Globalisation's Hit Men

John Perkins

How Good People become Evil

Errol Morris’ “Feel-Bad” Masterpiece

Assorted Podcasts

Doing without a ruler: in defence of anarchism

Morality and political violence

To be or not to be (Part 1)
Suicide has been a focus of philosophical examination in the West since at least the time of Plato, and for good reason. It raises a lot of difficult questions. What makes behaviour suicidal? Is suicidal behaviour rational and - the question that has obsessed philosophers down the ages - is it morally permissible? This week, the first part of a two-part investigation of this enigmatic and disconcerting phenomenon

The science of happiness

Frost/Nixon interview

DeLong Expects Dollar to Fall Versus Asian Currencies

Shultz Supports Fuchs-Emanuel Social Security Plan

Flynn Siler Says Mondavi Was `Brilliant' at Marketing

Credit Shocks and Economic Aftershocks

Quitting the habit: neurobiology, addiction and the insidious ciggie

Look at the history of parishes from about the 14th Century

The Logic of Life

Secrets of Mental Math

Implementing Cluster Competitiveness Initiatives

Glenn Loury: The Missing Voice of Jeremiah

Bad News in High Style: Kevin Phillips

Zakaria Says U.S. Political System Has Broken

Common Wealth: economics for a crowded planet

"American Idol and Poverty" featuring Edward H. Crane

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State

Georgia's Transformation into a Modern Market Democracy

Goosebumps at Google

Robert Lawrence Stine, author of "Goosebumps", "Rotten School", "Mostly Ghostly", "The Nightmare Room" and "Fear Street" series.

He has just released a new series of Goosebumps.

The Secret to Economic Growth revealed

Commission on Growth and Development (inlcudes Solow, Rubin,and other eminent economists) has released their growth report.

“We are acutely aware that there are no silver bullets to create long-running, inclusive growth, and that no single paradigm exists,” says Commission Vice Chair Danny Leipziger

Guess the following oil producing country

The economy contracted during the first half of 2007. This was driven by a drop in oil production following a strong outturn in 2006, reflecting cutbacks to optimize oil field utilization as well as ongoing facilities maintenance. The government and private nonenergy sector, on the other hand, provided a positive impetus to growth benefiting from energy-related income spillovers.

Inflation is subdued and credit growth has only recently picked up. Inflation remains low at 0.1 percent (year-on-year) through the first nine months of 2007, partly due to price controls and declining prices on clothing and recreation. Credit growth rose by around 5 percent in the first half of 2007 following a contraction in 2006, reflecting base effects and more broad-based credit expansion. Although nonperforming loans (NPLs) in the banking sector remain high, these mostly relate to credit losses incurred in the late 1990s following financial problems in the corporate sector; provisioning appears broadly adequate and the generation of new NPLs is low. Moreover, local banks' capital adequacy ratios remain high at close to 20 percent.

High oil and gas prices continue to drive large fiscal and current account surpluses. As in the past, energy-related revenue windfalls are being largely saved and invested abroad. The primary fiscal surplus reached 21½ percent of GDP in FY2006/07 (April-March) as oil and gas revenues remained very high. The current account surplus reached 56 percent of GDP in 2006 for the most part reflecting high nominal energy exports.

Growth will remain weak in the near term, but recover over the medium-term. Output is projected to slow to around ½ percent in 2007 and decline fractionally in 2008 due to extensive oil sector facilities upgrading as well as the maturation of oil fields; nonenergy private growth is expected to remain solid. The main risk to the near-term outlook is a global slowdown leading to lower energy prices. Over the medium term, growth is expected to recover and reach around 3 percent as oil production returns to current levels, with new and upgraded facilities coming on stream, and government capital spending is stepped up with improved implementation. There are upside risks to this outlook related to possible new hydrocarbon discoveries.

O' Really

Environmental fanatics?

John Francis,After a massive oil spill polluted San Francisco Bay in 1971, Francis gave up all motorized transportation. For 22 years, he walked everywhere he went -- including treks across the entire United States and much of South America -- hoping to inspire others to drop out of the petroleum economy

Russian Corruption Fact of the Day

The level of corruption remains extremely high," Medvedev said. "In 2007 alone, 10,500 criminal cases involving corruption were launched, and we understand perfectly well this is only the tip of the iceberg."

