan, Amnesty International Secretary General writes;

"Fear of the outsider is a powerful totem for governments who mean to isolate and control their populations. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe continues to tout the threat of the former colonial power and others in the west to justify his policy of forced eviction of people from their homes and a crackdown on all who criticise him. In Russia the government talked up fears of mysterious foreign financiers to introduce a tough law on NGOs that was then used to shut down a human rights organisation working in Chechnya. At the same Russia has done little to tackle the alarming rise in hate crimes against foreigners and minorities."

Here is the latest Amnesty International Report 2007 on Human Rights

See their blog as well.

X-rated nude car wash OK in Down Under

A nude car wash offering an X-rated sideshow and topless cleaning in Australia's tropical Queensland state has been given the all-clear after police and officials said they were powerless to scrub it.

The Bubbles 'n' Babes car wash in Brisbane prompted a flood of complaints with a topless car wash for A$55 ($45) and a nude car wash with X-rated lap-dance service for A$100. "If it was approved for a car wash then I can't imagine how we can stop them," Lord Mayor Campbell Newman told a council meeting with worried local lawmakers.

-X-rated nude car wash gets police all-clear

Via Independent Sources

Female shark can reproduce assexually?

A hammerhead shark that gave birth in a Nebraska aquarium reproduced without mating, a genetic analysis shows.

This form of asexual reproduction, called parthenogenesis, has been found in other vertebrate species, including some snakes and lizards. But this is the first time it has been documented in a shark.

Researchers from the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland found no male DNA in the female baby shark, which was born in December 2001 and died shortly after birth, apparently killed by another fish. The mother was one of three female bonnetheads, a small hammerhead species, that had been captured in Florida and kept without male sharks for three years in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.

At the time of the birth, many scientists thought that the female had mated with another species, or that it had used sperm obtained years before. Female sharks are capable of storing sperm, although none have been known to store it as long as these sharks had been isolated.

But through the analysis “it was pretty clear that there was no male contribution,” said Mahmood S. Shivji, director of the Guy Harvey Research Institute and author of a paper on the finding being published online today by the journal Biology Letters.

Instead, the female shark’s own genetic material combined during the process of cell division that produces an egg. A cell called the secondary oocyte, which contains half the female chromosomes and normally becomes the egg, fused with another cell called the secondary polar body, which contains the identical genetic material

-Female Shark Reproduced Without Male DNA, Scientists Say

Fatwa of the Day- Symbolic Breastfeeding

Cairo's al-Azhar Islamic University on Monday suspended a lecturer who suggested that men and women work colleagues could use symbolic breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

The lecturer, Ezzat Atiya, had drawn on Islamic traditions which forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of males and females.

But after controversy in the Egyptian and Middle East media, university president Ahmed el-Tayeb suspended Atiya pending an urgent investigation into his opinions, the Egyptian state news agency MENA reported.

Atiya is the head of the department which deals with sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the university is part of the al-Azhar institute, one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam.

Atiya's unusual opinion was widely publicised by Arabic-language satellite television channels and featured in a discussion in the Egyptian parliament.

The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.

But a committee from al-Azhar said his proposal contradicted the principles of Islam and of morality.

Atiya had said he had drawn on medieval scholarship to justify his position. The opposition party newspaper al-Ahrar on Monday quoted him as saying he retracted his views because they were based on the opinions of a minority of scholars.

-Lecturer suspended after breastfeeding fatwa

via FP Blog

Tyler Cowen not happy with Zimbabwe

Tyler Cowen is not happy that Zimbabwe has won approval to lead the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. The Economist thinks otherwise;

But look on the bright side. Few things are more dull than a worthy cause run by a do-gooding country. It is a fair bet that if, say, Sweden or Canada were chairing the commission, nobody outside the aid industry would hear a squeak about its doings over the next year. Zimbabwe's stewardship, by contrast, will attract much scrutiny. Journalists, donors and other critics will be searching for examples of misspent money or—even better—further examples of hypocrisy.

The power of such a spotlight has already been demonstrated: Libya's chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Commission in 2003 helped force that body's transformation into something that—perhaps—requires slightly higher standards. Since then Libya has started to shrug off bits of its roguish reputation, voluntarily ending its nuclear programme.

Chivvying the world's nastiest countries by putting them in charge of good causes is a promising principle. Unimaginative diplomats from west European countries and America are worrying whether Kazakhstan is a suitable country to become chairman of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2009. Might that honour help nudge reform along? Far better, of course, to put the still more ghastly government of Turkmenistan in the chair. That closed, dictatorial country would find it hard to maintain its isolation through the hectic schedule of chairing a 56-member organisation.

Similarly, putting some notorious narco-state in charge would electrify the UN's sleepily-run drug programme. Saudi Arabia could take over the UN's commission on the status of women. The inter-governmental panel on climate change could be overseen by smoke-belching China. Belarus, which ruthlessly sells weapons of all kinds to anyone with cash, could be asked to take over the UN disarmament department.

