From the BBC:
So there you are, the boxes are unpacked and you’re settling in nicely to your new house.
The sunlight dapples through the majestic plane trees, a bird cheeps from its perch on a Victorian lamppost, a bicycle jiggles over the picturesque cobbles.
It all seems worth the stress and the mortgage. But what’s this coming into view? A cavalcade of fluorescent-jacketed workmen is marching up the street.
A chainsaw is applied to a trunk, spades flick cobbles out of the ground, and there’s a mournful screech as your lamp-posts are uprooted. The council has come to nick your street furniture.
Of course, as far as the law is concerned, this isn’t “nicking” at all. Cobbles and lamp-posts do not belong to the street. They’re items the...
Looks like the Globalization Institute, which once upon a time styled itself “Europe’s Favourite Think-Tank blog”, is no more. I guess employing Paul Staines and Tim Worstall will do that for you. Fortunately Alex Singleton, ex of the GI, has not deprived us of his wisdom forever and blogs for the Telegraph here. Good luck to him....
It seems Iain Murray (yes, that Iain Murray) has written a book with the catchy title ‘The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About–Because They Helped Cause Them‘. This handy guide to how liberal environmentalists are destroying the planet explores, among other issues, ‘How Al Gore’s hero Rachel Carson cost the lives of millions of Africans [from malaria] through her efforts to ban DDT’.
Serious, intellectually sceptical econoblogger Arnold Kling is pleased to see such a weighty contribution to the debate and invites us to ponder ‘The total death and illness caused by all of the chemical pollution ever created vs. the death and illness caused by the ban on DDT’. In comments,...
David Leonhardt:
In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.
This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records.
Barbara Ehrenreich:
We say, “There’s something wrong with the economy,” rather than, “I’m getting screwed by the oil companies, the banks, and my employer.” Things get mystified and depersonalized. We say there’s a “recession,” as if were some sort of bad weather, rather than pointing our fingers at the people who brought it down on us...
I think it’s fairly characteristic of Bryan Caplan that he spends this post on the subject of traffic congestion near Washington slagging off the public for their supposed economic illiteracy rather than really thinking about real-world solutions.
The problem, apparently, is that Route 66 heading east into D.C. turns into one long traffic jam as everyone tries to drive into the city at once. The only and obvious solution as far as B.C. is concerned is “Raise the price when demand is high” using road tolls. But alas, Caplan’s wisdom goes unappreciated again, due (again) to the lamentable stupidity, sorry I mean of course the ‘economic illiteracy’ of the public.
Now, I do believe that driving could probably do with being more expensive in America,...
It seems a shame to let pass without further comment this post from The Economist’s Free Exchange blog, which from the tone I’m guessing was written by Megan McArdle of “So where are the Iraqi refugees??” fame. Here is the quote from an interview with Paul Krugman that starts things off:
GQ: I know you’re also concerned about the growing gap between rich and poor.
KRUGMAN: I have spent a lot of time looking back at what happened under FDR, when we narrowed the income gaps between rich and poor through stronger unions, wartime wage controls, and a change in tax policy. We can do some of that. …
GQ: Well, what happens if we let the income gap remain?
KRUGMAN: It’s bad for democracy. The ugliness of our politics is closely tied to...
In comments, Anthony Evans of The Filter has responded to my intemperate assault on critique of Bryan Caplan’s ‘Myth of the Rational Voter‘ arguments, and has simultaneously posted at The Filter an erudite critique of his own. As ever, AJE’s response is as patient and polite as it is smart, something that unfortunately enough probably applies to my writing too.
Anyway. I’d like to tackle the issue of ‘character assassination’ first of all. I didn’t make a point of commenting on Caplan’s character for the fun of it, or just to be hurtful or make a splash. I did it because he puts individual character at the centre of his explanations of poverty and wealth. In ascribing his own success to his own character and the poverty of the poor...
Like the rational consumer I am, I see no reason to buy Bryan Caplan’s new book The Myth of the Rational Voter when there are skimmable summaries available for free online. As I understand it, Caplan’s thesis is that decisions about economic policy are too important to be left to ordinary people, because they are generally too stupid to understand what’s good for them. So democracies should have less influence over economics, and the size of government should be reduced according to the sagacious prescriptions of wise economists such as the author himself, who should perhaps be given some sort of ceremonial robes to wear (okay, I made up the last bit).
Caplan’s prime example is trade. People are too protectionist for their own good, he says, and this is due to...
Johnathan Pearce, possibly the last reality-based Samizdatista, tries vainly to explain to his colleagues and readers that environmentalism is not actually a vast leftist conspiracy:
The fact may be that the planet is genuinely getting warmer and that human activity has helped to cause that. Pollution of the air, seas and rivers is a problem for someone who is polluted. The destruction of ancient woodlands and the loss of flora and fauna is bad.
