Greenspan on the Daily Show

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes to NY

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is going to speak at the World Leader's Forum at Columbia University next Monday.

Post your questions in the comments section.

Related;
Iran blocks access to Google and Gmail
Why Bush won't attack Iran
Iran warns U.S. of crushing response
Ahmadinejad Spars With CFR Members


Olmert makes a bid for peace through strength;

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he was interested in holding peace talks with Syria, without precondition.

We want to make peace… we are willing to make peace with Syria unconditionally and without demands. I have a lot of respect for the Syrian leader and the Syrian policy.

Taken by itself, the offer is a strange one, as it requires the Syrians to do absolutely nothing. However, when viewed in light of recent events, it makes sense. Allegedly, the Israelis conducted an air strike against a Syrian nuclear facility earlier this month. Now, a few weeks later, Olmert offers to talk to the Syrians "unconditionally".

The Krugman Blog

The Conscience of a Liberal

China's Hidden Weaknesses

The Latest Foreign Exchange Show focusing on China;

Dead Economics Blogs

The solipsistic economist- Professor Peter Thompson

HANDBOOK OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

Links to the Chapters

A Free Course on Macroeconomic Management and Fiscal Issues

Some course materials on IMF Courses

Capital Flows and their Consequences in India

Interesting blog from Ministry of Finance, India.

See the post Four slideshows on open economy macroeconomics

Related;
India: Asset Prices and the Macroeconomy;

Summary: This paper examines rising asset prices in India. For the most part, asset prices in India reflect structural factors but the risk of a correction cannot be ruled out. However, at this juncture monetary policy may not be the most effective tool to safeguard financial stability because (i) India's economy is undergoing rapid structural change making it difficult to identify price misalignments; (ii) the macroeconomic impact of an asset price correction is likely to be small; and (iii) the relationship between monetary policy and asset prices is also weak. Targeted changes in financial regulations are better tools to address potential risks.

Assorted from NYT

This Is Your (Father’s) Brain on Drugs;

-More than four million arrests in 2005, including one million for violent crimes, 500,000 for drugs and 650,000 for drinking-related offenses, according to the F.B.I. All told, this represented a 200 percent leap per capita in major index felonies since 1975.
-21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers and college students combined, according to the government’s National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health.
-18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?

In a series of recent articles and a book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people’s reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding — when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism

Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?

Anita Roddick, Body Shop Founder, Dies at 64

New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age

Tell-All PCs and Phones Transforming Divorce

Hedge Funds and Private Equity Alter Career Calculus

Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan

World Bank and UN join hands

The World Bank and the United Nations announced Monday that they were setting up a system to help developing nations recover assets stolen and sent abroad by corrupt leaders that amount to an estimated $40 billion a year.

“There should be no safe haven for those who steal from the poor,” Robert B. Zoellick, the bank’s president, said in presenting the plan with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Mr. Zoellick estimated that the overall cross-border flow of global proceeds from criminal activities, corruption and tax evasion was $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion annually, and said that even a small portion of that could provide financing for much-needed social programs.

He said that every $100 million recovered could pay for immunizations for four million children, or provide water connections for 250,000 households, or finance treatment for a year for more than 600,000 people with H.I.V. and AIDS.

The problem of stolen assets is most acute in Africa, where an estimated 25 percent of the gross national product of states is lost to corruption, he said.

-World Bank and U.N. to Help Poor Nations Recover Stolen Assets

Still Life

“Vanitas Still Life,” by Jacques de Gheyn the Elder, 1603.


"Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware," by Willem Claesz. Heda, 1635

"Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill," by Pieter Claesz, 1628.

via NYT

How Bloomberg created Bloomberg

Assorted Econometrics

Worldwide Institutional Rankings in Econometrics 1989–1999

The Econometrics Hall of Fame

List of Econometricians

Time Series Econometrics

Free First-year Ph.D. Econometrics Textbook

A draft of a first-year Ph.D. econometrics textbook prepared by Bruce E. Hansen, University of Wisconsin

This and That

The Jane Fonda Effect

Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan

The Experimenter

Raj Chetty, now 28, was a sophomore at Harvard University when he came up with the theory that higher interest rates sometimes lead to higher investment. It was a counterintuitive idea. Usually, companies invest less when rates rise because the higher rates increase the cost of capital. But Chetty found that some companies, in fact, invest more because they want to get revenue-generating projects off the ground sooner, rather than later, in order to pay down that costly capital more quickly.

That idea was so compelling that economist Martin Feldstein, who had been using Chetty to help with his own research, told him instead to go off and pursue his own ideas. “A professor likes nothing better than to have a brilliant research assistant,” says Feldstein, a Harvard professor who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan and is CE O of the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research. “But I realized Raj was quite unusual. His sophistication and ability to work through problems were just higher than even the best of undergraduates at Harvard.”

Order and Disorder

‘Super Crunchers’

Judging Colleges: An Economist's Tactic

How To Make More Babies

How to eliminate the black market in stolen antiquities

The bad economics of switching health-care plans.

So What Have You Been Maximizing Lately?

Rules vs. Authority in Central Bank (and Other) Policies-Becker

Harry Potter and the curse of headache.

The Edifice of Pinkerism

Time of your month

Hidden method of reading revealed;

Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case.

In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously.

Markets in Everything

"Female genital mutilation, to give it its proper name, ranges from a straightforward nick to the complete excision of the clitoris and labia with the remaining genitals sewn up, leaving only a small opening. It is done for cultural reasons in many African countries but also in Asia and the Middle East. The World Health Organisation estimates that some 3m girls are subjected to the procedure each year and that, in total, between 100m and 140m women have undergone it. But now surgeons are working to repair some of the damage.

Surgery to reopen the vagina and mitigate the medical complications of genital cutting has long been available. But in Burkina Faso, where as many as 75% of women are thought to have had their clitorises cut, a relatively new procedure is being offered. Clitoris-reconstruction surgery aims to restore sexual sensation to women who have been mutilated. A year after it was introduced, more than 100 women have elected to have it performed, according to Michel Akotionga of the Yalgado Ouedraogo University Hospital in Ouagadougou. Unlike surgery to reopen the vagina, which is free in Burkina Faso, clitoris reconstruction costs about $150 in a public hospital and up to $400 in a private clinic."

-Female genital mutilation, A cut less cruel

Not so stupid in America- Cash for Grades

In New York they paying cash to students for good grades;

Quote of the Day

Peter Boettke writes about advice for graduate students;

James Buchanan -- "Keep your ass in the chair. If you work 6:00am to 6:00pm, you will outwork all the other academics around you."

One Answer to Global Warming

According to Mankiw;

Among policy wonks like me, there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it. So if we want to reduce global emissions of carbon, we need a global carbon tax. Q.E.D.

The idea of using taxes to fix problems, rather than merely raise government revenue, has a long history. The British economist Arthur Pigou advocated such corrective taxes to deal with pollution in the early 20th century. In his honor, economics textbooks now call them “Pigovian taxes.”

Using a Pigovian tax to address global warming is also an old idea. It was proposed as far back as 1992 by Martin S. Feldstein on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Once chief economist to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Feldstein has devoted much of his career to studying how high tax rates distort incentives and impede economic growth. But like most other policy wonks, he appreciates that some taxes align private incentives with social costs and move us toward better outcomes....

But Gilbert Metcalf, a professor of economics at Tufts, has shown how revenue from a carbon tax could be used to reduce payroll taxes in a way that would leave the distribution of total tax burden approximately unchanged. He proposes a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, together with a rebate of the federal payroll tax on the first $3,660 of earnings for each worker.

The Future of America

"A typical day I will wake up. Go crazy looking for an outfit, like for four hours..."

