George Washington on leadership

Be realistic about politics

Dear Sara:

Thanks for writing. I often say, quite sincerely, that I'm not cynical about politics; I'm realistic about politics.

If a stranger knocks on your door and tells you that he or she is here for the express purpose of helping you, of serving you, of making your life better -- not because of anything that he or she will gain by doing so, but because he or she believes in your goodness and knows that you deserve more than you have -- what would you think? Would you give this person the benefit of the doubt, and trust that he or she really and truly is motivated chiefly and overwhelmingly by a desire to serve you?

Would you continue to give this person the benefit of the doubt on this score when he or she informs you that, to help you, he or she must have the power to tax you and to take away some of your liberties? When he or she assures you that, by some mysterious process, he or she "feels your pain"? When he or she modestly exclaims that those other persons standing on your porch ready to make pretty much the same offer cannot possibly care about you as much as he or she cares about you -- cannot possibly have sufficient skill, determination, and wisdom to improve your life; that only he or she possesses these qualities?

Would that benefit of the doubt continue to be given when you learn that, should you decide to trust this stranger with some of your wealth and your liberties, he or she will get lots of prestige and acclaim and applause simply because he or she holds power over you?

And would you persist in giving this person the benefit of the doubt when, should you ask probing questions about his or her motives or about inconsistencies you believe to have spotted in the plans he or she laid out for helping you, he or she suddenly begins dissembling or speaking in platitudes or vague generalities, or launches into stories of his or her past glory in some endeavor or other that has little to do with the power that he or she now seeks from you?

I suspect, Sara, that should such a person arrive at your door and deliver such a spiel to you that you'd quickly slam the door in his or her face, convinced (and correctly so) that that person is either an utter goofball or a supremely arrogant busybody. You'd want nothing at all to do with him or her, and if he or she persisted in knocking on your door you'd call the police or your bouncer-friend Bubba to escort this obnoxious person as far away from your home as possible.

So, if you'd not give such a person the benefit of the doubt, why in the world are you surprised that I don't give Barack Obama, John McCain, or any other successful politician you care to name the benefit of the doubt?

Sincerely,
Don Boudreaux

The Plight of Dalits

There are about 200 million Dalits, or members of the Scheduled Castes, as they are known officially, in India. They remain socially scorned in city and country, and they are over-represented among India's uneducated, malnourished and poor.

Yoga for bloggers

Yoga for Computer Users: Healthy Necks, Shoulders, Wrists, and Hands in the Postmodern Age

How to dog-train your kids

One of the best TED talks;


The Anti-Cesar Millan

Sirius Dog Training, as Dunbar called it, showed proven positive results from early off-leash training. His classes, and the resulting video, were embraced by trainers and owners alike. Many say Sirius spurred the demise of punitive, punishment-based training that was the vogue after World War II. In 1993, Dunbar founded the Association of Pet Dog Trainers whose mission is to promote better training through education.

The return to dominance training such as Millan's, Dunbar says, is a disservice to dogs more than anything else. Though Millan gets results, Dunbar notes that most people don't have Millan's strength or skill, and even fewer keep dozens of dogs. "I teach methods that a supervised 4-year-old can use," Dunbar says. Having been called as a witness in high-profile Bay Area bite trials -- he was one of a team who evaluated one of the dogs involved in the deadly attack on Diane Whipple in 2001 -- he is all too familiar with the violent underbelly of dog aggression. Fear, he underscores, doesn't train a reliable dog.

Claudia Kawczynska, editor of Bark magazine, is one of Dunbar's many fans. "It's irritating to see Millan treated as the expert. Ian is an animal behaviorist with decades of experience," she says, "He should be where Millan is." Kawczynska likens the Millan cult of personality and popularity to the anti-science, anti-academic sentiment she sees prevalent in American culture and politics. "Millan lived on a farm, so what? He's good looking, but he's not smart about dogs. It seems people don't want their experts to be educated."

Dunbar refuses to comment on whether his lack of profile is due to his weighty credentials, though a Millan fan on Gladwell's blog says the backlash against the Dog Whisperer is "because Malcolm had written about the unschooled Millan rather than a string of PhDs that the average person has never heard of -- and never will."