- Russia's Medvedev launches anti-corruption drive

When will we hear good news from Africa?

The myth about being 'technical' virigins and oral sex

"There is a widespread belief that teens engage in nonvaginal forms of sex, especially oral sex, as a way to be sexually active while still claiming that, technically, they are virgins," Laura Lindberg of the Guttmacher Institute in New York, who led the study, said in a statement.

"However, our research shows that this supposed substitution of oral sex for vaginal sex is largely a myth. There is no good evidence that teens who have not had intercourse engage in oral sex with a series of partners."...

About one in 10 of the teens said they had engaged in anal sex. These teens were far more likely to have also engaged in vaginal sex.

"Teens of white ethnicity and higher socioeconomic status were more likely than their peers to have ever had oral or anal sex," the researchers wrote.

Lindberg said the new findings illustrate that the Bush administration's emphasis on school programs teaching sexual abstinence until marriage "does not give teens the skills and information they need to be safe."

Statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March showed that more than one in four U.S. teen girls was infected with at least one sexually transmitted disease. The CDC said in December the birth rate for U.S. teens rose in 2006 for the first time since 1991.

Lindberg said the Guttmacher Institute's findings have health policy implications.

"While oral and anal sex carry no risk of pregnancy, engaging in these behaviors can nevertheless put teens at risk of sexually transmitted infections," she said.

"Counseling and education should take into account total STI risk by addressing the full range of behaviors that teens engage in, including oral and anal sex."

-Teen sex study doubts "technical virginity"

Corrupt Politician or Management Expert?

India's Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wife offer prayers at the Mahavir Hindu Temple in Patna, 18 December 2006, after being cleared of corruption charges. India's Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav was cleared 18 December of amassing unaccounted assets in his former post as chief minister of the impoverished eastern state of Bihar, local media said.

Related;
“When we get into very corrupt states, ..UP or ...Bihar, we have to go in with a political analysis...may be we don’t publish the political analysis..”

-India Country Director for World Bank, Isabel Guerrero

The Greatest Social Revolution in Human History is coming

Econ Talks of the Week

Allan Meltzer

Myron Scholes

Bryan Caplan

Richard Posner

Kenneth Arrow

Fareed Zakaria

More Idiocy from Chavez

'Willy Wonka' faces closure threat from Chavez

Hopeless in Myanmar

McCain on Earmarks, etc

Live From New York, It’s John McCain

Books to Pre-Order

Sea of Poppies: A Novel
by Amitav Ghosh

Israeli Artists

Artists Absorb Israel’s Six Decades, and Move On

Adi Nes / Sigalit Landau / Ohad Meromi /Nelly Agass / Erez Israeli / Michal Helfman / Boaz Arad

Song of The Flower

Song of The Flower by Khalil Gibran

Logarithmic spirals in Space

Typhoon Rammasun (right) and 25 million light-year distant galaxy M101 - each with arms exhibiting the shape of a simple and beautiful mathematical curve known as a logarithmic spiral, a spiral whose separation grows in a geometric way with increasing distance from the center

The British role in the Middle East

Costs and Benefits of Amazon Kindle

Megan McArdle is loving it;

I've got about 50 books on it, and I love always having something with me to read. I also love the ease of using it one handed, and checking my email from anywhere. As far as I'm concerned, it's better than a book. The biggest downsides are that not everything I want to read is on it yet, and conversely, that it's awful easy to spend a hell of a lot of money browsing. But there's so much cheap content from the public domain that this is not a huge issue.

Arnold Kling has mixed reactions;

It turns out that my reading style is to scan. Sometimes I'll be in the third chapter of a book and start asking myself what the author is getting at. So I'll flip to the conclusion. Or I'll jump ahead to what I think is a more important chapter. Although one can use the Kindle that way, it takes a lot more thought and effort than with a paper book.

My main concern continues to be with what is available on the Kindle. The typical semi-academic nonfiction that I read tends to be unavailable. My guess is that if I stick with the Kindle it will skew my reading in the direction of more popular nonfiction.

I'm not the first one to say this, but it's probably bad to try to replicate an older media experience using a new technology. Instead, if a new device is going to have real impact, it has to be adapted in unexpected ways. For that purpose, the proprietary Kindle format and the closed operating system are its most serious flaws. If it could be hacked, I could imagine it being used for email or blogging. Or it might become a vehicle for new scholarly journals, or cheaper textbooks.

