What is striking about the class of poverty professionals (of whom I am one) is that the good living (granted, not at the billionaire or millionaire level, but pretty good nevertheless) is made through the very process of analyzing, writing, recommending on poverty. To me, at least, this is discomforting and disconcerting. I feel slightly ashamed within myself when I turn up to a poverty conference (perhaps even one where I am the keynote speaker), having flown business class, staying in an expensive hotel and (sometimes) being paid handsomely for attending. I recall many years ago, when I was in my twenties, telling the anthropologist Mary Douglas about how I was starting to do consulting for the World Bank on poverty issues, and how important it was to do this work. “And it’s not too bad for one’s own poverty either, is it?” came her worldly, knowing, reply. The seeds of discomfort sown by that comment have germinated and taken root, and now won’t let go.

Ravi suggests that everyone working in development should reconnect with poverty through a poverty immersion:

each poverty professional should engage in an “exposure” to poverty (also known as “immersions”) every 12 to 18 months. I do not mean by this rural sector missions for aid agency officials, nor the running of training workshops by NGO staff. What I mean is well captured by Eyben (2004); these are exercises that “are designed for visitors to stay for a period of several days, living with their hosts as participants, as well as observers, in their daily lives. They are distinct from project monitoring or highly structured ‘red carpet’ trips when officials make brief visits to a village or an urban slum….”

A friend of mine from DFID did this recently and came back saying how valuable it was.  I am in favour of immersions, though I don’t think it gets close to addressing the problem that Ravi is grappling with.

This reminds me that in March 2008, the Conservative development spokesman (and, since yesterday, the UK Secretary of State for International Development) announced that all DFID staff would be required to undertake a week-long immersion living in a poorer community. Andrew Mitchell said:

These immersions will serve as a valuable ‘reality check’ from the usual round of meetings, paperwork and spreadsheets. It will help keep everyone at DfID focused on their core mission: serving and helping poor people to work their way, sustainably, out of poverty.

I hope that they will implement this proposal now that they are in Government, and I hope DFID’s new Ministers will consider doing an immersion themselves, perhaps during the summer recess.

(via Suvojit)

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.

But it is  less impressive to see people come to this issue only after they themselves need an organ.  I don’t recall Mr Jobs using his celebrity to promote this issue before.

I think it would be a good idea to introduce the presumption that people who register as organ donors will jump the queue if they themselves subsequently need an organ.  Perhaps that would focus some minds.

For the record, if I should die, please use anything that still works; and sent the rest to med school for dissection training or whatever they do.  I won’t care then, and as a person living today I like to think that I might be useful.

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. …

Here in Ethiopia around a third of maternal deaths are the result of unsafe abortions.

Well done to the New York Times for addressing this. Too often this problem is swept under the carpet.

while Ms. Palin is perfectly entitled to believe that evolution is a myth, that women should be barred from choosing to have abortions, and that global warming has yet to be proven, these views all run counter to the views of mainstream America.

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

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

Brilliant.  I've asked for some.

Hat tip: Tim. 

Update: they arrived. Proving that even if there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is such a thing as a free wristband. 

But there is another purpose to giving aid: to redistribute income and consumption from rich to poor.  If aid is taken from people who are quite well off, and used to put food in the bellies of people who would otherwise go to bed hungry, it might have no lasting or measurable impact on the economy, but the world would be a better place as a result of this redistribution.

A new paper by World Bank economists Francois Borguignon, Victoria Levin and David Rosenblatt looks at the impact of aid on global inequality (ignoring, for these purposes, any dynamic effects on growth).  The paper finds that aid does indeed reduce global inequality; and that while it is extremely small in terms of changes in standard inequality measures, it is of some importance for the lowest decile of the world's income distribution. The authors also find that some of this impact is counteracted by trade barriers imposed by high-income countries.

They make this interesting observation: 

Although this paper is about international inequality, we know that the actual level of global inequality of income is extremely high ­ with a Gini coefficient between 0.64 (Milanovic 2005) and 0.66 (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002). If this level of inequality were to exist within a single country, that country would probably experience substantial social strife. That this does not happen in the world simply means that, as of today, there is nothing like a global community.

When writers such as Charles Dickens wrote about the lives of the poor in England and other newly industrialised countries, they made it impossible for society to continue tolerate or sustain the inequality and poverty in their midst.  We desperately need that same realisation for the world. 

Hat tip: PSD blog 

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. 

There are people who believe that a human foetus is a human life with full moral rights and that all abortion is therefore wrong.  That is a coherent point of view, though it is not one that I agree with.  There are those who believe that – at least during the early stages of pregnancy – a foetus does not have characteristics which would confer moral worth sufficient to outweigh the rights of the mother.  That alternative view is also coherent.