What do you think?

Politics of Pension Reform in India

Interesting op-ed on political realities of Indian pension reform- via Ajay Shah blog;

"To deal with this alarming situation, the National Democratic Alliance government decided to change over to a defined contribution system, in which employees get a pension related to what they have contributed, to allow employees a choice of investments for their pension savings, and to open organised pension schemes to private sector employees, self-employed and unemployed — to anyone in fact who could save for old age. It also notified a defined contribution system for new recruits to the civil service from 1 January 2005. Whilst the homework was done by the previous government, it was the present UPA government that tabled the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Bill in Parliament in 2005. However, the Bill has not been enacted; presumably its Communist allies do not like it.

It is unlikely that this government will summon the courage to enact the legislation; the Bill will die when the present Parliament comes to its natural end in 2009, or to an unnatural end earlier. It also looks as if the government will implement the new pension scheme without getting the legislation in place. If that happens, there will be some mishaps, hiccups and surprises. But maybe that is what the government is looking for — it would like to get some experience of running the new scheme before setting it in stone. In that case, there is plenty of time to take another look at the proposed pension design and to improve it. Hélène K Poirson of the International Monetary Fund took a look, and came out with her findings last month.

A question she raises concerns the absence of the first of three pillars in the Indian scheme. The first pillar in a pension scheme is a minimum guaranteed pension, the second is a pension coming out of a compulsory contribution, and the third is a pension based on additional contributions that the employee may choose to make. The Indian scheme provides for the two latter pillars, but not a minimum guaranteed pension. This may make the employees’ choice more conservative. On the other hand, the Indian government would be pretty inept at providing the first pillar. So, it would be best for us to do without it."

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More than a notional improvement;

IN THE less-than-cool world of public pensions, new trends come along infrequently. For much of the past 25 years, most discussion of state pensions has been about funding: getting today's workers to save now in order to pay for their own retirement later. Systems in many countries have moved from pay-as-you-go financing, in which today's workers pay for today's pensions, towards individual accounts in which workers accumulate their own cash. With Chile leading the way in 1981, this system has proved especially popular in Latin America. Workers in a dozen countries there now make mandatory contributions to their personal nest eggs.

In the past decade or so, however, several European countries, led by Latvia and Sweden, have been trying out a new style of pension. This new approach, the subject of a weighty book just published by the World Bank*, is based on “notional” (or non-financial) defined contributions (NDCs) by workers. It sticks with pay-as-you-go financing, but mimics a funded plan in determining what benefits pensioners receive

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To Peg or Not

Kuwait yesterday removed its currency peg to the US dollar, throwing plans for Gulf currency union by 2010 into doubt and raising the prospect that other oil-producing states might abandon long-held dollar pegs.

Sheikh Salem Abdelaziz Al Sabah, governor of the Central Bank of Kuwait, told the official Kuwait news agency the decision had been made owing to the "detrimental effects of the pegging system to the national economy".

Since late last year, Kuwaiti officials have hinted that the country would revert to a basket of currencies to prevent the sliding dollar increasing the cost of imports, which has stoked inflation to more than 4 per cent, double the historic average. This has encouraged speculators to plough billions of dollars into the dinar over the past few months, betting that the central bank would allow the dinar to appreciate.

-Kuwait abandons peg to sliding US dollar

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What's Experimental Economics

Listen to the Master- Vernon Smith at EconTalk.

India and Electricity

According to the Planning Commission of India, 600 million people — roughly half the population — are off the electric grid...

The World Bank estimates that at least $4 billion in electricity is unaccounted for each year — that is to say, stolen. Transparency International estimated in 2005 that Indians paid $480 million in bribes to put in new connections or correct bills...

At Tata, company managers took pains to say that power shortages did not hinder their ability to meet deadlines for their clients.

“The work as such does not suffer,” said Gurinder Virk, an assistant general manager. “We have sufficient stocks of diesel at all times.” Behind the building, three generators purred as a sweltering evening descended. A 2004 World Bank survey found that 60 percent of companies in India have such facilities.

-Electricity Crisis Hobbles an India Eager to Ascend

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MBA vs Master of Science in Finance

High Powered Expert Committee Report on Mumbai - An International Financial Centre, recommends Indian colleges start offtering MSc in Finance (Box 13.1, p.175);

Usually about 20–25% of the coursework in an MBA curriculum is focused on finance, while all the coursework in an MSF is in finance.

The MSF imparts greater knowledge of mathematics and computer science, thus preparing the student for the quantitative and data-intensive modern finance workplace, where mathematical models are applied into measuring risk, pricing financial instruments, and developing and testing trading strategies.

The MSF tends to involve substantial teaching in analytical financial economics, going beyond the more descriptive finance coursework as seen in the MBA where the mathematical background of students is inadequate.

The MSF program prepares students for careers in financial analysis, investment management and corporate finance where they will confront sophisticated financial instruments, markets and trading strategies. The typical MBA student has a very limited knowledge of derivatives arbitrage; the typical MSF student knows quite a bit about it.

