As  Labour puts the finishing touches to its election manifesto, sources familiar with the process say that a new big idea is taking shape. The proposal is to extend the concept of  “earned autonomy” in public services  down to individuals.  Labour plans to put every citizen who has completed full-time education into prison.   Citizens will then be able to earn their way out, by getting a job and using their spare time for voluntary service to the community. When they demonstrate that they are not terrorists, and when they can prove that they do not have any kind of mental illness that predisposes them towards a crime, they will move first to an open prison from which they can get a job, and eventually to their own homes.   People close to Ministers say that they have been impressed with how well this approach has worked with asylum seekers, who start off imprisoned until they can demonstrate their value to society, and think that this approach would be popular in seats where Labour is alarmed by the rising popularity of the British National Party.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a minister familiar with the details of the manifesto said:

Hard working families will welcome these steps.  Honest, law abiding citizens have nothing to fear. Where individuals demonstrate the capacity and capability to do more we want to work with them to test how greater individual control can deliver more effectively and more efficiently.  We want a new relationship between the citizen and government, one based on a partnership approach to delivery. It is not sufficient to say that citizens should have more control and freedom; this is a partnership and citizens need to be clear as to what they are asking us for, and how changes will benefit everyone.   We are ready to cede control where individuals can demonstrate that they will use those freedoms effectively, but greater control must be balanced with responsibility and accountability.

Owen Barder
1 April, 2010

As well thiking it was the wrong decision in principle, I worried that a company that says one thing (“Don’t Be Evil”) and does another will eventually suffer from the contradiction between their values and their actions.

So I applaud their announcement today that they are taking a new approach in China and their threat to pull out of the market.

(Ironically, Google’s own blog is censored here in Ethiopia. You cannot access blogspot blogs.)

Google is standing up to dictatorship and speaking out for free speech, and putting this ahead of their immediate commercial interests.

It is hard to imagine other companies standing up for their – and our – values in this way. (Can you imagine Microsoft withdrawing their Bing search engine instead of producing sanitized results?)

Bloggers are quick to criticise when companies do the wrong thing.  So let’s be equally unstinting in our praise when they do things right.

Good on yer, Google.

The most important step in his argument is the first one.   Wolf says:

I, for one, have no difficulty with arguing that immigration is a privilege, not a right. Most people agree.

The assertion that “immigration is a privilege not a right” seems to me to be the wrong starting point.  I would begin with an opposite premise that seems to me to be much more basic and compelling:  “The burden of proof rests on those who would restrict human freedom.” If someone wants to move from one part of the planet to another, to live and work and raise their family, then we ought to have a very good reason before we set up a system to stop them.

To construct his argument, Martin Wolf wants us to believe both the following claims:

1. Immigration has a negative impact on the existing population; and
2. We ought to pay more attention to the interests of the existing population than the interests of the migrants.

On the first leg of this argument, Martin Wolf (under the guise of “calling for a debate”) claims that immigration is harmful to the economy, environment and society of the existing population.  As it happens, I don’t agree with any of this, though since that is not the point I want to focus on, I shall restrict myself to pointing to the economic and social success of countries that have been open to large-scale immigration.   But while I think the first leg of the argument is wrong, it is the second leg of the argument that I most want to challenge.

I doubt if anyone would seriously contest the view that even if if immigration causes some harm to the existing population, this harm is in total is far less than the very significant benefits to the migrants themselves.   So the case for restricting the freedom of people to live where they choose can only be made if you accept that we should pay more attention to the interests of the existing population than to the interests of the migrants.

There is no question that it is a widely-held view that we should give more weight to the interests of the existing population.  For example, Wolf says:

My view is that the interests of the existing citizens are of decisive weight, though we should also place some weight, too, on the interests of immigrants.

Perhaps I was born with faulty wiring, but I simply do not understand this view.

I believe we should give equal weight to the rights and interests of every human being. The idea that the interests of people born in our own country should weigh more in our moral calculus than the interests of people born elsewhere is, in my view, indefensible.  To say that we will less attention to the interests of another human  because they happen to have been born far away is organised racism, directly comparable with the pass laws under apartheid.

The United States Declaration of Independence asserts:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence does not limit its assertion of equality to people born within a single country. Nor is the pursuit of happiness bounded by national borders created by man. (This is just as well, as in the period following US independence one third of Europe’s population migrated to the Americas.)

Of course, the view that we should give equal weight to the interests of all human beings is unlikely to get very far in political systems designed to represent the interests of the citizens within existing borders.  But just because a political system makes it possible to ignore the rights and interests of a group of people who are weakly represented in it does not mean that it is morally right to do so.

My view is that the burden of proof lies with those who would restrict the freedom of people to live anywhere they choose.   This argument would require, at minimum, weighing up the costs and benefits of a restriction to show that we are better off in total if we curtail this freedom.  A case could only be made by placing more weight on the interests of the existing population than on the interests of other people.  I understand that there is a a widely-held view that we should do exactly that, but I nonetheless think it is profoundly wrong.   When we weigh up the argument for a policy to restrict people’s freedom based on the benefits that such a restriction will bring, we should place equal weight on the rights and interests of all people, and not privilege the interests of some people who happen to be like ourselves.  The case for restricting immigration rests on denying the equal humanity of people born abroad.  I hope that, over time, we will come to see this with the same moral outrage as we now view slavery and apartheid.