What does not make any sense is to say that the moral worth of the foetus depends on whether it is "viable" – that is, whether it could survive outside the womb.  Yet time and again, the abortion debate is argued on this territory.

According to the BBC a Catholic Cardinal has called upon the government to revise the abortion laws on just this basis:

Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor argues that technological advances mean the abortion laws are outdated. Modern medicine can now ensure the survival of some foetuses born before 24 weeks gestation.

This does not make any sense.  If we should attach moral worth to a foetus, it is because of the characteristics it has (e.g because it feels pain or because God has infused it with a soul) or because we attach value to what it has the potential to become.  Whether or not a foetus has moral worth cannot possibly depend on whether scientists have yet developed an effective artificial incubator.   Whether or not a foetus is a bearer of rights does not change over time with scientific progress, nor does it vary between countries according to the state of the health care system.  (Whether or not those rights will in practice be recognized may well depend on these factors.)

Linking the rights of the foetuses to viability is not only sloppy thinking, it is cynical opportunism on the part of the anti-abortionists.  They know that one day in the not too distant future it will be possible for a human egg to be fertilized in vitro and incubated entirely in an artificial womb.  That means that all embryos will be "viable" from the moment of fertilization (it also means that a freezer full of egg and sperm will be "viable" but we will leave that aside).   By linking the moral value of the foetus to viability, they are hoping to make it easier to criminalize all abortions one day. 

We are being asked to abdicate the important moral judgement (what characteristics are sufficient for a living object to have rights that would compete with the rights of the mother?) by asking a different, empirical question (how likely is it that a foetus will survive outside the womb?).  For example, on the BBC's Any Questions this week, Sir Mark Tully (a journalist who is a Christian) said:

I also think that of course it is very important that we do consider the scientific evidence of this as to what actually we are doing when we abort a child, when we reach the stage when really that is that child is beyond any doubt a living being …

I think this is something which has to be left to science very much. I think if people like us or indeed religious leaders or anyone who is an amateur starts actually speculating about that question it's very dangerous indeed.  [my emphasis]

This is clearly nonsense.  Scientists can tell us the probability that a particular foetus might survive outside the womb, or at what stage a foetus is likely to be able to feel pain.  But they are in no better position than anyone else ("amateurs") to form a view about which of these characteristics ought to be regarded as determining the moral worth of the foetus.

Those who oppose abortion should stand their ground on a meaningful claim about the characteristics of the foetus.  If you take the religious view that a foetus has rights because it has been unobservably infused by a transcendental soul at the moment of conception, then say so.   If you believe that the foetus has some other characteristic that give it a moral claim – such as the ability to feel pain, or consciousness – then let's hear what these characteristics are and we can consider together whether we find it persuasive that having those characteristics is a sufficient basis to trump the rights of the mother. 

The religious fundamentalists know that they won't win the argument by saying that a foetus has moral rights because God has entered its soul at conception.   So they try to sidestep the question about what characteristics are significant in determining moral worth by pretending that it matters whether a foetus could survive outside the womb.  That is not the point, and they know it.

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.

One problem with the World Bank is that decisions continue to be made on the basis of "one dollar one vote", reflecting the continuing pretense that it is nothing more than a lending insitution owned by its shareholders, rather than the strategic international institution that it is.

Over on the Center for Global Development blog (CGD is my employer), Ngaire Woods makes a very interesting proposal for the reform of the governance of the World Bank.

… for about 174 members of the Bank, there is little incentive to engage in decisions being made by the Board. Eight Directors can marshal a majority among themselves with little if any consultation with others.

This does not have to be the case. If Directors had to marshal not just 50% of votes (which might be just 8 members), but also 50% of members (92 countries) to make decisions, there would be a clear incentive for to consult and bring on board Directors who represent a large number of countries but wield few votes (such as the two Directors who represent over twenty African countries each yet each wield less than 3.5% of voting power).

This is not a difficult reform. The Bank’s Articles already provide for double-majority voting (Article VIII) for any amendment to the Articles. This could be extended to other decisions. Along with transparency of the Board’s process such as publication of the full minutes of any Board meeting so that countries can read exactly what their Director has said in Board meetings, would be first steps towards a more effective Board.

This seems to me a splendid proposal.  We also need to stop the board from micromanaging every decision taken by the World Bank, focusing instead on strategic direction – perhaps a change like that would help to force the Board to move more "upstream" in its deliberations? 

NB: I’ve disallowed comments on this post here: if you agree (or not), visit the CGD blog and comment there.

But there is another important, and little understood, innovation in the E-Bay model: the second price auction. “Oh, the second price auction”, I hear you cry in unison, “WTF is that?”