Related;
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Microbanking, microschooling;

In sharp contrast to big-name business schools, which set high standards for prospective students, the tiny Mann Deshi Business School in the Indian state of Maharashtra has few entry requirements. The brainchild of Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank, a not-for-profit microfinance provider, the school offers women mainly from rural districts courses in topics including entrepreneurship, marketing and finance. A free gym and career counselling are also available to students.

Classes at Mann Deshi began in December 2006 with 150 students in the first intake. Over the next five years, the Satara-based school hopes to enroll 350 students for each session of between three and six months. The cost of enrolment is a steal by business-school standards at between 150 and 600 rupees ($3.70-14.80). Already, the school has declared its programme so successful that it plans to expand into the neighbouring state of Karnataka

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One person's spoken language might sound like gobbledy gook to another - but when it comes to music do we beat to a common evolutionary drum? Could music be the universal language - linking minds across cultures and ancestral time? And, which came first - music or language? Don your headphones and climb aboard for an acoustic adventure. Does music lie at the heart...and brain...of what it means to be human?

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Science writer and broadcaster Len Fisher from the University of Bristol asks why so many people are ignorant about science and why it is regarded as such a hard subject in school and in daily life

Those who have ears
Brisbane educator Jennifer Riggs discusses children who have serious problems with auditory processing. Studies have shown that a third of us are strongly visual-spatial learners and many children cannot learn through being talked at, but will learn better by seeing and doing. The fundamentals of learning are the five senses, but how many of them do we use in teaching?

Polar bears and humming birds
Why do some people remain thin and others fat however much they seem to eat? Dr Hendrick Rensburg blames genes. But we can't go back to the supplier and trade in our genomes, so what are the options for losing weight in a healthy way? To find answers, Dr Rensburg goes back to nature, to polar bears who fast and humming birds which may eat three times their body weight in a day. His book Polar Bears and Humming Birds, A Medical Guide to Weight Loss, tries to dispel some dieting myths

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Norwegian Commission on Low Emissions

'necessary, feasible, and not impossibly expensive.'

Another national report on becoming a low-emission society- the commission was chaired by Professor Jørgen Randers from the Norwegian School of Management.

Godfather IV

I was shocked after reading the following testimony of James Comey- pity the American democracy;

COMEY: I raced to the hospital room, entered. And Mrs. Ashcroft was standing by the hospital bed, Mr. Ashcroft was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn’t clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off. […]

I went out in the hallway. Spoke to Director Mueller by phone. He was on his way. I handed the phone to the head of the security detail and Director Mueller instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances. And I went back in the room. […]

And it was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the attorney general very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there — to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was — which I will not do.

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general…and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left.

The two men did not acknowledge me. They turned and walked from the room.

See the Daily Show version

Quotes to Discuss

"In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets."- Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

"What is pure democracy? It is a question of ... whether you want to see the glass half-full or half empty."
-President Putin

Where Inflation is the Opposition

Zimbabwe's inflation watch;

Year-on-year inflation rose 1,500 points in April to 3,714 per cent from 2, 200 per cent in March.

President Robert Mugabe's government is setting up a National Incomes and Pricing Commission to monitor price trends of goods and services through regular surveys and inspections, starting with basic items like bread, cooking oil, meat, school fees and transport.

It will determine prices and investigate pricing violations. People convicted of offences under the new legislation face maximum prison terms of five years

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Killer Toothpastes

"Diethylene glycol, a poisonous ingredient in some antifreeze, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said yesterday that the product appeared to have originated in China...

Panamanian health officials said diethylene glycol had been found in two brands of toothpaste, labeled in English as Excel and Mr. Cool. The tubes contained diethylene glycol concentrations of between 1.7 percent and 4.6 percent, said Luis Martínez, a prosecutor who is looking into the shipments...

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that a Chinese factory not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients had sold 46 barrels of syrup containing diethylene glycol that had been falsely labeled as 99.5 percent pure glycerin. That syrup passed through several trading companies before ending up in Panama, where it was mixed into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine."

-Poisoned Toothpaste in Panama Is Believed to Be From China

Credit Rating Worries

Per Kurowski, a former ED of World Bank is doing CFA exams and wonders;

Explain whether you agree or disagree with the following statement: “The credit risk of a bond is the risk that the issuer will fail to meet its obligation to make timely payments of interest and principle”

If I had answered the above with a YES, as anyone would have intuitively done, had they not peeked in on the updates, I would have distanced myself further from my CFA certification since the right answer indicated is a “NO”, among others because the (modern) credit risk now includes a “Downgrade risk, which is the risk that an issue will be downgraded by a rating agency”

And so now, instead of having to focus on the true object of the credit risk, we must also focus on the side issue of the opinions of the credit rating agencies, and that Sir, though we might feel all cosily comforted by more knowledge, does not really seem to put the world on a wiser financial track.