When I was a teenager, I visited Berlin, and read the grafitti on the Berlin Wall that said “No wall can stand forever”.  Now on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we look back with horror at the way the wall was used to keep people in.  Perhaps in another twenty years we will look back with equal disgust at the walls we build today to keep people out.

The transcript of the briefing by US officials on Air Force One going home from Gleneagles says different.

Looking back at the successes of previous governments, we remember mainly the institutions they built as their lasting legacies. Lloyd George gave us national insurance; Clem Attlee gave us the National Health Service. We don’t remember Andrew Bonar Law much, because he built nothing. Harold Wilson famously cited the creation of the Open University as his greatest achievement.

This Government’s most notable institutional changes have been devolution, the independence of the Bank of England and the partial reform of the House of Lords: planned in opposition and implemented soon after the 1997 election. In Government, the PM has taken the view that the priority is to put in place the right people to take the right decisions. I think this is a manifestation of New Labour’s philosophy that they would go with “what works”. They would govern with pragmatism, not ideology; and that meant appointing the right people and getting on with it rather than constructing effective and long-lasting institutions that might limit their discretion.

In that context, the Prime Minister’s speech on 27 January in Davos made interesting reading, because it is all about the need for more effective international institutions:

This is my major reflection on 10 years of trying to meet these challenges, 10 years in which, as a deliberate policy, Britain has been at the forefront, for better or worse, of each of these major global issues. Interdependence is an accepted fact. It is giving rise to a great yearning for a sense of global purpose, underpinned by global values, to overcome challenges, global in nature.

But we are woefully short of the instruments to make multilateral action effective. We acknowledge the interdependent reality. We can sketch the purpose and describe the values. What we lack is capacity, capability, the concerted means to act. We need a multilateralism that is muscular. Instead, too often, it is disjointed, imbued with the right ideas but the wrong or inadequate methods of achieving them.

None of this should make us underestimate what has been done. But there is too often a yawning gap between our description of an issue’s importance and the matching capability to determine it. … Global purpose, underpinned by global values requires global instruments of effective multilateral action.

This emphasis on the need for more effective multilateral institutions is both right and important. As the world become more interdependent, there are more and more choices that we need to make collectively. These include the provision of global public goods, collective security, and mechanisms to ensure that the benefits of globalisation are fairly shared so that progress can be sustained. As I think the Prime Minister is now saying, if we do not have legitimate and effective institutions to take these decisions, we will find that we have no way to meet these needs and aspirations, nor to resolve the world’s tensions.

Britain has quite a specific long-term interest in this too. We are witnessing the rise of new world powers such as China, India and Brazil. I personally welcome this, though there is a lot of angst around about what it means for us. One thing it almost certainly means is that in 20 years time, Britain will no longer be a major world power with the same amount strategic influence at the most important forums such as the G8 and the Security Council. If and when that happens, we will depend on the existence of effective multilateral institutions to protect our interests, and those of other middle-ranking powers. It seems to me that we should be using the power that we have today, while we still have it, to put in place those institutions and build them up so that they are effective and legitimate in the future. That is a legacy for which future generations in Britain may well thank us.

Two weeks in Club La Santa in Lanzarote. Feeling fitter, more tanned, and (oddly) a little heavier than when we left.

Food miles are useless. There is no doubt that transport intensity in the food supply system has been increasing – driven by forces of globalisation, consolidation in retailing, larger shops with more choice meeting demand for year-round supply, car-based shopping etc. But “food miles” are barely useful in capturing or articulating any of this interesting complexity.

Absolutely.

“I was literally hung out to dry by Tony Blair”

It seems he said the same to the Scotsman.

I find it hard to believe that he was literally hung out to dry. Metaphorically, perhaps?

You would think a former head teacher would know what ‘literally’ means.

Over the past couple of years there has been a growing consensus that conditionality does not work.  … It has failed because imposing good policies on countries that don’t want to do them just results in countries taking the cash and then not doing the agreed policies. … Instead of conditionality, the approach should be to set minimum levels of governance and anti-corruption that countries must attain before receiving budgetary support – those countries are likely to absorb the money well and pursue good policies, thereby not needing the conditionality.

This is exactly right. (It is also what I argued in a presentation I gave in a meeting at the Africa Centre in December 2001, what the British Government set out in its policy paper of March 2005, and which I described at greater length here in December 2005.)

Alex goes on: 

DFID currently pays lip-service to governance, but in practice just writes the cheque. In countries where money is likely to be misspent by government, that is a mistake. Instead money should be spent through local, domestic NGOs, and through other bottom-up mechanisms like aid vouchers.

I don't agree at all that DFID only pays lip-service to governance.  DFID has just published an entire White Paper about Making Governance Work for the Poor.   It has recently reallocated its aid in both Uganda and Ethiopia in response to concerns about governance.  That is why DFID refuses to give budget support in countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. 

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, writing in the current edition of The Lancet (pdf), have analyzed how funding provided by aid donors through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization has raised the percentage of children receiving the combined diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine between 1995 and 2004.

This independent assessment of the effect of GAVI on DTP3 coverage shows that GAVI has contributed to increased DTP3 coverage in countries with baseline DTP3 coverage of 65% or less at their first approval for GAVI funding. We estimate the cost to GAVI to be about $8·40–20 per additional child immunised. This estimate is close to the proposed cost to GAVI of $20 per additional immunised child.

Once again, immunization has been shown to be one of the most cost-effective interventions in development. 