In a normal auction, the winning bidder pays the highest price that was bid.  She wants to minimize the price that she will pay, so she tries to outbid the others, but by the smallest amount possible. No sensible bidder will bid more than the item is worth to them – so the highest possible bid is the value to the buyer.  But buyers will generally bid less than the item is worth to them, hoping to win the auction with a bid that is just slightly bigger than the next biggest bid.  In an open outcry auction, the winning bidder stops bidding when the last competing buyer folds – she does not, if she is sensible, continue to push the price up once there are no other bidders. In a sealed-bid auction, each buyer guesses what price the others will bid, and makes an offer just marginally above the highest price they expect somebody else to make. The best strategy is never to bid what the item is worth to you – because you might end up paying too much – but a little above what you anticipate your nearest rival will bid.

A second price auction works differently. The winning buyer is still the person who offers the highest bid; but the price that she actually pays is the amount bid by the next-highest bidder, plus a penny. So the amount that that you pay is de-linked from the amount that you bid.What is your best strategy in this case? Obviously you still don’t want to bid more than the item is worth to you – as you may end up having to pay very close to that price, and you don’t want to pay more than the item is worth to you. But now there is no longer an incentive to bid less than the item worth to you either, because lowering the price you bid won’t lower the price you pay.  If you offer a bid of less than the value of the item, you may end up losing the auction to someone else, even though you could have bought the item for less than it is worth to you. So the rational bid in a second-price auction is to offer what the item is worth to you, no more and no less. This means that bids in a second price auction will be generally higher than in a normal auction, because there is no longer an incentive to hold down your bids below the value you place on the item.

How does this relate to E-Bay? Well, it turns out that E-Bay is a second-price auction. I bought a second hand cell-phone today on E-Bay, to replace my partner’s phone that I lost somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. She wanted a particular model, now discontinued; and it had to be red. Such a phone was being auctioned on E-Bay today. I told E-Bay’s system what
I was willing to pay (which was £50). The phone had reached £30. The automatic bidding system then bid £31 on my behalf. Another buyer had set a valuation higher than this, so the system put in a bid from him; and then the system automatically bid for me. I watched
E-Bay conduct an automatic bidding war until the price reached more than he was willing to pay. At that point, my bid was £36. Presumably, he had set an upper limit of £35.

And so after a few iterations, I got the phone for £36. As it happened, the amount I had to pay was substantially less than the £50 that I had told E-Bay I was prepared to pay (a small investment for domestic harmony). I got it at the price that my nearest rival was willing to pay. My own valuation was higher than the market value because I needed to buy this particular model in this particular colour. Because I know that this is how the E-Bay system works, I had entered my actual valuation into the E-Bay system, and then let the automatic bidding do the rest.

The seller never found out that I would have been prepared to pay quite a bit more for her phone. She got paid the market value of
the phone. If this had been a first price auction, I would have bid about £30, expecting that this would be about what other buyers would have offered. As it happened, I obtained a consumer surplus of £15 (the difference between what the phone was worth to me, and what
I had to pay); and the seller probably got as much, and possibly more, than she would have received in a first-price auction.

Because they sound complicated and counter-intuitive, and because they are hard to administer, second price auctions have not been used much in practice. Some governments have used them to auction spectrum licenses. But for online auctions, they work
brilliantly.

The basics of the E-Bay system was programmed by Pierre Omidyar over the Labor Day weekend in 1995. His insight went beyond
creating a system that reduced transactions costs to enable millions of small raders to buy and sell. It was to use
a very clever piece of economic theory – the second price auction – to enable the market to function efficiently in the interests of both buyers and sellers. Though most of the traders on E-Bay have never heard of a second-price auction, they learn quickly how the system works, and adapt their behaviour accordingly.

• The Earth revolves around the Sun.
• The speed of light is a constant.
• Apples fall to earth because of gravity.
• Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes.
• Elevated uric acid is linked to gout.
• Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease.
• Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels to see whether the patient needs vitamins.

ACTUALLY, I can’t make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient’s test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.

Now I think that Michael Crichton made a fool of himself with State of Fear, which claims that the threat of climate change is merely alarmism. But if he is right on this, then it is indeed something that should concern us.

Rich countries accepted last year that they have a “responsibility to protect” people from genocide and crimes against humanity.  Over the coming weeks our governments must live up to that responsiblity. They must adopt a meaningful mandate for the UN operation that will be taking over form the AU peacekeepers in a few months; they need to supply troops, equipment, logistics and other military support for the AU forces and for the UN peacekeepers; and they need to provide sufficient food, blankets, water and other essentials for the people of Darfur.

Kofi Annan, writing in today’s Washington Post says this:

When I visited Darfur last May, I felt hopeful. Today I am pessimistic, unless a major new international effort is mustered in the coming weeks.

Please write to your MP or write to your Congressional representatives.  Now is the time for us to act.  Please do not be one of those people who passed by on the other side.