I do not mind credit rating agencies but, if we are forced by financial regulators to go by their criteria, then they should be forced to be equally responsible for them. Alternatively, let them hang around, giving their First Amendment protected opinions, but do not force anyone to have to follow them

Peter Eigen in Africa

A German TV report profiling Peter Eigen's recent work on natural resource transparency;

"Peter Eigen, former head of anti-corruption agency Transparency International, now heads EITI, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Its focus is on the natural reserves sector - difficult terrain.

With China and India's economies expanding rapidly, the global competition for natural commodities is getting fiercer. In Africa, western multinationals have accused them these booming nations of using unfair methods to secure supplies. Professor Peter Eigen cannot allow himself to take sides. Our reporter Karl Harenbrock accompanies Eigen to a conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa that deals with environmental issues, the marketing of natural reserves, and fighting corruption in the field of drilling and extraction right"

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Quote of the Day

"If they fuck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too."

- Paul Wolfowitz, former President of World Bank (see annex 13 of the report)

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Premier on Islamic Finance

A new working paper from the IMF-The Economics of Islamic Finance and Securitization by Andreas Jobst;

Summary: Islamic lending transactions are governed by the precepts of the shariah, which bans interest and stipulates that income must be derived as return from entrepreneurial investment. Since Islamic finance is predicated on asset backing and specific credit participation in identified business risk, structuring shariah-compliant securitization seems straightforward. This paper explains the fundamental legal principles of Islamic finance, which includes the presentation of a valuation model that helps distil the essential economic characteristics of shariah-compliant synthetication of conventional finance. In addition to a brief review of the current state of market development, the examination of pertinent legal and economic implications of shariah compliance on the configuration of securitization transactions informs a discussion of the most salient benefits and drawbacks of Islamic securitization.

via FreeExchange

Related;
The Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (hereinafter referred to as AAOIFI) is an Islamic international autonomous non-profit making corporate body that prepares accounting, auditing, governance, ethics and Shari'a standards for Islamic financial institutions.

The Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) is an international standard-setting organisation that promotes and enhances the soundness and stability of the Islamic financial services industry by issuing global prudential standards and guiding principles for the industry, broadly defined to include banking, capital markets and insurance sectors.

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Islamic Bond Fatwas Surge on Million-Dollar Scholars ;

Just as Wall Street turned to Nobel Prize winner Myron Scholes in the 1980s to help make derivatives the fastest growing financial market, banks can't find enough scholars steeped in the teachings of Muhammad to accommodate the demand for new bonds that conform to Shariah law. Without men like Yaquby to bless the borrowings, none of the $70 billion of Islamic debt outstanding can be traded and companies would have been unable to sell any of the $17 billion new offerings last year, according to data compiled by Standard & Poor's and Bloomberg.

``The credibility of institutions comes from the stature of the Shariah boards they have,'' said Afaq Khan, head of Islamic banking at Standard Chartered Plc in Dubai, the world's second- biggest underwriter of Islamic bonds. ``Transactions can get shot down at the structuring stage if scholars don't allow them.'' ...

International banks, mostly in London, use the same scholars for religious rulings, or fatwas, said Rushdi Siddiqui, who runs Islamic indexes for Dow Jones & Co. in New York.

``Unfortunately people think we are overpaid but this isn't true,'' Yaquby, dressed in a traditional white ghutra headcloth and ankle-length dishdasha robe, said in an interview in Dubai last month. ``They don't look at what bankers and lawyers are being paid. Yet the CEO of an Islamic bank can't take a decision without the scholar.''

Yaquby said the biggest international banks pay scholars annual retainers of $20,000 to $50,000.

Mohamed Ma'sum Billah, a scholar in Selangor, Malaysia, sits on about 20 boards. Fees are as high as $100,000, up seven- fold from 2002, he said

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Art Book Recommendation

THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS; The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism
By Ross King

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This and That

Prostitution Insurance by Arnold Kling;

A few economists argued that Americans ought to try to get over their discomfort with paying for sex. The economists proposed that Americans pay for prostitution with their own money, in which case they would be less likely to obtain unnecessary services. In addition, consumers would pay more attention to cost, which would force prostitutes to lower their prices in order to avoid losing business.

Marvelous properties- Don Boudreaux

Each time you shuffle a deck, you produce an arrangement of cards that exists for the first and only time in history. The arithmetic works that way. For a very small number of items, the number of possible arrangements -- which item is first, which item is second, which is third, and so on -- is small. Three items, for example, can be arranged only six different ways. But the number of possible arrangements grows very large very quickly. The number of ways to arrange five items is 120. For 10 items it's 3,628,800. For 15 items it's 1,307,674,368,000. The number of different ways to arrange 52 items is 8.066 times 10 to the 67th power.

This number is so enormous that no human can comprehend it. By way of comparison, the number of ways to arrange a mere 20 items is 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 -- a number larger than the number of seconds that elapse in the course of 10 billion years. And this number is microscopic compared to 8.066 times 10 to the 67th power.