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Not ready yet?

He Is ‘Ready to Be President,’ Bill Clinton Says;

“Barack Obama is the man for this job,” Mr. Clinton says.

“Barack Obama is ready to lead America,” he says, a line that brings the conventioneers to their feet. And here’s the money quote: “Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.”

Assorted Nudge

Cass Sunstein: for the Homer Simpson in all of us (podcast)

Sometimes, What’s Needed Is a Nudge

Guiding Forces

Tuaregs of Niger

Tuaregs

Assorted Podcasts

Shakespeare Studies with Stanley Wells

What do Greta Garbo, Madonna and Napoleon have in common? Why Glamour, Darling!

Lipsky, Lanman Discuss European Central Bank's Challenges

Makin, Fischer Discuss Market Regulation, Global Economy

Credit Crisis, Risk Management Assessed One Year Later

Levy, McCulley, Lipsky, Lanman Discuss Economy, Fed

Roberts on the Price of Everything

Blog of the Day

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

City at the end of Time

Go Fug Yourself

Finding the "Ultimate Blogs": An interview with Sarah Boxer

Blogs- a book review;

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture
compiled and edited by John Rodzvilla, with an introduction by Rebecca Blood

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
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Republic.com 2.0
by Cass R. Sunstein

Blogwars
by David D. Perlmutter

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove

We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Lawin the Internet Age
by Scott Gant

Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World
by Hugh Hewitt

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture
by Andrew Keen

Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, foreword by Tom Peters

Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture
by David Kline and Dan Burstein

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US Agriculture


American Education

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The Private Armies of Iraq

The market value 100 billion dollars;




Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq
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Private Sector, Public Wars: Contractors in Combat - Afghanistan, Iraq, and Future Conflicts (The Changing Face of War)
by James Jay Carafano

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
by Jeremy Scahill

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One in year jail for 79 year old illiterate lady- and electricity was also cut from her apartment.

Meanwhile Chinese youth embrace Communism;

The first rule of politicians

Politicians do what they do to stay in office or come to office

From a debate in 2007, a clip shows Mr. Biden standing next to Mr. Obama. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News queried Mr. Biden: “You were asked, “Is he ready?” You said, ‘I think he can be ready but right now, I don’t believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.’”

Mr. Biden: “I think that I stand by the statement.”

In addition, the McCain ad uses footage from another TV appearance, where Mr. Biden said, “I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off.”

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Advise to the Young Economist

For those of you who have yet to encounter Gordon's scholarship, I urge you to purchase and to read, cover to cover, the 10 volume Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, that I recently edited for Liberty Fund. There is no better education for a young economist aspiring to contribute in the tradition of Virginia Political Economy, no better introduction into the ways of truly creative Renaissance Scholarship.

-Gordon Tullock is Retiring (an alternative title could be Gordon Tulllock is becoming more polite)

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Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it

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CROSSED SWORD PAKISTAN : ITS ARMY AND WARS WITHIN
by Shuja Nawaz

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Gorbachev on Georgia-Russia war

Russia did not want this crisis. The Russian leadership is in a strong enough position domestically; it did not need a little victorious war. Russia was dragged into the fray by the recklessness of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili. He would not have dared to attack without outside support. Once he did, Russia could not afford inaction.

-Mikhail Gorbachev

Kissinger on Kissinger and Nixon

Former U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Henry Kissinger joined CEO Eric Schmidt for a fireside chat at Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters

What would an Obama loss mean?

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Link of the Day

The Massacre Map;

On the night of June 3-4, 1989, troops of China’s People’s Liberation Army moved into Beijing to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that began in April of that year. The number killed remains unknown although estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. The government of the People’s Republic of China insists that the demonstrators were counter-revolutionary criminals. Tens of thousands were imprisoned in the political crackdown that followed.