I had lunch with Quentin Stafford Fraser, the Executive Director of Ndiyo.

Ndiyo! is a project set up to foster an approach to networked computing that is simple, affordable and open.

The idea is to use very thin clients – basically small enough and cheap enough to build directly into a monitor – to access a central Linux or Windows server, over ethernet or over USB.

Technologies are being developed (see Newnham Research, for example) which could revolutionise the cost of providing computing services, for example in schools, internet cafes, businesses or government departments. Instead of providing each user with a beige box, with processing power, memory and in most cases a sotware licence, each user would access their own account on a central server. The result would be computing that is cheaper and easier to maintain.

I’m much more excited about this than I am about Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop.

Recently, Mr Murray has published a series of confidential documents which purport to show that the UK Government government knowingly received information extracted by the Uzbekistan government using torture. This revelation has caused quite a storm in the blogosphere, including at Bloggerheads and at Daily Kos.

Mr Murray says (and the documents appear to confirm) that he warned the UK Government that information being passed on by the Uzbek security services was torture-tainted. But in a thoughtful post, another former Ambassador, Sir Brian Barder (who happens to be my father) makes an important distinction between using information tainted by torture as evidence in court (which is, and should be, inadmissable) and acting upon intelligence, however obtained, as the basis of further investigation.

As my father says, if our security services get information about a possible terrorist attack they should investigate it further, knowing that information gathered under duress of torture is likely to be far less reliable than information from other sources. That is what Mr Murray says has been happening, and it isn’t obvious to me that it it is either ethically wrong or illegal.

Furthermore, I don’t think UK Government Ministers have ever said that we don’t, or shouldn’t, act upon information even it is has been obtained by torture. So it not clear to me that Mr Murray’s documents demonstrate that the Government has in any way misled us about receiving or using such information.

I suppose it might be said that our willingness to receive and use information obtained from torture somehow encourages the Uzbek government to torture people that they otherwise wouldn’t. But given the nature of that regime, I doubt if it makes any difference to them if we do, or don’t, use the information they provide.

What Mr Murray is surely right about is the need for the UK and US to be much more robust in isolating the brutal, dictatorial regime and putting maximum economic and political pressure for change (read Mr Murray’s comments on my father’s blog for some idea of the nature of the government). It is deplorable that the relationship between the Uzbek government and the US or UK is sufficiently friendly for us to be receiving any intelligence information at all from their security services, let alone doing anything to encourage them to torture people.

So on this precise point, I don’t think Mr Murray is right, as it is not necessarily ethically wrong, nor is it illegal, for our services to use whatever information they can get in the fight against terrorism; and it is not clear to me that our Ministers have ever said otherwise.

A group of K-Stars ran the Silicon Valley Half Marathon this morning. All enjoyed it, and Tomas (1:29:53) and Dave O’Connor (1:24:50) achieved personal records. Christine (1:40:20) won her age group. Grethe ran 1:38:07 and I ran 1:21:49. Andy (1:22:56), Dave and I scored for the team. We were not the fastest team but don’t know if we were in the top three. (Update: we were third team.)

Now for a large breakfast.

In the photo (clockwise): Tomas, Mike (1:55:54), Owen, Andy, John (1:27:43), Dave O’C, Dave P (1:30:02), Christine, Grethe.  Missing from photo Heather (1:42:03 – second in age group).   In the 5km (not in photo) were Janet and Malinda.

Full results here.

I don’t normally bother to cross-post from here, but this is a very interesting paper. 

People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music. I’ve had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn’t commit suicide because of this music…. On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That’s not for rent.

Apparently Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger and not too pleased with John Densmore’s principled stance.

What would Jim Morrison think?

Here are the lyrics from Black Polished Chrome, which apparently Cadillac didn’t want to use:

Someone knew the tv showman
He came to our homeroom party
And played records
And when he left in the hot noon sun
And walked to his car
We saw the chooks had written
F-u-c-k on his windshield
He wiped it off with a rag
And smiling cooly drove away
He’s rich. got a big car.

Jack Straw’s Labour Party Conference Speech, 28 September 2005

At the Millennium Summit two weeks ago, with the UK in the vanguard, major reforms were agreed. New development aid targets; a peace-building commission; a new and more effective human rights council; and, most important of all, a new recognition that sovereign states themselves and the nations of the world as a whole, have a clear “responsibility to protect” all citizens from genocide, from ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

And if this new responsibility had been in place a decade ago, thousands in Srebrenica and Rwanda would have been saved. We would not have had to take action in Kosovo without an explicit UN mandate; and the later divisions over Iraq might (just) have been avoided.

And my pledge to you is to ensure that the fine words on responsibility to protect are translated into collective action.