The Africa program will begin with a relatively small Gates contribution of $100 million over five years, plus $50 million from Rockefeller, to fund development of more robust disease- and drought-resistant seeds for primary African foodstuffs, enhanced distribution networks for seed and fertilizer, and university-level training for African crop scientists.

The green revolution in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s – building on research started in the 1940s – transformed food production, incomes and kick started the industrialization of Asian economies.  That too was the result of an investment by the Rockefeller Foundation, who commissioned Norman Borlaug to work on developing new wheat varieties and managing education campaigns to get the new varieties to farmers.  Since 1970, wheat yields in India and Pakistan have grown ten-fold. 

If the Rockefeller Foundation and Gates Foundation can repeat that success, it could make a very significant contribution to Africa’s future economic development and industrialisation.

Via: Pienso. More via the Gates
and Rockefeller
foundations

To be a liberal does not mean shrugging your shoulders at those who loathe you and hoping that somehow everyone will get on. A world divided between Christian bible-belt fundamentalists, powered by US military and oil interests, and Islamist Qur'an-belt fundamentalists, ruled by misogynistic mullahs, is a bad world, period.

Quite so.  But let's be clear: the battle of ideas is not between Christian and Islamic religions and cultures. The real battle of ideas is between rational, reality-based thought and religions of all kinds.

Reports reaching this press indicate that the consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture is a "square peg in a round whole" and yet still he is there, receiving thousands of dollars while our brothers and sisters who are more qualified are earn less than a million leones per month.

The objectives of technical assistance are noble; the execution is dismal.  Even before Elliot Berg's landmark report in 1993 we have known that the expert-counterpart model of long term ex-patriate  technical assistance is generally neither effective nor good value for money.  In no other walk of life do we try to train people by parachuting in an expert to do their job for a couple of years. You do not learn skills by watching over someone's shoulder: you learn through a combination of on-the-job training, coaching, mentoring, and formal structured training courses.  So why is that not the way we should provide technical assistance?

A fifth of all aid – some $20 billion a year – is currently spent on technical cooperation of various kinds (though much of it may not be spent on this sort of technical assistance).  About 40% of US aid is spent this way.  Some – perhaps a lot – of this money is wasted.  We know that this approach to technical assistance is not generally effective, and yet we go on doing it, presumably because the development-industrial complex is too powerful for us stop. 

The transfer and sharing of knowledge and skills is a very high priority for development.  Technical cooperation has an important role to play.  But we need to do it much better.

Full disclosure: I myself was an ex-pat technical adviser in an African country for two years.  I know of what I speak. 

HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. "It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds.

It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents," the ministry said.

And The Register reports that  the education ministry is far from convinced that this is a good use of funds:

The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as "paedagogically suspect". Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."

The Indian Government is asking the right questions: Is this really the best use of $100 per child? Why is this right for developing countries, but not being rolled out in industrialized countries?

Like many others, I am perplexed by the determination of Nicholas Negroponte, whom I admire, to make this new laptop only available to large-scale government purchasers.

Donor countries have committed themselves to increase aid to developing countries by 60 percent over the next five years; and larger increases would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But there are concerns that there may be a limit on the amount of aid that developing countries can absorb and use effectively — and that large aid flows might even be harmful. Could a large increase in aid be “too much of a good thing?”

In this essay, CGD Senior Program Associate Owen Barder disentangles the seven possible reasons why additional aid might not be effective. These include microeconomic effects (e.g. transactions costs), macroeconomic effects (e.g. ‘Dutch Disease’) and the impact on political economy (e.g. the ‘Resource Curse’). The paper looks at each possible constraint in turn.

The paper finds that there are indeed serious obstacles to effective use of increased aid, but than none is immutable. All of the constraints which limit the effective use of additional aid can be addressed by a relatively small set of practical improvements in the way that aid is provided and used. Donors have already committed themselves to a significant program of aid reform. If the measures to which donors are committed were consistently implemented, the seven constraints to effective aid absorption could be relaxed.

The paper concludes that, provided that increased aid is accompanied by reforms to the way aid is delivered, the capacity of developing countries to absorb and use aid should not be presented as a barrier to the increases in aid which would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The issue is simple: should internet service providers be under an obligation to carry all network traffic without discrimination? Those in favour of net neutrality say that such a requirement is needed to protect the open, innovative nature of the net. Those against net neutrality say that market forces will ensure continued innovation and that legislating this requirement will stifle investment in new broadband services.

This is not about the ability of internet service providers to charge consumers more for faster, high-bandwidth connections; they have always been able to do this.  It is about whether the ISPs can enter into arrangements with particular content providers to give their data preferential treatment as it travels through the net.

The cable and telephone companies want to be able to charge content providers.  Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T, said this:

Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

Of course, the problem with this argument is that consumers already pay for the cost of those services, in rough proportion to the amount they use them.  What the telephone companies want is something more: they want to be able to share in the value created by content providers.

None of us likes the idea of government regulation of the internet, which has grown and propsered largely on a self-regulating basis.  If the network providers faced significant competition, there would be a strong case for letting the market decide.  But they don't: telephone and cable companies have legally backed monopolies, and without net neutrality they will be able to use their market dominant position to extract a share of rents earned by value-added content providers such as Google and Yahoo.  Cable and telephone companies have a product – the network – which is increasingly a low-value commodity, with surplus capacity, and they are keen to use their market power to grab a share of the value being created upstream.

Tony Wu at Columbia University, described the danger in graphic terms:

it's just too close to the Tony Soprano vision of networking: Use your position to make threats and extract payments. 