"It scares me- the fact that the hood is always going to stay the same or I'll never be able to get out of the hood"

-Wild at Heart, and Seventeen

One Man's Vision?

Via Heavy Lifting

A Happy Ramadan

An interesting BBC documentary-AN ISLAMIC HISTORY OF EUROPE

Have a great weekend

Via Big Picture

Photo of the Day- Baby Elmo

Elmo is just four days old, but he has already captured the hearts of his keepers in the animal hospital at Taman Safari in Bogor, West Java

Merchant of Death

Another must read book- Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

Roaming war zones as a capitalist convert in golf clothes, Bout did business with the third world's cruelest strongmen. His catalog of munitions—rifles, land mines, surface-to-air missiles, and tanks pilfered from poorly secured ex-Soviet storerooms—helped sustain the regimes of Charles Taylor in Liberia and Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaire (now Congo), and fueled the rebel campaigns of Bemba in Congo, Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, and Sam "Mosquito" Bockarie in Sierra Leone. But what also alarmed U.S. officials at the time—and to this day—was the potential that Bout's planes could carry even more dangerous cargo, such as nuclear material. "We paid particular attention to the WMD issue because of Bout's connections inside the Soviet military," says Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst who headed Alec Station, the agency's in-house unit that tracked bin Laden in the late nineties. U.S. counterterror officials knew that bin Laden's Al Qaeda lieutenants had already tried and failed in the early nineties to buy nuclear materials in Sudan, and they were anxious about the Eastern bloc's loose grip on Soviet nukes and radioactive substances. Unlike his competitors—such as the Odessan Leonid Minin, whose weapons trafficking to Liberia in the late nineties ended in his brief incarceration in a Milan jail—Bout had the ideological neutrality and elaborate infrastructure to deliver the goods, making him a new type of transnational threat.

As he amassed his fortune, Bout developed the glowering countenance of a commissar and gained a reputation for being brash, even bullying. During his 2001 tour with Bemba, someone mentioned a biblical verse with an interpretation that seemed to bother the Russian. In front of a crowd of people, Bout—a gifted linguist who speaks fluent English, French, and Spanish—suddenly launched into a loud, extended discourse in French explaining how the verse should be taken and how foolish the interpreter was, stunning the audience into silence. He also lectured Liberia's Charles Taylor like a schoolboy and thought nothing of keeping a coiled killer like Mosquito Bockarie waiting at a Monrovia roadblock. Bout was just as relentless in taking on the freebooting Russian airmen who competed with him. In one celebrated case, his operation boldly spirited away a decrepit Ilyushin plane that had been consigned for use as a Soviet war monument. Former Russian aviation official Valery Spurnov recounted a tale of Bout offering one of his pilots $20,000 to fly a shuddering wreck out to a desert landing in the Emirates, where it was promptly turned into a highway-side billboard. "It was as if he was walking on the edge of the knife all the time," recalls his ex-partner Alexander Sidorenko, a decorated paratrooper who parted ways with Bout in the early nineties. Of course, Bout's hauteur was bolstered by his constant security detail of heavily armed Russians who had served with the special forces of the GRU.

His interview on The Daily Show and Aljazeera

How's the Egypt economy doing?

IMF preliminary conclusions on the state of Egyptian economy;

The task ahead is to sustain high job-creating growth.

6. Sustaining growth in the order of 6-8 percent will require investment to rise to around 26 percent of GDP, and reforms therefore need to continue to tackle constraints on business development, such as inadequate infrastructure, limited access to bank credit by SMEs, red tape, poor public service delivery, and the lack of skilled labor. Continued efforts are also needed to reduce the underpricing of energy, which remains an important distortion that risks attracting investment into sectors where Egypt may not have a long-run comparative advantage, encourages levels of energy consumption that impose high environmental costs, and uses up vast public funds that could be more productively spent, for example on education or infrastructure. Fuel subsidies recorded in the budget amount to 5-6 percent of GDP; however, valuation of domestic oil and gas production at world market prices would put the implicit subsidies substantially higher still. To ensure the domestic and external stability critical for sustaining high growth and investment, continued fiscal adjustment is needed to raise national saving and ensure sustainable public debt dynamics. A further strengthening of the framework for exchange rate and monetary policy will enhance the CBE's ability to smooth cyclical swings and shocks, while keeping inflation low.