Sleepless in Sudan - An aid worker diary from Darfur, 29 September 2005

The UN’s aid chief, Jan Egeland, has been making some noise this week about insecurity in Darfur and how unacceptable the situation is getting – close on the heels of similar remarks by the UN’s genocide envoy, Juan Mendez, who visited Darfur recently. …

Any man, woman or child in a typical Darfur town, be it Geneina or Kebkabaya, will tell you that the Janjaweed are still walking through the market with their guns – or jogging through the streets with the military as new recruits, as the case may be. And that the SLA are again rumoured to be on the cusp of launching an attack against one of the major towns soon. And that no, that road is NOT safe to use – you WILL be robbed, possibly beaten and maybe shot if you keep going that way.

What would really be news is if someone actually prosecuted the people behind the violence for their crimes – or, perhaps more importantly, their bosses. Unfortunately, there’s little hope that this will happen in the Sudanese tribunals that have been set up to deal with Darfur. And as the International Criminal Court, the one body who might have an impact on ending impunity in Darfur, sits around and mulls over its options I suppose the United Nations officials will be content with continuing to state the obvious.

As Jim points out, these very simple purported relationships tell us almost nothing.  Proper statistical analysis of the relationship between aid and growth finds a robust positive relationship.

The interview touches on the Government’s draft anti-terrorism legislation, the UN summit, development, Iraq, and Tony Blair’s legacy of reform of public services.

If I have time, I will post soon about the Government’s proposed anti-terrorism laws. In the meantime, I will let the Prime Minister’s words speak for themselves:

let’s be absolutely clear: there will be all sorts of people who say for all sorts of reasons: "look, I understand why the terrorists do it, and you know, you can sympathise with their motivation." Now I happen profoundly to disagree with that, but I am not suggesting that you make that a criminal offence. Er, what I am suggesting should be an offence is somebody who in effect by glorifying is inciting and is saying to people – particularly impressionable people – and we know, look,  that this is a modern phenomenon that we have, this extremism based on a perversion of Islam – is in effect saying to impressionable young people: this is something you should do.

I remain unclear what statements the Government wishes to make illegal. Are there statements which are not incitement, which is already illegal, and which are not merely expressing sympathy with a terrorist’s motivation, which Mr Blair does not think should be illegal. Can anyone think of an example of such a statement?

Credit, though, to BlairWatch, who highlights a recent article in the Guardian.

And to my father, Brian Barder, who resigned from the Special Immigration Appeals Commission in protest at the Government’s attempts to use the immigration system to imprison people without a fair trial (which the High Court subsequently found to be illegal) and whose blog is an essential resource for anyone interested in civil liberties.

And to Tony Hatfield, who continues to plug away on this. 

And to Stephen Grey, a remarkable journalist who has probably done more than any other British journalist to hold the Government to account (see his website, online news article here, radio transcript here, newspaper article here).

And we should acknowledge Kenneth Clarke for raising the issue in his recent speech on foreign affairs. 

Apologies to anyone I’ve missed (let me know in the comments section if there are other great blogs about this.) 

The British Government should not condone, tolerate, participate in or benefit from torture. Full stop.

Thinking about it some more, this seems to be particularly true of some of the greatest musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. Here is my top five list of great singers who can’t actually sing:

1. Bob Dylan
2. Lou Reed
3. Paul Simon
4. Van Morrison
5. Mark Knopfler

Other nominations gratefully received.

It is quite a common perception in America that it stood up for democracy and freedom in Europe.  Just this week, President George W. Bush compared the war in Iraq with the two World Wars

We defeated fascism; we defeated communism; and we will defeat the hateful ideology of the terrorists who attacked America. Each of these struggles for freedom required great sacrifice. From the beaches of Normandy to the snows of Korea, courageous Americans gave their lives so others could live in freedom.

I am not making a point about Republicans: a decade ago Bill Clinton said:

Our people fought two world wars so that freedom could triumph over tyranny.

I am an economist, not a historian, so doubtless somebody will put me right if I have got this wrong, but that isn't how I understand America's involvement in either of the World Wars.  The way I heard it, America was a determined isolationist in the run up to both wars:

• Britain went to war on August 4th 1914 in response to an unprovoked invasion of Belgium.  The US entered the war on April 6th 1917, nearly three years later, following aggression against American shipping by German submarines (and about two years after the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7th, 1915).  
• Britain went to war again on September 3rd 1939 when Poland was invaded. Canada, Australia, New Zealand & South Africa all immediately joined Britain by declaring war on Hitler in 1939, and the United States did not. It wasn't until more than two years later, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 6th 1941, that the United States entered the war. Hitler declared war on the United States, not the other way round. Though some brave and principled Americans chose to join the Canadian armed forces to help fight the Nazis, the US Government  remained officially neutral until it was attacked, and most Americans opposed joining the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor.