A world full of good news

The End of National Currency

Summary: Global financial instability has sparked a surge in "monetary nationalism" -- the idea that countries must make and control their own currencies. But globalization and monetary nationalism are a dangerous combination, a cause of financial crises and geopolitical tension. The world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars, euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn.

Conflicting creeds: how to value art, houses and Asian stock by John Kay;

There are two approaches to valuing assets. For fundamentalists, the value of an asset is the sum of the returns it will yield over its life. For fellow travellers, an asset is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. The conflict between fundamentalists and fellow travellers is the root of many financial controversies, over investment styles, over fair value accounting. Anyone who owns, or might buy, a Chinese share, a house, or a work of art is pressed into – implicitly – taking a view

Specialization or diversification

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To Prevent Heart Disease, Clean your Teeth

We now know that oral health is connected with diabetes, and prematurely born low-birthweight babies, and the latest discovery is that periodontal disease, or gum disease, is connected with heart disease.

Barbara Taylor: It could be that the bacteria that are in dental plaque and which cause periodontitis, actually release molecules, chemicals, that trigger off reactions in the body or those products could themselves enter the bloodstream, and damage the endothelium, which is the lining inside the blood vessels that become diseased in cardiovascular disease. It could be that the process of inflammation in the body produces different cells and molecules and that those cells and molecules somehow trigger off further damage to the endothelium inside the blood vessels.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript.

Cavities in the fluoride push

Iraq Economy Watch

"However, a surprise jump in inflation from 32 percent at end-2005 to 65 percent a year later raised serious concerns (see Chart 1). The increase was caused mainly by shortages of key commodities, especially fuel products, which were largely the result of the continuing lack of security in Iraq. In a recent poll, 62 percent of Iraqi respondents complained about the availability of basic household goods, up from 38 percent in 2005. But underlying inflation (excluding fuel and transportation costs) was also stubbornly high, at about 30 percent. Given that the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) maintained a tight grip on Iraqi dinars in circulation while the budget was in surplus, the high inflation appears to have been accommodated by the pervasive cash dollarization of the economy.

In mid-November 2006, the authorities initiated a strong policy response to the inflationary pressures. One of the objectives of the government budget for 2007 was to prevent current spending from putting further inflationary pressure on the small non-oil economy. The CBI, meanwhile, raised its policy interest rates sharply and allowed the dinar to appreciate against the dollar, which was possible in view of Iraq’s comfortable level of international reserves (almost six months of import cover). These measures were intended to dedollarize the economy to enhance the CBI’s control over monetary conditions and also to reduce imported inflation. This policy appears to have had some success in increasing the demand for local currency. Moreover, in February 2007, overall inflation came down to 37 percent, and core inflation fell to 24 percent. Similar rates of inflation were recorded for March. But it is too soon to declare victory over inflation.

Despite strong initial political resistance, the authorities began in December 2005 to increase fuel prices gradually. Before the adjustments, fuel prices were extremely low, even by regional standards, with regular gasoline selling in Baghdad for 3 cents a liter and, outside the capital, for less than half that price. But fuel shortages worsened and inflation increased during 2006, making it an urgent priority to ease supply bottlenecks in the fuel market.

The authorities took action on two fronts: first, raising the price of fuel products to reduce the incentive for smuggling; and second, allowing the private sector to import fuel products. By March 2007, the prices of regular and premium gasoline were near the average levels in other oil-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and prices for diesel exceeded the regional average (see Chart 2).

One important outcome of the price increases was a reduction in budgetary subsidies, which allowed budgetary resources to be shifted to priority public services. Despite the increases, official fuel prices are still lower than the black market prices that most people have to pay. By and large, Iraqis seem to have largely accepted the higher prices because they consider it more important to have a regular supply of fuel.

With the passage of new legislation last October to allow private fuel imports, the increase in fuel prices is expected to make it more attractive for the private sector to become active in this area. It is hoped that better fuel availability in 2007 would help reduce black market prices and ease inflationary pressures."

-Iraq takes steps to stabilize and reform its economy

The Prophet of Innovation Podcast

Interview with Thomas K. McCraw author of Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.

"Schumpeter had given out heavy assignments, the librarian had refused to allow the students to check out the assigned books, and when Schumpeter threw a tantrum (he was only 26, and had just started teaching), the librarian challenged him to a duel. Schumpeter won the duel by cutting a small slice out of the librarian's shoulder. The two men later became good friends, and the students got access to the books."

Related;
Solow's review of the book
Tyler Cowen's review

When doctors tell stories

"The whole edifice of medical training is based on subterfuge. I know I'm not just an extra set of hands. Otherwise, I'd never learn to be a surgeon."
-Atul Gawande

Some books on health and doctors;

JOHN E. CASTALDO AND LAWRENCE P. LEVITT "The Man With the Iron Tattoo and Other True Tales of Uncommon Wisdom: What Our Patients Have Taught Us About Love, Faith and Healing"

ATUL GAWANDE "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance"

JOHN GEYMAN "The Corrosion of Medicine: Can the Profession Reclaim Its Moral Legacy?"