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Onethousandpaintings

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Onethousandpaintings.com

Trading on the female body

handsoffourovaries

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by Julia Derek

What the future holds for Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda

Shortly after 9/11, a Russian scientist named Dmitri Gusev proposed an explanation for the origin of the name Al Qaeda. He suggested that the terrorist organization took its name from Isaac Asimov’s famous 1950s science fiction novels known as the Foundation Trilogy. After all, he reasoned, the Arabic word “qaeda” means something like “base” or “foundation.” And the first novel in Asimov’s trilogy, Foundation, apparently was titled “al-Qaida” in an Arabic translation.

-A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature

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The battle for peace in Northern Uganda

Podcast of the Day

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Ownership Congestion? Tragedy of Anticommons?

A former World Banker;

Well, I’ve been finding ownership puzzles in a host of disparate places, like waiting around in airports and wondering why we don’t build more runways. Just 25 new runways at our busiest airports would solve most air travel delays. Why don’t we build them? In Europe, for instance, I started thinking about why cell phones work so much better there than here. The answer, in part, is that over 90 percent of our prime spectrum is dead air. Talking to research scientists I asked why we have so many pharmaceutical patents today but so few new drugs that actually help people. My students clued me in to another puzzle: why has African-American farm ownership dropped 98 percent in the last century? And why are so many old television shows, like China Beach and WKRP in Cincinnati, still not available on DVD? Turns out, all of these problems are really the same problem. Private ownership usually creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect – it creates gridlock. Once people see this free market paradox, once we have a shared language for gridlock, we can begin to talk about it and then to fix it...

A drug company executive tells me he may have a better Alzheimer’s treatment. But to get FDA approval and bring it to market, he has to license dozens and dozens of patents relevant to testing for safety and side effects. So negotiations fail and the Alzheimer’s drug sits on a shelf, even though my informant is confident it could save countless lives and earn billions of dollars.

Very few people or organizations are speaking out against this – against the underuse of property rights. Whom do you lobby for drugs that don’t yet exist or for cures that people can’t yet see? Gridlock, that is, resource underuse, is invisible in comparison with overuse – everyone can see the dramatic results of fisheries being depleted or air being polluted. But with wasteful underuse, the effects are almost always hidden. So when drugs, wireless services, DVDs, and runways go missing, we don’t really have champions ready to set it right. The flip side of gridlock is that it’s one of the great entrepreneurial and political opportunities of our era....

The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives, Michael Heller

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Symmetric Tragedies: Commons and Anticommons
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The End of Suburbia

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Who would you hire- an economist or a psychologist

Charlie Rose asks some of the best macroeconomists;

'If in fact you just simply want to make a lot of money,.. would you rather have a mind that is brilliant about the economy or would you rather have a mind that is brilliant about understanding human psychology'

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Bubbles, entry in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

Lectures and Talks

Reviving the Invisible Hand: the case for classical liberalism in the 21st century

Principles and Practice of Global Economic Governance
Prof. Jose Antonio Ocampo, former UN Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, currently Professor in the Professional Practice of International and Public Affairs at SIPA, Columbia University

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Prof. Douglass C. North

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Democracy and Autocracy in Eurasia: Georgia in Transition

Finance in East Asia: from crisis to integration - challenges of second generation reforms

Good Governance
Prof. Jobst Fiedler, Associate Dean, Hertie School of Governance

A discussion about the Federal Reserve
Markus Brunnermeier, Wei Xiong, Harrison Hong

The Price of Political Connections

To illustrate our approach in action, let’s take a trip to Indonesia and turn the clock back to 1996. Former President Suharto, who by then had ruled the country with an iron fist for nearly 30 years, would be forced to step down a few years later. However, in 1996, Suharto’s government still exercised tight control over the economy: The president decided who could get loans, log for timber, build toll roads, or import rice. In other words, he decided who would make money and how much. If ever there were a time or place where we’d expect the market to place a value on connections, this would be it.

But the aging dictator was in poor health. And because none of his kids or cronies was seen as a capable successor, any leader who followed Suharto would be unlikely to honor (or enforce) the cozy business relationships established under his rule. Any threat to Suharto would translate into a threat to the value of connections, and bets would be placed accordingly.