But as a closed system, you have to compare it to book technology. It is easier to purchase, carry, and store books on the Kindle. But it is harder to read them.

Steven Levitt has yet to try;

I’ve never actually read an e-book (after all, I am hopelessly behind when it comes to technology), but this new development is encouraging me to finally try. I would be interested to hear from readers who have tried both the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle as to which they prefer.

David Friedman on Kindle

Kindle Economics

Why Amazon's Kindle is revolutionary

Big Picture on Kindle

The Future of Reading

Kindle is interesting but …

Kindle-nomics

Initial Kindling reactions- Krugman

Experiencing The Endowment Effect

Amazon's e-book reader has clunky design, good performance, and a couple of annoying quirks

So on second thought it seems I should wait around for a while (6 months?) before buying a Kindle.

Econ Talk of the Day

Myron Scholes-on outlook for the credit crisis, economic modeling and the need for a new system of accounting.

The food an American family throws away each month

One Country’s Table Scraps, Another Country’s Meal

A smart worker, not a hard worker

Award-Winning Writer Gloria Calderón Kellett Discusses Sitcom Writing, Screenplays and the Changing Landscape of Television

Mindjet: Between the award-winning screenplays, theater, comedy and books— how do you manage to be so productive with so much of your life dedicated to your work?

Gloria Calderón Kellett: I am super anal-retentive and organized. I think I’m a smart worker, not a hard worker– I was the person who’d always write the papers the night before, and get an “A.” If I have a deadline I’ll meet it, so oftentimes I give myself a self-imposed deadline. For example, I’ll book a theater before I’ve written the play. Or, I’ll invite six actors to come to my house on a Sunday to read something I haven’t written yet so that I’ll be forced to write something for them to read. I like writing— I have a lot of ideas— but I don’t love re-writing. But, I’m getting comfortable with re-writing because I know it’s an essential part of writing. Also, my husband is super prolific; he works harder and smarter than I do, so anything I do comparatively is not that much work. And we have a lot of artistic friends, who are doing all kinds of things— we’re surrounded by it— so what I do doesn’t seem like work. Most days at work are really fun.

MJ: What do you think of how revenue is being re-distributed with the changing landscape of television (consumers, ads, Internet, production)? How did the writers’ strike* affect you?

GCK: I think it’s very exciting actually. Personally, as a lover of television for many years I feel that TV’s very stale. A lot of the shows that are new every season are just versions of shows I’ve already seen on the air. There’s not a lot of creativity anymore. When we were growing up, 35 million people would watch the Cosby Show or Family Ties, and those were okay numbers for them. Now, if we get 11 million viewers for How I Met Your Mother we’re excited because there are just so many options [with new media like Internet and streaming content]. The networks are nervous, they’re forced to make milquetoast decisions as to what the programming is, and don’t take a lot of risks. Which is what makes cable and Internet so interesting, because they don’t have to rely on pleasing such a wide array of people. I looked into a Web series, and I sold two during the strike but can’t do them now since I’m back on my contract. There’s no money in them, but you get creative freedom to do whatever you want, throw something out there. And digital’s fairly easy to produce— with the Internet, production value isn’t super important; they just want funny or interesting material.

The strike itself was difficult because I wasn’t working and I missed everybody. I love my job and I wanted to be there, but this fight is for future generations that will need payment for the Internet. It was a very theoretical fight. I was walking on the picket line with writers from I Love Lucy who don’t make one penny on residuals and their pension plans are nil. How often is that show played on the air? How often has it played over the years? These people should be safe in their retirement, and are not. I felt it was my duty to strike for future generations that will be going through the same thing. There won’t be any impact on my living wage for quite some time, but it could be that in the next 10 years everything will be streamed. The landscape of entertainment is going to change significantly. It’ll all be on demand eventually. [Your favorite show] will still be on every Monday at 8 pm, but that’s the earliest you can watch it. And they’d promote new shows, like, “hey if you like How I Met Your Mother, then you might like Buds, and you can get five free episodes of Buds and if you like it, then you can pay 50 cents an episode, and add that to your subscription.” I think heading in that direction is exciting; it’ll open up worlds for more writers, and for more interesting television. So it’s not something I feel threatened by at all; I think it was a worthy fight and I’m glad we made some headway on it.