JEROME GROOPMAN "How Doctors Think"

BERTON ROUECHÉ "The Medical Detectives" and "The Man Who Grew Two Breasts"

SHANI STEIN-RATZKER "M.D.: A Four-Year Journey Through Medical School"

GERALD WEISSMANN "Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment"

Related;
How Doctors Think- Slate Book Forum
Doctors and Fallacies in Logic
"How Doctors Think" and using social networks for your health
Physician, Hear Thyself
The mistakes doctors make
Writing the Medical Experience

Jerome Groopman's Blog
The Patient from Hell: How I Worked With My Doctors to Get the Best of Modern Medicine And How You Can Too by Stephen H. Schneider
The Way We Age Now-Atul Gawande

Highly recommeded this NPR interview with Groopman

Wikipedia of Life

"Many of the world’s leading scientific institutions today announced the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life, an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered."

That was E.O. Wilson's TED wish;that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of data from scientists and amateurs on every aspect of the biosphere.

Here's the page on Rice.

Open Economy Macroeconomics in Developing Countries

Parts of a draft of a textbook by Prof. Carlos A. Végh is available online- this draft deserves more wider discussion and need to be used more in teaching.

Useful material by the professor;
HOW TO WRITE A RESEARCH PAPER
USEFUL READINGS FOR UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS
Stuttering Economics
Readings in International Finance

World's Abortion Facts

"Over 60% of the world's 6.5 billion people now live in countries where abortion is generally allowed, and a quarter where it is banned, according to the Centre for Reproductive Rights, a pressure group. Mexico has just decriminalised it, whereas in some countries, such as America and Poland, laws are becoming more restrictive. Some 46m abortions are thought to be carried out annually (more than one in three pregnancies is terminated). Of these, 20m are illegal, resulting in the deaths of some 70,000 women, according to the World Health Organisation."

Source: The Economist

Science Podcast- Gravitational Waves

"The rather un-poetically named star SN 2006gy is roughly 150 times the size of our sun. Last week it went supernova, creating the brightest stellar explosion ever recorded. But among the vast swathes of dust, gas and visible matter ejected into space, perhaps the most significant consequences were invisible – emanating out from the star like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond. They are called Gravitational Waves, they run through the fabric of space-time itself and having been predicted by Einstein nearly 100 years ago we may be on the verge of proving they exist.

But what are gravitational waves, why are scientists trying to measure them and, if they succeed, what would a gravitational picture of the universe look like?"

Listen to the podcast from BBC.

Related;
NASA's Chandra Sees Brightest Supernova Ever
Jillian's Guide to Gravitational Waves
Science to ride gravitational waves

Too much Multivitamin can kill you?

A study in nearly 300,000 men showed taking multivitamins more than seven times a week increased the risk of advanced and fatal prostate cancer.

The findings indicated the risk of advanced prostate cancer is 32% higher in men who take multivitamins more than once a day compared with those who do not take them at all.

Risk of fatal prostate cancer was almost double

The correlation was strongest for men with a family history of the disease, and who also took selenium, beta-carotene or zinc supplements.

-Multivitamin prostate warning

Narcotics 101

So far this year, about 20,000 acres have been destroyed, just a fraction of the record 407,000 acres planted with opium poppy, according to the United Nations. The crop is expected to yield more than 6,500 tons of opium, exceeding global demand. The export value — about $3.1 billion — is equivalent to about half of the legal Afghan economy...

Opium Used as Currency

“We have security chiefs, police chiefs, who traffic in drugs,” he added. “Traffickers give money to governors to allow cultivation in their areas. So far, I haven’t seen any governor or security commander willing to crack down.” Drug production is now greatest where the Taliban is strongest. In Helmand Province, which the insurgents mostly control, opium is so abundant that blocks of it serve as local currency.

Farmers growing poppies in Taliban-controlled areas pay a tax to the insurgents, who then hire “day fighters.” For their part, drug traffickers pay the Taliban for security. Smugglers who take opium and heroin out of Afghanistan bring weapons and bombs back for the insurgents, officials say.

In Nimruz Province, in southwest Afghanistan, the Taliban demanded that traffickers provide $4,000 a month and a Toyota Land Cruiser to support 10-man fighting units, according to United Nations officials. An Afghan official said Taliban forces were given five Land Cruisers for attacking the Afghan border police so traffickers could move drugs more easily.

-Poppy Fields Are Now a Front Line in Afghanistan War

Podcast of the Day-Infotopia

Discussion with Cass Sunstein at Econ Talk.

Related;
Deliberation and Infotopia
Cass Sunstein’s “Infotopia”
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Jailed for 1933 years

A Spanish anaesthetist with hepatitis C has been sentenced to nearly 2,000 years in prison for infecting hundreds of patients with the virus.

Juan Maeso, 65, infected 275 people between 1988 and 1997, by injecting himself with a morphine syringe before using the rest on a patient.