In other words, without net neutrality the service providers will in effect be able to extort protection money from every content provider, by threatening to slow or even block the websites and services of their competitors or those who refuse to pay up.

One of the great successes of the internet has been that it is a 'dumb network' – that is, all the 'thinking' is done by machines at either end. The network just carries the data from one place to another, irrespective of what it is.  This property facilitates innovation – Tim Berners Lee, for example, was able to invent the protocol that underlies the web, and Dave Winer could invent RSS feeds which underpin blogging – without needing to persuade anybody who operates the network in between to support their new service.  Without net neutrality, this disappears. The network itself will treat different sorts of data differently, so it will be harder to innovate and add new services that compete with existing products.

If we allow Big Media and Big Entertainment to buy up the internet, we will all lose out.  Bloggers will find their traffic is in the slow lane relative to the news output of the large media corporations.  New internet startups will not be able to compete against incumbents because they won't be able to afford the ticket onto the superhighway.  

But the prospect of larger monopoly rents is a powerful motive. The phone companies are spending tens of millions of dollars lobbying against net neutrality. On the other side is a coalition which is non-partisan and which brings together large companies, NGOs, lobby groups, bloggers and most of the people who care about the future of the internet.  Companies such as Google, Microsoft,  Amazon and EBay (not always natural bed-fellows) have joined together with groups as diverse as MoveOn.org and the Christian Coalition of America to campaign to protect net neutrality. 

The news today is not good:

In a dramatic tie vote Wednesday, a U.S. Senate committee rejected an amendment that would have preserved the status quo of equal pricing for all Internet traffic, an issue known as network neutrality.

But all is not yet lost:

The amendment that failed was part of a larger telecommunications bill that passed the committee and now heads to the full Senate. A similar amendment could be reintroduced into the larger bill before that vote.

in my view this is significant issue. If you like the internet without big business being able to use its financial strength to keep the little guy out, you should care about this.  If you don't act now, please don't complain when the net is taken over by big corporations. 

So what can you do? The Save the Internet Coalition has a handy list of seven things you can do if you want to protect net neutrality. 

the job of the intellectual is to confront faith.

I admire Hitchens for his advocacy of secular, scientific and rational thought.  (He calls himself a "anti-theist" rather than an atheist.)

Many people of faith regard it as important to try convince others of their ideas.  (In some faiths, that is an essential activity of a believer.)  The rest of us tend to be passive: after all, we believe in freedom to worship.  But this creates an asymmetry: people of faith try to convert others, but those of us who do not believe do little to try to balance the argument.  I am with Hitchens in thinking that we have to do more to confront faith.  We should explain the origins of the supersitions that underpin religions, and use scientific evidence to challenge the claims.  Unless we take on the argument, we risk losing it by default.  Religion is not harmless, like astrology or Harry Potter books: it is a significant cause of conflict and individual tragedy.  

A the Hay on Wye Festival last year, Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchen discussed the proposed blasphemy laws. You can download an MP3 (lasting 78 minutes) of their discussion here. (Thanks to Dave Hoatson for recommending this.)

I do not regard this as a purely personal choice: I would readily vote for a political party which was committed to making it a criminal offence to eat an animal for pleasure. 

Even so I would have no hesitation in eating an animal if my life depended on it. To say that animals have rights is not the same as saying that they have the same rights as humans.  (I would also have few qualms about a group of people killing and eating a fellow passenger in a shipwreck if there is no other way to survive.  Rights can be trumped by other rights.)

I believe that the qualitities that attract moral consideration – essentially, consciousness and especially self-consciousness – are present in many animals but are more significant in humans than in guinea pigs and rats. I believe that a human being has a more signficant claim on our moral attention than a guinea pig.

I today signed ‘The People’s Petition‘ supporting the use of animals in medical research in the UK.  The petition says

‘I believe that medical research is essential for developing new medical and veterinary treatments.  I understand that finding safe and effective treatments and medicines requires some studies using animals. 

I believe that medical research using animals, carried out to the highest standards of care and welfare, and where there is not alternative available, should continue in the UK.

I believe that people involved in medical research using animals have a right to work and live without fear of intimidation or attack.’

I do not support animal testing for cosmetics.  But I believe that the good to mankind of medical research far exceeds the harm done to animals.  I understand that animal models are not perfect measures of the risk and benefit to humans, but they are not, as the critics would have us believe, useless. They provide essential information that saves millions of lives and reduces suffering and disability. Even as a committed member of the vegetarian jihad, I therefore support the controlled use of animal testing.

Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The American dream is a reality for many immigrants who not only increase their own living standards but who also send billions of dollars of their money back to their families in their home countries—a form of truly effective foreign aid.. America is a generous and open country and these qualities make America a beacon to the world. We should not let exaggerated fears dim that beacon.

Economists from any political background are invited to sign. I agree, of course, and have emailed to say so (though I am far less eminent than many of the economists who have already signed up.)

Personally, I would go further. My sympathies are with Chris Dillow, who argues for free immigration.  He makes this interesting point:

I’m not saying here that immigrants should have rights to welfare benefits. They have a liberty right to live where they like, not a claim right upon our money (ta, Norm).  I suspect most hostility to immigration is based upon the failure to see this distinction.

Here is the text.

Dear President George W. Bush and All Members of Congress:

People from around the world are drawn to America for its promise of freedom and opportunity. That promise has been fulfilled for the tens of millions of immigrants who came here in the twentieth century.