Help me decide

Should I buy an iPod or Amazon Kindle

Photos of the Day- Istanbul

See more from the photographer- Neeka

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

Where to Stay in Istanbul

36 Hours in Istanbul

Istanbul: Memories and the City

Assorted Asia News Links

Asia Foundation Blog

ADBI E-Newsline

Stupid working paper titles

Has Inflation Hurt the Poor? Regional Analysis in the Philippines

From Asian Development Bank

Branding

Brand Names Before the Industrial Revolution;

In medieval Europe, manufacturers sold durable goods to anonymous consumers in distant markets, this essay argues, by making products with conspicuous characteristics. Examples of these unique, observable traits included cloth of distinctive colors, fabric with unmistakable weaves, and pewter that resonated at a particular pitch. These attributes identified merchandise because consumers could observe them readily, but counterfeiters could copy them only at great cost, if at all. Conspicuous characteristics fulfilled many of the functions that patents, trademarks, and brand names do today. The words that referred to products with conspicuous characteristics served as brand names in the Middle Ages. Data drawn from an array of industries corroborates this conjecture. The abundance of evidence suggests that conspicuous characteristics played a key role in the expansion of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution.

Related;

Generals also Lobby

DCI Group- Lobbyists for Myanmar in DC

DCI Group is a strategic public affairs and global issues management firm. We use a campaign-style approach to help corporations, trade associations, and nonprofit organizations address their most critical communications and public policy challenges.

Not Related;
MCC Signs Largest Compact to Date ($698m) with Tanzania

No Mystery about Property Rights

International Property Rights Index

Turkey Fact of the Day- Legal Aid

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

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

Movies and GDP

The 1976 classic, directed by Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro as the bitterly alienated protagonist, gave the world De Niro’s catchphrase “You talking to me?,” and also introduced a young Jodie Foster. But what does it have to do with the world economy?

John Hinckley, the deranged would-be assassin who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981, claimed that he was inspired by it. He said that his action was an attempt to impress Foster. (The movie features a scene in which a mohawked De Niro attempts to assassinate a politician.)

According to Mundell, the wave of sympathy for President Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Due to this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Professor Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed.

“Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP,” Mundell told delegates. “It’s the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5 trillion and $15 trillion of output to the US economy.”

-The Travis Bickle Effect

The Library of Nineveh

History podcast of the Day- The Library of Nineveh;

In 1849 a young English adventurer called Henry Layard started digging into a small hill. It was on the banks of the River Tigris in Northern Iraq and underneath it was the ancient city of Nineveh.

Layard found extraordinary things - wonderful carved reliefs, ancient palace rooms and great statues of winged bulls. He also found a collection of clay tablets, broken up, jumbled around and sitting on the floor of a toilet. It was the remnants of a library and although Layard didn’t know it at the time, it was one of the greatest archaeological finds ever made.

Further reading;
John Malcolm Russell, Sennacherib's Palace Without Rival at Nineveh (1991)

Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods (University of Chicago Press, 1992)

John Curtis and Julian Reade, Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum (British Museum Press, 1995)

David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (Henry Holt & Co, 2007)

Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination and Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (Heinemann, 2003)

Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 2001)

R. MacLeod (ed.), The Library of Alexandria, Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (I B Tauris, 2000) {despite its title, includes essays on other ancient libraries too}

Olof Pedersén, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East, 1500-300 BC (CDL Press, 1998)

James Raven (ed.), Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ISBN1403921199)

The Economist who became an Accidental Actor

Danny Glover

Obamatopia and more election humor

The Golf Sacrifice

In a rather obsequious and fawning interview with the US newspaper Politico and Yahoo News, Bush disclosed that he was enjoying a game of golf in August 2003 when he got word that the United Nations building in Baghdad had been bombed.

Bravely, Bush decided to make what in his mind he no doubt considered a major sacrifice: He put his clubs away for the duration.

"I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," Bush said.