Valencia's Provincial Court sentenced Mr Maeso, who is a morphine addict, to 1,933 years in jail.

However the most he can serve under Spanish law is 20 years.

- Spanish Hep C anaesthetist jailed

Freak Weather

Four Villages Hit By Tidal Waves In Aceh

Mauritius- Six missing after freak waves;
Mauritius weather services reported waves of larger than three metres off the coast of the Indian Ocean islands at the weekend, and warned of further large waves on Monday.

Giant waves thrash Reunion Island

Tanzania-10 children drown as dhow capsizes

Maldives experiencing tidal waves across the country

Climate change to make one billion refugees;

In its report "Human tide: The real migration crisis", Christian Aid said that as the developed world was responsible for most of the climate-changing pollution, it should bear the brunt of the cost of helping those worst hit by it -- the poor.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2080 up to 3.2 billion people -- one third of the planet's population -- will be short of water, up to 600 million will be short of food and up to 7 million will face coastal flooding.

Climate change- How to cool the world

I, Coffee

"Over the past decade the price of raw coffee has fallen by two thirds - while the market for take-away coffees has trebled, from $30 billion to $90 billion per year. From farm to cafe, the coffee travels over 6,000 kilometres - and increases a total of 16 times in price."

Listen to the interesting podcast about coffee value chain from BBC.

Iraq Quote of the Day

I noticed the mother attempting to breast feed her little baby and yet the baby continued to cry. [The interpreter] who is a certified and well educated doctor of internal medicine educated in Iraq, told me that the mother, because she was very frightened by our presence, was not able to breast feed her baby because the glands in the breast close up due to sympathetic responses to fear and stressful situations. I then tried to reassure the mother by allowing her to leave the room and attain some privacy so that she could relax and feed her child. I felt something that had been brooding under the attained callousness of my heart for some time.

My heart finally broke for the Iraqi people. I wanted to just sit down and cry while saying I'm so, so sorry for what we had done. I had the acute sense that we had failed these people. It was at this time, and after an entire year of being deployed and well into the next deployment that I realized something. We burst into homes, frighten the hell out of families, and destroy their homes looking for an elusive enemy. We do this out of fear of the unseen and attempt to compensate for our inability to capture insurgents by swatting mosquitoes with a sledge-hammer in glass houses.

- Emails of the fallen soldier,Army Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr.

via FP blog

China’s “Missing Girls”—Son Preference or Hepatitis B Infections?

A research brief from World Bank;

The imbalance of sex ratios among children and the associated human and social implications has received increasing attention from scholars, policymakers, and governments. Amartya Sen drew especially vivid attention to this by pointing out that over 100 million women were “missing.” [1].

Both India and China have vigorous public policies in place to encourage parents to view daughters as no less valuable than sons. The assumption underlying such policies is that a strong preference for sons is driving the imbalance in sex ratios.[2].

But in a recent paper, Emily Oster argues that up to 75 percent of the “missing girls” in China can be accounted for by the high prevalence of Hepatitis B infection.[3] If true, this would be especially good news for policy makers in China seeking to address the skewed sex ratios, because implementing a Hepatitis B vaccination campaign is far easier than reducing people’s preference for sons.

Unfortunately, Oster’s hypothesis that Hepatitis B accounts for most of the “missing women” in China is difficult to reconcile with demographic and medical data

Das Gupta found that data from a huge sample of births in China show that the only women with elevated probabilities of bearing a son are those who have already borne daughters (Figure 1).[4]

Those who have borne only sons show a mildly elevated probability of the next child being a girl—indicative of a mild preference for having a daughter if the sons are already safely in place.

A study of the sex ratio of aborted fetuses in China confirms that women who have only daughters account for the bulk of the excess of female fetuses among total abortions. These data are consistent with the view that son preference is the predominant explanation for the missing girls.[5]

A similar pattern of son preference is found across Asia, showing that parental discrimination against girls is related to the sex composition of their children.Studies in India, Bangladesh, and the Republic of Korea, based on data from before the availability of sex-selection technology (when households resorted to postnatal discrimination), show excess female child mortality concentrated among girls born into families which already have a girl.[6] …

In China, sex ratios have fluctuated sharply over the twentieth century, and these fluctuations seem to correspond to resource constraints and ideological shifts (Figure 3).

Sex ratios rose sharply when households were placed under severe resource constraints by the disruption of war in the first half of the century, and by fertility decline in the latter decades of the century, which reduced the number of times parents could “toss the coin” to obtain a son.

By contrast in Mao’s China, an ideology of gender equality backed up by collectivization and control over private lives sharply reduced the scope for households to prioritize resource allocation among its members. This is reflected in relatively normal sex ratios, with a muted rise even during the Great Leap famine.

It is highly implausible that the prevalence of Hepatitis B infection fluctuated in tandem with these political shifts. It appears governments have been correct to assume that son preference is the main factor behind the “missing girls” and to focus their policies on changing the cultural roots of son preference.