7. A strong outlook for 2007/08 and continued favorable external conditions provide a conducive setting for the implementation of the reform agenda. Real GDP is expected to expand by about 7 percent, led by strong growth in investment and consumption. Inflation is projected in the 6-9 percent range as the impact of the 2006 supply shocks dissipate, as long as a prudent monetary policy stance is maintained. Exports and imports are expected to continue growing strongly, and a rising trade deficit will moderate the current account surplus. The overall balance of payments should remain strong though, as Egypt continues to attract FDI and other capital. There are some downside risks to the outlook: tightening global credit markets may contribute to a worsening of the external environment, such as lower global growth and less easy access to international capital markets. Also, reform fatigue may set in as some interest groups are adversely affected and parts of the public are disappointed with the pace at which reform benefits accrue to all strata of society.

For Discussion: Should we worry so much about jobless growth?

Watch this before your MRI Scan

Via Mind Hacks
Related;
MRI's inside story

Five Different Ways of Swearing

Steven Pinker has a new book out (thanks to Tyler).


Related;
Q&A With Pinker;

(9) I was wondering whether you have ever experienced such a high from a scientific insight or discovery, such a luminous instance of what the poet W.H. Auden called "the Vision of Dame Kind," that you thought to yourself: "Ah, how wonderful. Everyone should have a chance to feel this way at least once."

When I was working in visual cognition with my former grad student (now Brown professor) Michael Tarr, we were puzzled that the time people took to recognize shapes was linearly related to their orientation (slowest for upside-down, a bit quicker when they were on their side, faster still when they were at 45 degrees, fastest of all when upright), suggesting that people mentally rotate an image of the shapes to the upright. But our subjects did not show this pattern at all for mirror-reversed versions of the shapes--in that case, every orientation took the same amount of time. At first we though that people use different strategies for normal and mirror-reversed shapes, when it dawned on me that you could always rotate a mirror-image onto its normal version in the third dimension around an oblique axis (e.g., as when you flip your right hand from palm-down fingers-up to palm-up fingers-right), and that the rotation is always exactly 180 degrees. If our subjects intuitively figured out the optimal rotation axis in every case, they would produce exactly the pattern of data we obtained. When Mike programmed an animation in which a shape alternated with a misoriented version of itself, we instantly saw it rock through the shortest-path rotation (in the picture-plane for normal shapes, in depth for the mirror-reversed ones), confirming that the brain effortlessly calculates the optimal 3-D kinematics. It's tremendously gratifying when a seemingly ugly pattern of data suddenly reveals itself as the predicted outcome of an elegant underlying process.

10 questions for Judith Rich Harris

Pinker's Thinkers

Of thought and metaphor;

"As it turns out, people swear in five different ways. That's why it took me a while to figure this out," he says.

"The subject matter of swearing is something that people don't like to have taken lightly. Sex is a big deal. An atmosphere in which you bring up sex at the drop of a hat seems to many people to remove some of the inhibitions about thinking about sex. Casual speech about sex occurs in an atmosphere that would tolerate casual sex itself and there are a lot of reasons why people get upset about casual sex."

Using sexual terms in swearing, something like motherf---er, evokes revulsion over the implied depravity.

In addition to sex, Pinker lists four taboo subjects that dominate swearing: religion, excretion, despised groups, and disease and infirmity.