The Race Card

The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,
Richard Thompson Ford

The black guy is a looter, a gangbanger, a stone-cold Crip out for an easy score. Isn't that a boom box in his hand? Oh, wait, it's a pack of diapers. The white couple: Jeannie and Jean Valjean, driven by adversity to take a loaf of bread, no doubt to feed their small children who are, unfortunately, just outside the frame. I bet they even left their names and telephone numbers and a note apologizing.

The Perfect Storm

Safia Ali, mother of five, has not eaten in seven days. Her 1-year old son, Farhan, has fallen ill.

The consensus now is that all the same elements of the early 1990s — high-intensity conflict, widespread displacement and drought — are lining up again, and at a time of the biggest spike in global food prices in more than 30 years. The United Nations says 2.6 million Somalis need assistance and the number could soon swell to 3.5 million, nearly half the estimated population. If there is excellent rain or a sudden peace, the crisis may ease. But weather projections and even the rosiest political forecasts do not predict that.

-Famine Looms as Wars Rend Horn of Africa

Politics in America

Photo of the Day

A tunnel through mountainous northwestern Kyrgyzstan

NAMA

A simple guide — NAMA Negotiations

Non-agricultural market access negotiations

Blog of the Day

burning bridge- current affairs from volatile areas


Not recommended for the faint-hearted
burma channel - images of Nargis

Law Book Recommendations

Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges
by Antonin Scalia , Bryan A. Garner

How Judges Think
by Richard A. Posner

How Supreme Court Justices Think

Justice Scalia: Be Likeable and Avoid Contractions
Good advice- especially don't start a fight with comedians (the video is not office safe)

Related;
Persuasion

Moyers - 'Democracy is a story of narrow escapes'

Moyers on Democracy
by Bill Moyers

Related;
Broadcasting Legend Bill Moyers on the 2008 Elections, the Rev. Wright Controversy, the Media, Vietnam and More

What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries

In Weak Rivets, a Possible Key to Titanic’s Doom;

Researchers have discovered that the builder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday.

The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic and two sisters, the Olympic and the Britannic....

Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed.

Each of the great ships under construction required three million rivets that acted like glue to hold everything together. In a new book, the scientists say the shortages peaked during the Titanic’s construction.

“The board was in crisis mode,” one of the authors, Jennifer Hooper McCarty, who studied the archives, said in an interview. “It was constant stress. Every meeting it was, ‘There’s problems with the rivets and we need to hire more people.’ ”

Apart from the archives, the team gleaned clues from 48 rivets recovered from the hulk of the Titanic, modern tests and computer simulations. They also compared metal from the Titanic with other metals from the same era, and looked at documentation about what engineers and shipbuilders of that era considered state of the art.

The scientists say the troubles began when its ambitious building plans forced Harland and Wolff to reach beyond its usual suppliers of rivet iron and include smaller forges, as disclosed in company and British government papers. Small forges tended to have less skill and experience.

Adding to the problem, in buying iron for the Titanic’s rivets, the company ordered No. 3 bar, known as “best” — not No. 4, known as “best-best,” the scientists found. Shipbuilders of the day typically used No. 4 iron for anchors, chains and rivets, they discovered.

So the liner, whose name was meant to be synonymous with opulence, in at least one instance relied on cheaper materials.

Many of the rivets studied by the scientists — recovered from the Titanic’s resting place two miles down in the North Atlantic by divers over two decades — were found to be riddled with high concentrations of slag. A glassy residue of smelting, slag can make rivets brittle and prone to fracture.

“Some material the company bought was not rivet quality,” said the other author of the book, Timothy Foecke of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency in Gaithersburg, Md.

The company also faced shortages of skilled riveters, the archives showed. Dr. McCarty said that for a half year, from late 1911 to April 1912, when the Titanic set sail, the company’s board discussed the problem at every meeting. For instance, on Oct. 28, 1911, Lord William Pirrie, the company’s chairman, expressed concern over the lack of riveters and called for new hiring efforts.

In their research, the scientists, who are metallurgists, found that good riveting took great skill. The iron had to be heated to a precise cherry red color and beaten by the right combination of hammer blows. Mediocre work could hide problems.

“Hand riveting was tricky,” said Dr. McCarty, whose doctoral thesis at Johns Hopkins University analyzed the Titanic’s rivets.

Wine Library

tv.winelibrary.com

Related;
Bottoms Up | Wine Guru Gary Vaynerchuk