What's more, as the third volume of Robert Skidelsky's magisterial biography of J. M. Keynes describes, Britain paid a heavy price for US support. The United States demanded that in return for Lend Lease, which Britain desperately needed to sustain its war effort, Britain pledge itself to abandon any aspirations of post-war empire, dismantle the system of imperial preference and shrink the sterling area to prevent it from competing with the dollar.  Skidelsky describes the way that Washington managed the flow of Lend-Lease supplies which had the effect, and perhaps the intention, of leaving Britain dependent on US help after the war on whatever terms America chose to impose.  And the terms they imposed were not generous.  Did you know that, even today, Britain is still re-paying America for its World War II debt?  The British Treasury still has to write cheques to the US Treasury, year after year, to pay back the costs of fighting the Nazis. (Britain will make its final payment in December 2006.)  Not exactly the behaviour of a close friend and ally, fighting shoulder to shoulder for democracy and freedom.

Of course, I realise that without the help of America, Britain would almost certainly not have won either war; and I pay tribute to the brave American men and women who fought in those wars.  I certainly don't mean to belittle their sacrifice. (And we should also remember that without the superhuman efforts of the Russians, America might not have won the second world war either.)

The way I see it, Britain stood up for democracy and freedom, reflexively and immediately. The United States, by contrast, was dragged kicking and screaming out of isolationism.  When the US join the second world war, several years later, it exploited the opportunity to pursue its global objectives, including making sure that Britain's economic and military power would be sharply reduced, to strengthen America's position as a global power.

Now I don't hold this against America, or Americans, today. All water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned.  I understand the reasons for America's isolationism then, and, as I say, I'm glad they joined the war on our side eventually.  Better late than never and all that. I'd rather they hadn't screwed us on Lend Lease, but let's let bygones be bygones, eh?  But if Americans are going to boast about their involvement as an example of America's commitment to liberty and democracy, then they must expect to be reminded of the inconvenient facts.

I didn't say anything to the man from Mississipi about any of this, as I didn't (and don't) want to be rude to my hosts here in America. I didn't want to have a fight with a big man at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Maybe I've got this all wrong – I'm an economist not a historian. In which case, please put me right. 

Update: have a look at Neil Hall's interesting comment on this post which describes how the United States profited from the second world war. 

changed the process by which public and other governmental inquiries are convened, conducted and, ultimately, reported on, not a single one of which serves the public interest. It does this by taking away from the independent chair of such an enquiry and from Parliament itself, a whole series of rights which have been in place since the 1920′s, rights which the government has now, through its ministers, reserved solely and exclusive to itself.

One of New Labour’s weaknesses, in my opinion, is that they are insufficiently interested in establishing and sustaining institutions that nurture and protect the rights and values that they espouse, preferring wherever possible to grant themselves discretion to act as they choose. This is a myopia that we will come to regret in time.

I agree with this as far as it goes, but it seems to me that there are four categories of reasons why we should help the world’s poor. 

• First, we have a moral duty to our fellow human beings
  Chris covers this in some detail, and I have little to add.  I would, however, particularly endorse the thought that we have just as much responsibility for helping the people of Lusaka as we do the people of Liverpool.   Just because they are further away does not reduce our obligations to them.
• Second, we bear some responsibility for poverty in developing countries
  A part (and only a part) of the reason why there is poverty in developing countries is because of the behaviour of rich countries; and they are part (and only a part) of the reason that we are rich.  I suspect this will be controversial, so I’ll set out a number of reasons why I believe this is true (and you don’t have to believe them all to agree with the conclusion.) The obscenity of slavery deprived Africa of generations of its most economically active young men, and traumatised many communities.  The colonial powers – especially France – benefited enormously from the products of slave labour, such as sugar and cotton. Through the period of colonialisation we exploited natural resources of developing countries, such as minerals and timber, accumulating capital for the colonisers but leaving nothing for the colonised. At the Berlin Conference 1884-1885, the colonial powers drew political boundaries in Africa which did not reflect linguistic, ethnic, historical or geographical boundaries, burdening Africa with deep complications in the governance of nation states.  The European tactics of divide and rule created conflicts in societies that persist today (for example, see Gourevitch’s account of how the Europeans invented a conflict between Tutsi and Hutus, in order to govern the Great Lakes regions; an artificial and recent division which eventually erupted into the Rwanda genocide).  Through the colonial era and in to the Cold War, the rich countries installed and supported dictators such as Mobuto, Mengistu, Houphouët-Boigny, Eyadéma, Traoré, and Banda, because we thought it was in our strategic and commerical interests to do so. Our opposition to the evolution of democratic institutions during the colonial period and Cold War has contributed to the lack of democracy, freedom and good governance that is now recognised as a major cause of poverty in Africa.  More recently, we continue to provide the money which feeds widespread corruption, for example through oil royalties or mineral extraction rights, while our companies refuse to publish details of the payments they make.  (This is not generally true of aid, which is now carefully monitored to ensure that the funds are well spent; but it remains true of the much larger flow of private sector funds.)    And through the emmission of greenhouse gases, it seems increasingly likely that we have contributed to global warming which leads to desertification and the destruction of the habitats and livelihoods of people in the developing world. (I have deliberately excluded from this list the many ways in which things we don’t do contribute to poverty – such as allowing poor countries access to our markets).
• Third, reducing poverty will reduce the risk of bad things happening to us
  We have strong reasons of self interest to fight poverty.  We have seen from recent terrorism that our security is threatened as much by weak states as by strong states.  Growing international inequality contributes to a sense of injustice among young people – for example, the would-be bombers in London on July 21 2005 were from East Africa.  Conflict between and within developing countries is never completely contained, and we sometimes become involved to keep peace or prevent humanitarian disasters. As well as violent unrest and conflict, we are at risk of organised crime, export of drugs, the spread of infectious diseases, and widespread environmental degradation which will reduce the quality of all our lives if we do not tackle it.
• Fourth, reducing poverty will increase the economic opportunities available to us
  It is in our interests to have economically strong trading partners. Rather than feel threatened by the loss of jobs overseas, we have the opportunity to build large and growing markets which, at least in the case of Africa and Europe, are on the doorstep. If conditions improved in developing countries, there would be opportunities for greater trade, cheaper raw materials, and greater economic diversity.