Throughout our history as an immigrant nation, those who are already here worry about the impact of newcomers. Yet, over time, immigrants have become part of a richer America, richer both economically and culturally.

The current debate over immigration is a healthy part of a democratic society, but as economists and other social scientists we are concerned that some of the fundamental economics of immigration are too often obscured by misguided commentary.

Overall, immigration has been a net gain for existing American citizens, though a modest one in proportion to the size of our 13 trillion-dollar economy.

Immigrants do not take American jobs. The American economy can create as many jobs as there are workers willing to work so long as labor markets remain free, flexible and open to all workers on an equal basis.

Immigration in recent decades of low-skilled workers may have lowered the wages of domestic low-skilled workers, but the effect is likely to be small, with estimates of wage reductions for high-school dropouts ranging from eight percent to as little as zero percent.

While a small percentage of native-born Americans may be harmed by immigration, vastly more Americans benefit from the contributions that immigrants make to our economy, including lower consumer prices. As with trade in goods and services, the gains from immigration outweigh the losses. The effect of all immigration on low-skilled workers is very likely positive as many immigrants bring skills, capital and entrepreneurship to the American economy.

Legitimate concerns about the impact of immigration on the poorest Americans should not be addressed by penalizing even poorer immigrants. Instead, we should promote policies, such as improving our education system that enables Americans to be more productive with high-wage skills.

We must not forget that the gains to immigrants from coming to the United States are immense. Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The American dream is a reality for many immigrants who not only increase their own living standards but who also send billions of dollars of their money back to their families in their home countries—a form of truly effective foreign aid.

America is a generous and open country and these qualities make America a beacon to the world. We should not let exaggerated fears dim that beacon.

I’ve been a long-time advocate of budget support, as I think it is a very important way to reduce some of the possible negative impacts of aid, such as undermining the systems of recipient governments, and reducing their accountability. It is good that the anecdotal evidence on which the policy is based has been backed up by this more comprehensive, rigorous and independent review.

I’m a bit surprised by the OECD press release about the evaluation (pdf) which is much more nuanced about the findings than the evaluation report itself (5Mb pdf here).

Hilary Benn, the UK development minister, was more effusive:

Mr Benn said Britain provided 25% of its aid directly to governments and, in addition to boosting health and education spending, there had been better management of public finances, greater transparency and more effective coordination between donors. …

The development secretary said he reserved the right to stop donating to  governments that failed to meet expected standards of governance and human rights. Britain has cut off aid to Ethiopia and Uganda over alleged human rights abuses, and in Zimbabwe the UK is
prepared to back only specific projects, such as HIV/Aids assistance.

See also the BBC report here.

Asked if the Prime Minister had sanctioned a peerage to Peter Law, the PMOS said that it was not only a party matter, but also, as people knew, the PMOS did not talk about the nomination process for the House of Lords.

The House of Lords are our legislators, for chrissake. They make our laws. And the official spokesman of the person who chooses them is not allowed to talk about the process for putting them there?

Except that I did not say what is attributed to me.  The excellent Neil Hall said it, in the comments to my post.

I’m aware of one person who clearly stated before the war that he believed that Saddam had no WMDs. That was Scott Ritter. This is not the same as saying that we didn’t know for sure, or should have waited some more; or that containment could have worked for a few months or years longer. I mean: an anti-war commentator, writer or speaker who clearly said that Saddam had no WMDs before we invaded and that therefore the war was illegitimate.

Robin Cook, in his resignation speech as Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom on 18 March 2003:

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the
commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device
capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It isn’t just hindsight.  

Global deaths due to measles fell by 48%, from 871 000 in 1999 to an estimated 454 000 in 2004, thanks to major national immunization activities and better access to routine childhood immunization …

The largest reduction occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest burden of the disease, where estimated measles cases and deaths dropped by 60%.

Tell that to people who say that aid does not work.

While America has been run by one of the most doltishly ineffectual governments in history, it has forged ever further ahead of Europe in terms of wealth, science, technology, artistic creativity and cultural dominance.

Why does America’s prosperity and self-confidence seem to bear so little relationship to the competence of its government? The obvious answer is that America, founded on a libertarian theory of minimal government, has always had low expectations of politicians.

This much is true. But he completely fails to provide evidence to support his main conclusion:

American politicians may be incompetent and venal, even by European standards, but this is not true of the public realm as a whole. America has a host of public institutions, ranging from government bodies such as the Federal Reserve and the National Institutes of Health to charities such as the great universities, museums and hospitals, that are driven by a sense of public service that puts British and European bureaucracies to shame.

The American system recognises that a capitalist economy has areas of market failure where incentives alone will not produce socially desirable results. But American public institutions try to maximise private activity and incentives, rather than rein them in, within their realms — whether it is universities encouraging professors to start businesses, or health administrators creating incentives for drugs companies to do medical research.

So is Kaletsky right that America has a quasi-public sector run on private sector principles and which produces better results than European nations?

Let’s look at his example of the National Institutes of Health.  This is a public sector body in America, not a private sector body (unlike, say, the Wellcome Trust in the UK).  Furthermore, the people who I know who work there say that it is like any other public sector bureaucracy. It is true that the US has more success in medical R&D than Europe, but then the US spend more than twice as much on R&D as Europeans (much more, in the case of medical R&D).  Furthermore, it isn’t just the private sector that spends more: the US taxpayer spends twice as much on R&D as the OECD average for government spending, even as a share of GDP.  The reason the NIH gets good results is that they have a budget of $29 billion a year – all of it taxpayer dollars.