If this seems to you like stating the blindingly obvious, that is because you are not used to posts like this, which see a proposal that we educate children about climate change as the slippery slope to a Soviet-style police state . This illustrates what Jonathan is up against, and why I think he cannot win: the implications of admitting the...
A right-wing think-tank produces another statistical hodge-podge designed to promote their favourite policies. Nothing new there. But looking at the rankings, I can’t help but notice that in the two supposedly most laissez-faire countries in the world, Hong Kong and Singapore, most land is owned by the state and most (Singapore) or at least a very sizeable proportion (Hong Kong) of the population lives in public housing (albeit not quite as we know it in the UK).
As Sock-Yong Phang says of Singapore, this isn’t quite Georgist land-taxation, but it does capture a good chunk of land rents. And the revenues from leases, which are pretty big, help keep the income taxes which Heritage focuses on so low and thus economic ‘freedom’ so high, as well as making public...
The Adam Smith Institute’s craven attempt at damage limitation following their ludicrous post about climate change seems to be blowing up in their faces somewhat, which is only right and proper. Tim Lambert picked up my post about my comments on Alister McFarquhar’s outlandish claims being deleted and my IP address blocked, and sent a trackback to the original post. Tim’s being a fairly high-profile blog, this seems to have panicked the ASI completely, as they decided there was nothing for it but to delete the offending post and pretend the whole embarrassing affair never happened.
Alas, as Ian Bertram points out, they reckoned without the all-seeing Google cache, which will hopefully preserve McFarquhar’s thoughts on climate change for the enjoyment future...
Usually when Alister McFarquhar of the Adam Sandler Smith Institute trots out one of his posts sowing FUD about man-made global warming, he is careful to avoid making any statements that are actually falsifiable. But in his latest missive on the subject, he makes a claim he might actually have to back up with evidence:
Surveys show two-thirds of scientists either don’t know or don’t believe man can influence climate
That would be quite a result, since it suggests that two-thirds of ’scientists’ don’t know what a greenhouse gas is. And not just one survey, ’surveys‘! I had to know more, so I asked:
Which surveys are those? Can you give a reference?
McFarquhar replied:
Personal communication from ClimateSceptics yahoo group; shows there is no...
Just time to sum up a few things I’ve been too lazy to turn into proper posts before the clock runs out on 2006.
More on FairTrade. Just to follow up my last post on that Economist article about FairTrade, I like the point made by Brad Plumer:
Something in the “free” market was already preventing producers from switching to other crops. Maybe farmers were too poor to diversify. Who knows? At any rate, fair-trade coffee only comprised 1.8 percent of the U.S. market in 2004—a tiny fraction—so it’s hard to imagine that this is the chief thing stimulating overproduction.
And while we’re at it, am I completely crazy to believe that increased demand for FairTrade coffee would tend to decrease demand for non-FairTrade coffee, since they are more likely to...
So apparently I’m out of step with a consensus. A consensus Anthony defines around these words of Owen Barder’s:
Of course, every country should abolish all tariffs, quotas and subsidies, unilaterally and immediately, in their own interests as well as everyone else’s
I’m not so sure it is a consensus (unless Anthony just means a consensus among those who agree with him). Sure, most sensible commentators agree that the US, EU and other rich countries should open their markets, but to suggest that the same goes for every other country, no matter how poor, is nonsense. It’s widely recognised that different principles should apply to the poorest countries.
Why’s that? Well, ask a whole bunch of Third World farmers. Like it or not, a lot them currently...
Here’s Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute on the Thames Water controversy:
No doubt assorted eco-nazis and anti-capitalists will take pleasure in beating up Thames Water over the next few days. The German-owned utility has just announced a 31 percent rise in pre-tax profits to £346.5 million. As every eco-nazi and anti-capitalist knows, profits are a bad thing …
Eco-nazis? Yes, eco-nazis.
If that’s not silly enough for you, try the previous day’s post from Alister McFarquhar, which is so wilfully irrational, smug and deceitful I can only conclude it represents some ASI attempt to terminally stupidise public discourse by demonstrating how scientific language can be used to convey messages which have less than zero scientific merit:
The bad news is that...
As long as they’re unable to get a comments system up and working for more than a day at a time, I suppose I’ll have to keep recording my comments on the Globalisation Institute’s blog posts here. One thing that caught my eye recently was this remark of Alex Singleton’s:
Africa, after all, has received six Marshall Plans of foreign aid and its economy has stagnated
A fine example of Easterly’s Fallacy. In fact, the best available evidence says that the African countries that struggled through the last 25 years or so would have done even worse without the aid they received. After all, it’s not like everything else was going swimmingly in Africa at the time - or has Alex forgotten about the debt crisis, the collapse in commodity prices, the AIDS...