I suspect that the second reason given above will be the most controversial, and I would emphasise that it is only part of the reason why I think we should help the world’s poor.  Each of these four categories would, in my view, be sufficient to make a compelling case.  Taken together, I believe the case is unanswerable.

There is also a debate about who exactly should bear this responsibility.  Some libertarians would argue that it is for private individuals, not governments, to determine whether and to what extent we should help other people.  (See the comments on Chris’s post at Stumbling and Mumbling for some flavour of this argument.)   I think the case for leaving this to individual decision is strongest if the justification for helping others is entirely moral: in that case, you might think we should each make an ethical decision for ourselves.  But if you believe the second, third and fourth category of reason given above, this creates a stronger case for public involvement in aid.  In particular, reducing the risks to us and creating greater economic opportunities are public goods, in the sense that they are non-excludable, and in the absence of government intervention there would be a strong incentive for some people to free ride on the generosity of others, leading to an underprovision of these goods. 

For example, a group of peasants may suffer entitlement losses when food output in their area declines, perhaps because of a local drought, even when there is no general lack of food in the country. The victims would not have the means to buy food from elsewhere, since they wouldn’t have anything much to sell to earn an income, given their own production loss. Others with more secure earnings in other occupations or in other locations may be able to get by well enough by buying food from elsewhere. Something very like this happened in the famous Wollo famine in Ethiopia in 1973, with impoverished residents of the province of Wollo unable to buy food, despite the fact that food prices in Dessie (the capital of Wollo) were no higher than in Addis Ababa and Asmera. Indeed, there is evidence of some food moving out of Wollo to the more prosperous regions of Ethiopia where people had more income to buy food.

In other cases, food prices may shoot up because of the increased purchasing power of some occupation groups, and as a result others who have to buy food may be ruined because the real purchasing power of their money incomes may have shrunk sharply. Such a famine may occur without any decline in food output, resulting as it does from a rise in competing demand rather than a fall in total supply. This is what started off the famine in Bengal in 1943, with urban dwellers gaining from the "war boom" – the Japanese army was round the corner and the British and Indian defence expenditures were heavy in urban Bengal, including Calcutta. Once the rice prices started moving up sharply, public panic as well as manipulative speculation played its part in pushing the prices sky high, beyond the reach of a substantial part of the population of rural Bengal.

What is striking about these cases is that food aid – that is, buying surplus production from rich countries and shipping it to the places where people are hungry – may do more harm than good.  What the poor people need in these circumstances is buying power, to enable them to buy the food that is already being produced but is not available to them.  Food aid may depress local food prices, and thereby cause some harm to food producers and perhaps reduce future production. In these circumstances, it would be better to drop dollar bills out of helicopters than sacks of food.

It seems that we may be in something like this situation right now in Niger.  According to this news report,  there is food in the markets in Niger: the problem is that the poorest people there do not have money to buy it:

Johanne Sekkenes, the mission head of MSF which is mounting the biggest emergency exercise in its history in Niger, says the current emergency could have been avoided. ‘This is not a famine, in the Somalian way,’ she said. ‘The harvest was bad in 2004 and the millet granaries are empty. Yet there is food on the markets. The trouble is that the price of the food is beyond anyone’s reach.