So what does the NIH example prove? Not Kaletsky’s proposition that the US has successful, semi-private bodies providing public services.  All this shows is that some public sector bodies can produce good results if you give them enough money.

More commonly, the trend in the US that Kaletsky describes of America’s reluctance to build effective public institutions has led to significant failures, which were brutally exposed by Hurrican Katrina.  From health care to broadcasting, America’s distrust of institutions that are socially funded and managed by public servants who are accountable to government has left gaping holes in its social fabric.  Not, as Kaletsky would have us believe, a system of genius.

First, Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s Senior Policy Counsel, posted this explanation of their decision.  He says that this was a difficult judgement, but that Google wanted to

provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people

and, crucially, that

Filtering
our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer
Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however,
does so far more severely.

Second, my Dad, Brian Barder, posted this comment which argues for constructive engagement:

The best policy for dealing with authoritarian states which impose
censorship and other illiberal restrictions on their citizens is almost
always to encourage them to open up by maximising their contacts with
the outside world.

Finally, this debate was picked up by MatGB, who quotes my father’s argument and adds:

The more people in China are exposed to the rest of the world, the more likely that change will come

The premise which underlies all three of these arguments is that the result of Google’s decision to establish their google.cn service is to provide citizens of China with more access to information than they would have had otherwise, albeit censored according to rules set by the Chinese Government.  Then, it is argued, the benefit to the Chinese people of the increased information might justify the collaboration with Chinese censorship that is required, because this greater openness encourages China to open up and maximise contacts with the outside world.  Some contact, even if constrained, is better than none.

But the premise is false.  The result of Google’s decision is not an increase in the amount of search information available in China. From inside China, it used to be possible to access the main Google search engine in Chinese at http://www.google.com/ig?hl=zh-CN  It is true that some of those searches were blocked by the Great Firewall of China, and the user received an error if they searched on "Tianamen Square".  Most searches were not blocked.  Now that google.cn has been established, anyone trying to access google.com from a Chinese IP address is redirected to the censored search engine.   So the effect of Google’s decision to establish google.cn has not been to increase the amount of information available to the Chinese people; it is merely that Google now does the work of the Chinese government by censoring the searches according to the same rules.

It is therefore a barefaced lie for Andrew McLaughlin to claim that the alternative to establishing google.cn was "Failing to offer
Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population".  As he  knows, there was an alternative in place, namely a Chinese language search on Google’s US servers, sometimes filtered by the Chinese Government. 

If it were true that the censored google.cn search engine provides more information than the old google.com searches as seen through the Great Firewall, then Google might be able to defend the justification that this is a form of constructive engagement.  Even then, there would be a balancing act required to judge between the good of somewhat better access to search results against the harm of collaborating with Chinese censorship.  But google.cn does not provide search to people who were otherwise denied it; it just makes the experience of having your internet searches censored a bit more slick and less obvious.

Google’s decision was not motivated by the hope that it would make China more open, because it won’t.  It was a purely commercial decision, based on Google’s desire to curry favour with the Chinese authorities, the need to recruit China’s talented and cheap engineers in the future, and  the fear that they will lag behind other, less principled companies in building market share in China unless they begin to build their brand and market share today. 

What could Google have done instead?  They could have supported and promoted anonymous web proxies outside China, such as Tor, so that users in China could have had uncensored search results.

I agree with Andrew Shieh at Stanford, that if Google is to continue to censor search results on behalf of the Chinese Government, and if their goal is more openness, then they should take the following steps:

1. The minimum that Google must do is to show the "Local regulations prevent us from showing all the results" disclaimer on the top
   of the search results, rather than hiding it away on the bottom.
   Everyone who is receiving censored search results deserves to know that
   the results are tainted.
2. In addition to the disclaimer, Google.cn could promote anonymous web browsing proxies such as Tor, so users in China can view the uncensored web rather than the filtered and often deceptive results that Google.cn displays.
3. Google
   could further expand the disclaimer, by describing precisely what
   criteria are used to remove sites from the Google.cn search listings.
   If Google is filtering sites based on government regulations, it
   shouldn’t be afraid to show us the criteria it is using. I’d personally
   like to see a list of sites that government regulations are forcing
   Google to remove; it would be far more interesting than Wikipedia’s list of terms blocked by search engines in China.

4. Google
   should continue to allow users in China to access the Google.com site,
   rather than forcing China IP addresses to be redirected to Google.cn.

Of course, they won’t do any of these, because despite the fine intentions attributed to them by my father and MatGB, and despite their own protestations, their goal is not to open China to more information, it is to build a closer relationship with the Chinese authorities to secure the future of their business there.

Executives from NBC in New York confirmed yesterday what many industry-watchers had been expecting and its admirers dreading. They intend pulling the plug on the programme for good when its current season – the seventh – ends in May.

I am enjoying BBC’s The Thick of It, a kind of a cross between Yes, Minister and The Office which has just transferred from digital to terrestial TV, but Hugh Abbot won’t take the place of President Bartlett. 

It is almost enough to make me oppose term limits.  At least for fictional presidents …

The proposed extradition treaty was signed on March 31, 2003 by US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and the British Home Secretary David Blunkett. It was transmitted by the President to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in April 2004, and was considered by them on 15 November 2005. The Committee hearings were held in private and no transcript has been published, so we don’t know exactly what happened, but it appears that the Committee declined to vote on the treaty. This is a major problem for the passage of the treaty, as the the full Senate cannot consider the treaty until the Committee has approved it.