Volcker Panel Report on World Bank

Independent Review Panel Calls for Strong Anticorruption Efforts as Essential Part of the World Bank’s Mission

Spread the World - World Pangea Day

Related
World Pangea Day
Avaaz.org- see their video on Wolfowitz (for World Bank employees)

Communists can bring down a government in the largest democracy

The strangeness of India;

India's communist party is threatening to withdraw from PM Manmohan Singh's government if the U.S.-India nuclear agreement goes through

Show Biz News for Next Two Weeks

Related;
Britney Spears doesn't dress, doesn't impres
LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! (not work safe)

Must Listen Podcast of the Day

Cowen on Your Inner Economist

Assorted

Comparing Apples to Oranges: Unit Errors in the NYT

Math: Gift from God or Work of Man?

Which Sporting Event Is the Best Attended?

Why did the Industrial Revolution come to England?

"Cultural Assimilation, Cultural Diffusion, and the Origin of the Wealth of Nations"

Institution building

The trapped bottom billion

Lessons on the surge from economics 101

The long-lasting consequences of the slave trade

Abortion/Crime: Where Do Ideas Come From?

Never Confuse "Could" and "Would"

The negative impact of impact factors

Bayes and risk

Making more sense with numbers

The next generation


Perspective on the Surge and US Losses

Multilevel modeling in Stata

Intermediate Macroeconomics without the LM curve

Chad Jones is writing a new textbook;

-Long run first, then short run
-Thorough discussion of economic growth, including the Romer model
-No LM curve: central banks set interest rates
-AS/AD uses short-run output and inflation (not the price level), putting students closer to facts

About time I guess.

Thought of the Day- A brief history of violence

"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth."

The Best Course in Economic Growth and Development

Yes, the best course you'll ever take in economic growth and development- taught by none other than Xavier Sala-i-Martin

Textbooks used;

Barro, Robert and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (2004), Economic Growth, MIT Press.
Easterly, William (2002), The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists� Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, MIT Press
Van Den Berg, Hendrik, (2001), Economic Growth and Development, McGraw Hill.
Weil, David N. (2005), Economic Growth, Addison Wesley

Related; Evolution of the World Distribution of Income

For Comment; what other books would you recommend

Five Must Reads of the Day

In Which Those Troublesome "Black Swans" Find a Champion in Economics

It’s Monetary Policy, Not a Morality Play

Who Gets the Surplus?

Econ Journal Watch-September 2007 issue

The unbearable lightness of being Martin Feldstein

Why don't Accountants Blog

Why can't I find good accounting blogs on the web- if you all know let us know.


Some that I came across;
McLelland
Accounting for a Detoured Economist

Energized Accounting
All Things Account

You Tube Lecture of the Day- Steven Pinker on Blank Slate

Steven Pinker

Dow Jones Islamic Market Titans 100 Index

Another explanation of Islamic Finance;


Via Islamic Finance and Banking blog

Related;
Islamic Finance for Dummies
Dow Jones Islamic Market Indexes

Angus Deaton's Letter on Super Crunching

Angus Deaton writes;

In recent years, the dominant econometric method has been instrumental variables; there is much to the jibe that students no longer look for a thesis topic, but for an instrument. As instruments have become ever more baroque, and their justifications ever more strained, and in the face of deeply serious critiques, particularly by Jim Heckman, the popularity of the method seems finally to be on the wane. In its place, there is a fast growing effort to replace econometric methodology, which can be thought of as a set of ex post fixes for non-experimental data, with real experiments, which require no such fix, and whose results are thereby transparent and convincing. There is lively work in laboratory and field experiments, often to test theoretical propositions, fed and encouraged by the growing collaboration between economics and psychology. But nothing has expanded so rapidly as the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, now the Abdul Latif Jamil Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), founded in 2003 by Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Sendhil Mullainathan (now at Harvard.) Born of a frustration with the inherent unreliability of econometric work, as well as by a perceived failure of the World Bank and other development agencies to seriously evaluate their project work, J-PAL runs an extensive program of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate social programs of many kinds, focusing mostly on health and education in poor countries, but with an eclectic overall portfolio of topics. J-PAL has got off to a flying start. It has projects in a dozen or so countries, this year it had vacancies for more than two dozen senior and junior people, and it is currently advertising a five-day course that teaches how to undertake social RCTs, at a cost of $3,950 a head. And the use of RCTs among graduate students and young assistant professors is expanding like wildfire; one Princeton student even persuaded a Mexican city to pave a random selection of its streets.