Related;
The Search for 100 Million Missing Women

Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women
Response to Das Gupta (2005) Comment: "Explaining Asias Missing Women -- A New Look at the Data"

Cultural versus Biological Factors in Explaining Asia’s “Missing Women”:. Response to Oster

"Everyone is fundamentally alike"

Global Politics in a Complex Age

Podcast of the Day- Jeffrey Sachs final Reith Lecture.

Listen or read the transcript.

How the Mobile Phone brought down the price of Fish

The Economist summarises Robert Jensen's "The Digital Provide: Information (technology), market performance and welfare in the South Indian fisheries sector”'

On average, 5-8% of the total catch was wasted, says Robert Jensen, a development economist at Harvard University who has surveyed the price of sardines at 15 beach markets along Kerala's coast. On January 14th 1997, for example, 11 fishermen at Badagara beach ended up throwing away their catches, yet on that day there were 27 buyers at markets within 15km (about nine miles) who would have bought their fish. There were also wide variations in the price of sardines along the coast.

But starting in 1997 mobile phones were introduced in Kerala. Since coverage spread gradually, this provided an ideal way to gauge the effect of mobile phones on the fishermen's behaviour, the price of fish, and the amount of waste. For many years, anecdotes have abounded about the ways in which mobile phones promote more efficient markets and encourage economic activity. One particularly popular tale is that of the fisherman who is able to call several nearby markets from his boat to establish where his catch will fetch the highest price. Mr Jensen's paper adds some numbers to the familiar stories and shows precisely how mobile phones support economic growth.

As phone coverage spread between 1997 and 2000, fishermen started to buy phones and use them to call coastal markets while still at sea. (The area of coverage reaches 20-25km off the coast.) Instead of selling their fish at beach auctions, the fishermen would call around to find the best price. Dividing the coast into three regions, Mr Jensen found that the proportion of fishermen who ventured beyond their home markets to sell their catches jumped from zero to around 35% as soon as coverage became available in each region. At that point, no fish were wasted and the variation in prices fell dramatically. By the end of the study coverage was available in all three regions. Waste had been eliminated and the “law of one price”—the idea that in an efficient market identical goods should cost the same—had come into effect, in the form of a single rate for sardines along the coast.

This more efficient market benefited everyone. Fishermen's profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months. And the benefits are enduring, rather than one-off. All of this, says Mr Jensen, shows the importance of the free flow of information to ensure that markets work efficiently. “Information makes markets work, and markets improve welfare,” he concludes.

Mr Jensen's work is valuable because studies of the economic effect of mobile phones tend to be macroeconomic. A well known example is the finding in 2005 by Leonard Waverman, of the London Business School, that an extra 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country leads to an additional 0.59 percentage points of growth in GDP per person. (He recently repeated this earlier study using a more elaborate model and found that an extra 10 percentage points in mobile-phone penetration led to an extra 0.44 percentage points of growth, a difference he says is not statistically significant.)

Related;
The Visible Hand(set)
Development and Growth for Research Students- Infrastructure Notes

London to issue sharia complaint debt?

The government is looking into issuing its first shariah-compliant bond in a bid to boost London's position as a centre for Islamic finance, Treasury minister Ed Balls said on Monday.

The Treasury estimates Islamic finance assets worldwide are worth over $250 billion (125 billion pounds), and the market is growing rapidly, as financiers angle for cash-rich investors from the Middle East.

Balls said the Treasury and Debt Management Office would look into the cost and benefits of the government issuing Islamic financial products in the sterling market, and publish the results of the study by the end of the year.

"I believe there are great potential advantages for the UK government issuing shariah-compliant government debt," Balls said. "The feasibility study will also be assessing the opportunity for issuing such instruments, taking into account the government's debt management objectives."

The government-backed National Savings and Investments has also been asked to look into making such products available to the public, Balls added.

-Government mulls issuing Islamic bonds

History Podcast of the Day

On 1 September 1851 the poet Matthew Arnold was on his honeymoon. Catching a ferry from Dover to Calais, he sat down and worked on a poem that would become emblematic of the fears and anxieties of a generation of Victorians. It is called Dover Beach and it finishes like this:

“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night”.

But was Arnold’s pessimism shared by his fellow Victorians? What events and ideas were driving it on and were any of their concerns about race and religion, class and culture borne out as the 19th century drew to a close?

Listen to the podcast.

When vibrators threaten Military

"Small, egg-shaped and promising 'divine' vibrations, a UK sex toy has been deemed a threat to Cyprus's national security. According to the company Ann Summers, the Love Bug 2 has been banned because the Cypriot military is concerned its electronic waves would disrupt the army's radio frequencies. Operated by a remote control with a range of six metres, it is described by Ann Summers as 'deceptively powerful'. The company said: 'The Love Bug 2 is available in Cyprus but we have had to put a warning out urging Cypriots not to use it."

-The sex is OK, it's just the frequency

via Danger Room