And indeed, Indonesian investors didn’t disappoint. On July 4, 1996, the Indonesian government announced that Suharto was traveling to Germany for a health checkup. That may not sound like much, but who travels 10 time zones to get his pulse taken? Investors at the stock exchange were inundated with rumors that Suharto had already suffered a stroke or heart attack. The Jakarta composite index, an indicator of Indonesian stocks’ overall performance, much like New York’s Dow Jones Industrial Average, fell 2.3 percent on the day of the news.

What was merely bad for Indonesian stocks turned out to be devastating for well-connected companies. One such firm was Bimantara Citra, a media conglomerate run by Suharto’s son, Bambang Trihatmodjo. In the weeks leading up to the July 4th announcement, both the Jakarta exchange and the price of Bimantara Citra bounced around a bit, not gaining or losing very much value. Then, with the market awash with rumors in the first week of July, Bimantara’s stock price took a nose dive. The prospect of the company without its connections had shareholders dumping their stock and running for the exits, driving its price down more than 10 percent in just a few days, obliterating about $100 million of its value. (As the chart shows, Bimantara starts its steep slide even before the announcement, probably reflecting early selling by those with close ties to the Suharto family or his doctors.)

One can just imagine what would have happened to Bimantara shares if the 75-year-old Suharto had died suddenly. In fact, our estimates, based on stock returns during a number of Suharto health scares, suggest that a complete severing of Suharto connections would have resulted in a 25 percent loss for similarly well-connected companies. How much is 25 percent of a company’s value? When Apple announced its iPhone to great fanfare in 2007, its shares went up 8 percent; when Pfizer was unexpectedly forced to withdraw its bestselling antibiotic Trovan in 1999, its shares fell 10 percent. So, connections in Indonesia were worth a lot more than a blockbuster new drug or the next big technology gadget—or even both of them combined.

Of course, Suharto’s government was considered one of the most corrupt dictatorships of its time, so we should not make generalizations based only on its extreme example. Luckily, researchers have since created market-based measures of political connections in many other countries. Mara Faccio, an economist at Purdue University, has measured the value of political connections for nearly every country with a well-functioning stock market. She has followed the political careers of business tycoons (and the business careers of politicians), traced bloodlines to detect family ties, and read the society columns of local newspapers to track who dines with whom. Her conclusion? Close political-corporate ties exist in nearly every country. In Russia, fully 87 percent of the Moscow stock exchange’s value is in companies with close Kremlin connections. Maybe this isn’t such a shock in the unruly capitalism of post-Soviet Russia. More surprisingly, nearly 40 percent of the London Stock Exchange is politically connected.

-How Economics Can Defeat Corruption by Raymond Fisman, Edward Miguel

Nigeria's child 'witches'

Obanomics

A conversation with Austan Goolsbee- Charlie Rose show

Podcasts

John Taylor on Monetary Policy

El-Erian Says Banks Face Harder Time Raising Capital
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The Stuff of Thought with Steven Pinker

Georgia revisited

Confessions of a subprime lender

Chinese repression of Falung Gong


Paying to be permanent
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Objective truth
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Uprootedness and national conflicts
he French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil identified the basic human need for roots as crucial. Uprootedness and disapora in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have shaped the narratives about the past and the future on both sides. Jonathan Glover, a Professor of Philosophy at King's College London has been in Australia to deliver the annual Simone Weil lecture on human value

The Wallace-Darwin papers on biological evolution - 150 years ago

Lung transplant
Australia has one of the highest success rates in organ and tissue transplantation, but it also has one of the world's lowest donation rates. About 3,000 Australians are on the official organ and tissue transplant waiting list and 20% of the people waiting for a heart, lung or liver transplant will die before they receive one. ABC journalist Phil Ashley Brown met a patient 20 minutes after she received the good news that she would get new lungs and he follows her progress through the transplant and recovery


Picture this!
Images by the illustrator and author Shaun Tan adorn the Children's Book Council's advertising for this year's Book Week (16-22 August, 2008). Reflecting on his fascination with both writing and painting, he reveals his thoughts on visual literacy and about creating an intimate distance between words and pictures.

Meet Terry O'Neill

Terry O'Neill with Riz Khan