The movement is not modest in its claims, and it has attracted a good deal of acclaim from outside the profession. Banerjee has argued that the World Bank should cease to fund any activity (including presumably macro policy advice) that has not been previously subject to evaluation by an appropriate RCT. Among other plaudits in the press, The Lancet, noted that “The World Bank is finally embracing science” (if only The Lancet would do the same in its treatment of economic issues!) and praised J-PAL for its role in pressing the Bank in that direction. There is much to be excited about in this program. J-PAL and other experimental researchers have come up with several surprising results that upset previous beliefs. And by replicating similar experiments in different settings they are beginning to create an impressive and valuable body of evidence. As might be expected in the first flush of enthusiasm, there has to date been less attention to some of the problems that have bedeviled RCTs in medicine, such as their limited value to physicians in practice, nor to the extent to which RCTs really do solve the standard problems of econometric analysis. (Indeed, many RCT papers subject their experimental results to various econometric corrections and analyses.) And the jury is still out on whether RCTs are any better than large data sets as substitutes for theory.

In the end, it is hard not to think that the quality of research owes more to people than to methods. Certainly, the best of the job market candidates this year made important advances and showed great imagination and skill, irrespective of the unresolved methodological debates that divide the profession. Given this abundant talent, and the new-found (or re-found) commitment of young economists to the great issues of poverty and health around the world, there is surely no fear for the future of economics. And perhaps one day soon, there will once again be a closer dialogue between theory and application.

Related;
A premier on instrumental variables
Are Health, Wealth and Happiness Linked Worldwide?
Global Patterns of Income and Health: Facts, Interpretations, and Policies

Bloomberg, Kumar and Development

Interesting article by Mallaby;

Michael Bloomberg founded his financial information firm 26 years ago, after a hot career at Salomon Brothers. Raj Kumar founded his development information firm seven years ago, as a student project at the Kennedy School of Government. Bloomberg’s company has become a giant, employing 8,200 people. Kumar’s Development Executive Group (http://www.developmentex.com) so far employs 65, but his concept is similar.

Bloomberg gives financial markets what they need: instant and plentiful information. Before the company’s terminals became ubiquitous, the bond market was a backward place: If you wanted to buy bonds, you called a few brokers to see what might be available. Now, with Bloomberg, investors can see all their options on a screen. They get the best price, which means Wall Street middlemen don’t scalp money off each trade, which means more of the country’s capital reaches firms that need it.

Kumar’s aspiration is to do the same for the development business. Foreign assistance is an industry in itself: Every year, governments and charities spend some $200 billion on projects in poor countries. Some of those billions are wasted, because the development market hasn’t had its Bloomberg yet: It lacks information. There is plenty of talk about corruption siphoning off development dollars, but sheer inefficiency in aid is probably the bigger problem.

Consider the process of procurement. Development projects involve contracts in the millions of dollars for construction, engineering, information technology and so on. If you’re running one of these projects, you can place ads in the newspapers asking for, say, water engineers. But most of your potential suppliers probably won’t notice. As a result, there will be few bids for your tender, and you will pay an unnecessarily high price, just as bond buyers did in the pre-Bloomberg era.

Now comes Kumar’s Web site, which creates a clearinghouse for information on 30,000 development projects. With that much business in one place, suppliers congregate like bees, especially since the site is searchable. By typing in a key word, a water-engineering firm can find 1,675 water-engineering opportunities. Suddenly, buyers of water-engineering services have multiple suppliers to choose from. Costs fall by perhaps one-fifth, judging by experiments in competitive procurement in Brazil and the Philippines.