It’s funny, but in almost the same breath that that they have been using to denounce (with what seems to be increasing urgency and even desperation) John Kenneth Galbraith as irrelevant AND a threat to the western civilization AND a commie-lover, the blogosphere’s free-marketeers can’t help but remind me how right he was about many things (though certainly not all) and how relevant he remains.
Take the twin anti-May Day rants unleashed by the Adam Smith Institute and Tim Worstall. First Madsen Pirie informs us without qualification that is only “the wealth-generating power of capitalism” that has improved workers’ lots, presumably as opposed to all that nasty freedom-stifling stuff like paid holidays, maternity leave, workplace safety regulation,...
In “Trade Liberalization and Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa“, Marian Tupy says
[Sub-Saharan Africa] continues to be one of the most protectionist regions in the world … Whereas average applied tariffs in high-income OECD countries fell from 23.7 percent to 3.9 percent between 1983 and 2003 (a reduction of 84 percent), average applied tariffs in SSA fell only from 22.1 percent to 17.7 percent (a reduction of 20 percent).
His source is this table from the World Bank. Scanning it, something struck me as odd: why did Tupy take 1983 as his base year, when there were only three Sub Saharan African countries reporting figures for that year, compared to nine in 1981 (the first year available)? There seems to be no good reason … but wait! If you take the average...
Will Stephens of Samizdata, who seems to specialise in moronic posts linking public spending to genocide, today claims, on the back of some new report from the Globalisation Institute, that millions die every year because of “state failure in water systems”.
In a very limited sense, he’s right, in that if publicy owned water systems in poor countries were fully funded and worked perfectly, then 42% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa would not have to live without access to decent water and nobody would die for lack of the stuff. But in another - more accurate - sense, he’s wrong, because he seems to think that private sector provision is the answer to this problem.
If that were the case, surely we would be seeing private companies scrambling over each other...
Reader Paul Staines (of ‘Global Growth Org‘) has been lecturing me on my manners - apparently my ‘abusive’ tone is dragging down the standard of online discussion. Problem is, I don’t think I feel like taking lessons in manners from someone who, in his other guise as crap blogger Guido Fawkes, got drunk with some other overgrown school-boy and recorded a ‘podcast’ in which they said that Mark Oaten was ‘definitely gay’ and then insinuated that he’s a paedophile. Cos it’s basically the same thing, isn’t it?
So far, so screamingly unfunny, but what was really hilarious was that Paul/Guido then attempted to claim credit for the News of the World’s outing of Oaten as having visited a male prostitute. He also...
Update: this post originally said that the Globalisation Institute blocked a dissenting comment of mine on their criticism of Make Poverty History. That comment subsequently appeared, so I’m happy to withdraw my post....
Over at the Globalisation Institute, Alex Singleton outlines his vision of an “intellectual revolution in international development“. Naturally, he sees himself at the forefront of this revolution, but what’s it all about? Actually, there’s not much to it. Alex thinks that micro-credit schemes are just great, and believes that these and other discoveries about the importance of enterprise-based development should be used to “turn development policies upside down”, starting at the Department for International Development, which is still far too fond of nasty old “top-down” government aid.
I’m not sure if Alex realises this, but DFID seem to be quite keen on micro-credit and other enterprise-based schemes. They just don’t buy...
I know I should spend more time doing serious analysis and less time jibing at free-marketeer think-tanks, but there are two reasons why I don’t: firstly it’s easy, and secondly they keep serving up such irresistable opportunities.
For example, here’s Paul Staines of the Globalisation Institute on corrupt think-tankers who produce ‘research’ to serve the interests of their corporate sponsors:
So how can I get into this game? Maybe I should develop a passionate interest in global warming. The London-based International Policy Network said it’s “a myth”. Ker-ching! It received $250,000 from Exxon for “climate change outreach”. IPN wonks are multi-taskers; they are software experts as well. Free open-source software is, they say, bad for economic...
I had been wondering if any of our free-marketeer friends would even acknowledge the bid-rigging scandal in the construction industry - which, if you’re not familiar with it, involves the Office of Fair Trading finding evidence that “bids for construction contracts worth £500m have been rigged … the scale of the anti-competitive practices could be much greater … more than a thousand contracts in just one region - the east Midlands - had been won this year because of unfair cartel practices”.
It seems I underestimated at least one of them - Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, who has decided that this is simply more evidence of “naïve or incompetent” government, completely ignoring the substance of the story, which has got nothing to do...