Opposition to the treaty in the US is based on fears that it removes the exception for political offences, allows for extradition even if no US law has been broken, removes any statute of limitations, applies retroactively, and allows the UK authorities to try a person for an offence other than that for which he or she was originally extradited. The  failure of the Committee on Foreign Relations to vote on the treaty is the result of opposition from American Civil Liberties Union (which probably doesn’t matter the Republican-controlled Senate) and from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other Irish-American organisations (which probably does matter).
If the treaty removes liberties from US citizens it do so even more from people under the jurisdiction of the UK. Under the existing 1972 treaty, the US has to produce evidence sufficient to make a case to answer under UK law, whilst the UK has to satisfy a “probable cause” test for extradition from the US. (These are broadly similar in effect: the requirement for prima facie evidence is probably a little more onerous than the requirement to show probable cause.)  Under the new treaty American prosecutors no longer have to provide prima facie evidence in order to extradite a citizen from the United Kingdom. Article 8 of the treaty only requires the US to provide a statement of the facts of the offence only. By contrast, Article 8.3(c) of the treaty requires UK prosecutors to supply information in an extradition request providing a “reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offence for which extradition is requested”.

Unlike many commentators on this treaty, I don’t think the main problem with it is lack of reciprocity. There are precedents for extradition treaties to contain provisions which are not entirely reciprocal (for example, different countries have different arrangements for the treatment of their own nationals in extradition proceedings). The problem with this treaty is that it removes the liberty of a person not to be extradited without the presentation of evidence, at least in respect of extradition from the UK.

The treaty has had to be asymmetrical because the US Bill of Rights protects US citizens:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

As a result, the US cannot agree to extradite to foreign countries unless the requesting country produces evidence on which it bases its request.   However, the UK Bill of Rights offers no similar protection, and so the UK Government has had no qualms about signing 47 extradition treaties (including with Russia and Albania) which permit extradition without requiring prima facie evidence of wrong-doing.  And that is the problem with this treaty.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the US takes a very broad view of its extra-territorial jurisdiction, as we have seen in recent cases of financial crime. This can result in extradition being sought by the US where the alleged offence was committed in the UK, the alleged victim was in the UK, the relevant documents and witnesses are in the UK, and the defendants whose extradition is sought are resident in the UK. If this treaty is ratified, the US authorities will be able to extradite people whom they consider fall under their jurisdiction, without providing any evidence, even if the legal authorities in the UK do not consider that a crime has been committed or that there is sufficient evidence to prosecute here.

This treaty may never be ratified if the Irish lobby is successful in convincing the Senate that the treaty will allow IRA sympathisers to be extradited to the UK, where they cannot be sure of facing a fair trial.  But the real problem here is that the Government has quietly given away, in this treaty and many others, the right of British citizens not to be forcibly removed to another country without the presentation of some evidence against them.  That is why this treaty should not be ratified.

Youssou N’Dour became well-known outside Senegal after his collaboration with Peter Gabriel, formerly of Genesis, in the mid 1980s. He had popular success in Europe with "Seven Seconds", a big hit in 1994 with Neneh Cherry.

He has faced some criticism in recent years that his career has moved too far from its West African roots, and pandered too heavily to pop tastes in rich countries. The fast and furious mbalax (Wolof word for rhythm) rhythms that made him famous with his  first album, Immigrés, have been less and less in evidence in his recent work.

N’Dour recorded his latest album, Egypt, more than five years ago; but it has only just been released (delayed, in part, by the events of September 11, 2001.)  The album is a homage to the caliphs and saints of Senegal’s mystical ‘Sufi’ version of Islam.  The music draws from the largely Arab and middle Eastern tones of the streets of Cairo.  He worked with Egyptian musician Fathy Salama. On the album he does not sing a single work in English, though he did one song in English during the concert.

Egypt is an amazing combination of N’Dour’s voice with the drones of Egyptian reed instruments, the sweeping violins, cello and bass, and twittering African flutes. All the music is performed accoustically.  The power of N’Dour’s voice, with its enormous range, is much in evidence, and he demonstrates a more subtle touch than his earlier work.

You would be disappointed if you were expecting the foot-tapping, hip swaying mbalax rhythms of N’Dour’s youth. But it is music to bring the world together, combining Arab melodies, North African rhythms and West African vocals.

One admirable feature of Youssou N’Dour’s work, and part of the reason for his enduring popularity in Africa, is that he continues to make cassettes and albums specifically packaged and targeted at the African market.

Tim Worstall argued at the Adam Smith Institute blog that:

…  British Airways allows passengers, for a modest sum, to offset the carbon emissions from their flight. Roughly 1 in 200 actually do so, which would, on a strict reading of people’s preferences, mean that 0.5% of the flying population are prepared to pay more to avert climate change.  … There really is a large difference between how much extra people say they would like to pay for things and how much extra they actually will pay. Probably has something to do with why taxes are usually mandatory rather than voluntary I suppose.

And in the comments, Patrick Hubble wields the intellectual stiletto that punctures Tim’s bubble:

Surely if asked the question, ‘would I rather pay more tax / pay more to save the environment / etc,’ a ‘yes’ answer means ‘yes, if everyone else does’, not ‘yes, I’m prepared to be a mug whilst everyone else freeloads on my generosity (stupidity)’. 