Related;
Starting a Career in International Development

Israel Lobby and NAFTA?

Successive...administrations have used AIPAC’s power on the Hill, not only for the sake of Israel aid, but for Egypt’s aid, for Jordon’s aid, for aid to the Palestinians, the Palestinian authority, the people are for the whole foreign aid budget would not pass without AIPAC’s influence.

The whole free trade agreement process was started with the US- Israel free trade agreement. Why? Because that was the only way the ...., now we’re talking about the Regan administration could get it through Congress was with AIPAC’s help.

And once they established the free trade agreement with Israel it became possible to get free trade agreements and that was the precursor to NAFTA and so on.

-Martin Indyk

An interesting and a highly charged debate on the influence of Israel Lobby hosted by the London Review of Books in NY, (here's the transcript-very highly recommended)

Related;
The Israel lobby debate
Lawmakers Approve $2.4 Billion in Military Aid to Israel

Israel Lobby Watch (Palestinian source)
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Wikipedia)

Israel's Influence
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

Israel Lobby (Dutch Documentary)
Paper on Israel Lobby Sparks Heated Debate

Walt and Mearsheimer on "The Israel Lobby"
Council on American-Islamic Relations News Conference on Israeli Influence
AIPAC, Iran, and the two Abdullahs

The War over Israel’s Influence

Podcasts

How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City


Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present

AAA ratings on rates

Albert Speer

The Centenary of the Modernist Crisis
This week marks the centenary of the publication of Pope Pius X's reactionary encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, in which he announced that 'Modernism' (a term he invented) was the synthesis of all heresies.

Metaphysics Down Under

Economic history with Gregory Clark

Shakespeare Authorship Doubters Club

If want to join, sign the Declaration

Members include;Mark Twain/ Henry James/ Walt Whitman/ Charles Dickens/ Ralph Waldo Emerson/ Sigmund Freud

You Tube Thought of the Day

Larry Summers speech at UC San Diego

Also highly recommended the following interview with Summers;

The Idea that is America

A very moving letter on the need for upholding the values we believe in (emphasis mine);

Dear Senator McCain:

I am a graduate of West Point currently serving as a Captain in the U.S. Army Infantry. I have served two combat tours with the 82nd Airborne Division, one each in Afghanistan and Iraq. While I served in the Global War on Terror, the actions and statements of my leadership led me to believe that United States policy did not require application of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. On 7 May 2004, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's testimony that the United States followed the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and the "spirit" of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan prompted me to begin an approach for clarification. For 17 months, I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain of command through battalion commander, multiple JAG lawyers, multiple Democrat and Republican Congressmen and their aides, the Ft. Bragg Inspector General's office, multiple government reports, the Secretary of the Army and multiple general officers, a professional interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, the deputy head of the department at West Point responsible for teaching Just War Theory and Law of Land Warfare, and numerous peers who I regard as honorable and intelligent men.

Instead of resolving my concerns, the approach for clarification process leaves me deeply troubled. Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is a tragedy. I can remember, as a cadet at West Point, resolving to ensure that my men would never commit a dishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard.

That is in the past and there is nothing we can do about it now. But, we can learn from our mistakes and ensure that this does not happen again. Take a major step in that direction; eliminate the confusion. My approach for clarification provides clear evidence that confusion over standards was a major contributor to the prisoner abuse. We owe our soldiers better than this. Give them a clear standard that is in accordance with the bedrock principles of our nation.

Some do not see the need for this work. Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda's, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Others argue that clear standards will limit the President's ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable.

Both of these arguments stem from the larger question, the most important question that this generation will answer. Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is "America."

Once again, I strongly urge you to do justice to your men and women in uniform. Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for.

With the Utmost Respect,

-- Capt. Ian Fishback

Can America be a humble nation?

Anne-Marie Slaughter on Colbert Report

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Some of Chris Jordan's photographic arts (from the series In Katrina's Wake) ;




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