That whistling sound you hear is a bag of hot air deflating. 

What the hard line libertarians don’t get is that some choices only make sense if we make them collectively.  Individually we would – rationally – make choices that lead to outcomes that are irrational for us collectively; and that is why we establish systems to enable us to make choices together.  Government is such a system. The fact that people would choose differently if they were making an individual choice is not an argument against government, it is precisely the reason why we need it.

See more at my Vaccines for Development blog. 

It was clear that, whatever her merits as a person, Harriet Miers was not suitable for a lifetime appointment to a Court for which qualifications include a sharp legal mind, intellectual rigour, and an ability not only to make decisions but communicate the reasons for them.

In the United States, the process of Senate approval can weed out unsuitable nominees.  Admittedly it doesn’t always correct the Administration’s mistakes, but the fact that the system exists, and that it is not toothless (a Republican-led Senate having refused to approve the appointment by a Republican White House of John Boulton, and leading to the withdrawal of Ms Miers) forces the Administration to think considerably harder about who it is going to nominate.

In the UK, we don’t have proper scrutiny of the thousands of appointments made by the Government, generally by the Prime Minister under Crown prerogative.  We should.

However, the reason the Miers nomination failed was not only that she was not suited for the job, but because the appointment failed to secure the support of the conservative base, by virtue of whose support President Bush governs. In his current difficulties I suspect that he will be tempted to throw them some red meat, by the nomination of a conservative. We may yet wish that Harriet Miers had been confirmed.

I assume the aim was to bring on a crusty retired diplomat to make a fool of himself by arguing for the absolute necessity of diplomatic immunity to enable diplomats to park with impunity, drink and drive, molest small children and so on. If so, they failed. Though I am admittedly biased, I thought he did very well explaining why diplomatic immunity makes sense, how it is limited (by the ability to expel a diplomat who flouts it) and why the US Embassy in London is wrong to try to avoid the congestion charge.

But don’t take my word for it: here is an MP3 file (2.9Mb) which you can download and play on your computer (or iPod) with the interview.  Alternatively, for the rest of the week (only) you can hear the whole programme here.

Update: See Brian Barder’s blog entry for details of why diplomats, even American ones, should pay the congestion charge.

One of the more significant risks of running on trails in Northern California is that there are Mountain Lions.  You hardly ever see them; but they do occasionally attack, kill and eat joggers, so they are best avoided if possible.

So we were somewhat alarmed to stumble across a mountain lion on a remote trail in Harbin, near Calistoga, on Saturday.   

The guidebooks say you should look it in the eye, make yourself appear as big as you can (for example, by opening your jacket and waving your arms), make a loud noise (“holler”, as they say here) and generally try to intimidate the poor creature.  Apparently if you turn your back, crouch, or run away, you will be deemed weak and you are likely to end up as cat food.

Fortunately, we didn’t need to do any of those.  The lion saw us long before we saw it, and decided to head away from the trail.  Which is just as well, because it was much bigger than I expected, and I would not have enjoyed looking it in the eye and yelling.  What would you say to it?

Over at the Center for Global Development, I’ve published a new Working Paper, entitled “Reforming Development Assistance: Lessons from the UK Experience”.

It is actually more interesting than it sounds. Here is the abstract:

The establishment of the UK Department for International Development in 1997, and the evolution of the UK’s foreign aid policies, has provoked international interest as a possible model for other countries to follow.

The UK now combines in a single government department not only the delivery of all overseas aid, but also responsibility for analyzing the impact on developing countries of other government policies, such as trade, environment and prevention of conflict. The department is led by a Cabinet-level minister. It has a remit to articulate the UK’s longterm security, economic and political interests in helping to build a more stable and prosperous world, and to ensure that this long-term goal is considered alongside the more immediately pressing concerns of political, security and commercial interests. It has benefited from a sharp focus on its long-term mission to reduce poverty overseas.

Within a few years, the new Department has established a reputation for itself, and for the UK Government, as a leader in development thinking and practice.

This paper describes the institutional changes in more detail, and considers how they came about. It also considers the steps that will be needed to consolidate its early success.

Link

that Sir Ian Blair may have sought to prevent an enquiry into the circumstances of the shooting of Mr Menezes. If this turns out to be true, then this would indeed be a resigning matter, consistent with my dictum that it is always the cover-up that does you.

Now the Curious Hamster has looked carefully at the letter that Sir Ian Blair wrote that day to Sir John Gieve, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. Curious Hamster notes that the letter reveals that Sir Ian Blair gave an order that the Independent Police Complaints Commission should be barred the scene of the killing, despite knowing that, by law, he was required to supply all information that the IPCC might require. This seems to me rather an important fact.

Remember, it is always the cover up that does you.

a Supreme Court spokeswoman said at the weekend that his health had declined.

Yep, you could say that. 

Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world. Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy. The June 17th presidential elections are sadly consistent with this oppressive record. Iran’s rulers denied more than a thousand people who put themselves forward as candidates, including popular reformers and women who have done so much for the cause of freedom and democracy in Iran.

I welcome this plain talking about the need for democracy. But I would like to see it applied consistently. Where are the strong denouncements about lack of democracy and human rights in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan? (And, even less likely, Israel?) This inconsistency matters because it is difficult to take these criticisms seriously as a principled stand for democracy and human rights when the US ignores similar or worse lack of democracy in countries that it find strategically useful. They just seem to want to pick a fight with Iran.