It has been encouraging to hear that there is now some international response to the crisis in Niger. But we we must do so in ways which deal with the real causes of the problem. Too often, our own self interest (we can provide income for our own farmers) combines with an ill-informed set of assumptions about Africa ("they can’t grow enough food to feed themselves") and leads us to support inappropriate solutions.

Hat tip: Ian 

How many of those people now carrying iPods could have told you a few years ago that that was what they really wanted? … in the words of Wayne Gretzky, you want to skate to where the puck is going to be, rather than where it is now. And to do that, you can’t usually rely on the customers. Nor can you relay on the business guys, or the sales guys, or the marketing guys. They’ll learn what the customer wants at about the same time as the customer does. No, to be ready for the future, at least to some degree, you need to be a technology-focused company.

Hat tip: John.

James Surowiecki has an interesting piece in the New Yorker which seems to support the case for aid:

Between 1946 and 1978, in fact, South Korea received nearly as much U.S. aid as the whole of Africa. Meanwhile, the billions that Taiwan got allowed it to fund a vast land-reform program and to eradicate malaria. And the U.S. gave the Asian Tigers more than money; it provided technical assistance and some military defense, and it offered preferential access to American markets. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the two Middle Eastern countries that have shown relatively steady and substantial economic growth—Israel and Turkey—have also received tens of billions of dollars in U.S. aid.

But this anecdotal analysis is no more valid than the opposite argument which was put by Bill Easterly in the New York Times on July 3rd:

From 1960 to 2003, we spent $568 billion (in today’s dollars) to end poverty in Africa. Yet these efforts still did not lift Africa from misery and stagnation.

Saying that we have given aid to Africa and yet Africans stayed poor is not an argument against aid; just as saying that we gave aid to Korea and they got rich is not an argument in favour of it.

As I argued here on June 30th, the question is whether aid makes a difference – and that requires some evidence about what would have happened in the absence of aid. You need to do a proper statistical analysis, controlling for other variables, to establish what difference, if any, aid makes to a country’s growth.

Plenty of studies have been done, and they nearly all find that aid is strongly, positively correlated with sustained economic growth in the medium term. My colleagues at the Center for Global Development did a study which looked at the relationship between aid and growth which finds:

higher-than-average short-impact aid to sub-Saharan Africa raised per capita growth rates there by about half a percentage point over the growth that would have been achieved by average aid flows. The results are highly statistically significant and stand up to a demanding array of tests …

And in a comprehensive survey of all the empirical research on thiark McGillivray at the OECD (pdf file here) finds that poverty would have been much higher in the absence of aid.

I’ve done a series of blog postings on aid effectiveness which set out the compelling micro and macro evidence for the effectiveness of aid. Jim at Our Word is Our Weapon is also a reliable source of evidence-based analysis.

By 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds. …

The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. A further $3.4 billion earmarked by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’. …

The auditors found that the CPA hadn’t kept accounts for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries. …

Both Saddam and the US profited handsomely during his reign. He controlled Iraq’s wealth while most of Iraq’s oil went to Californian refineries to provide cheap petrol for American voters. US corporations, like those who enjoyed Saddam’s favour, grew rich. Today the system is much the same: the oil goes to California, and the new Iraqi government spends the country’s money with impunity.

This is a staggering indictment of the US, UK and other coalition governments.  If even some of this report is true, it should be a resigning matter for the politicians and senior officials responsible.

The money that is missing or unaccounted for dwarfs the alleged impropriety at the United Nations, for which members of US Congress have been baying for blood.

It seems to me that there are three distinct roles for blogs in relation to conventional media:

• first, blogs give a chance for experts to communicate directly, without being intermediated by the media. They can express themselves at length, and impartially without the constraints that inevitably constrain commercial news outlets to simplfy and sensationalize, to be balanced (as opposed to objective); I know only too well the frustration of trying to convey ideas through newspapers and broadcast media, and when in charge of communications for a Government department, often wished that I could speak directly to the readers;
• second, blogs are a way for well-written opinions to be written in the true voice of the author – with passion and personality, rather than adhering to the political position of a commercial news organisation. These are not necessarily written by experts: the value lies in the judgement and eloquence of the commentator; this point is made by Paul Mason, in his very interesting reflections on his experience blogging Live8 for Newsnight.
• third, blogs act as a sort of watchful eye on the conventional media, correcting mistakes, challenging biases both in reporting and ommission, and so helping to raise the quality of journalism. This point is well made by Daniel Glover in a speech to a Heritage Foundation round table.

At least for now, blogs are not replacing conventional journalism. Most blogging is derivative on news reported by the mainstream media – commenting on news, criticising the way it has been reported, and selectively drawing attention to it.  Almost no bloggers engage in the patient investigative journalism that makes great newspapers (think of Bernstein and Woodward, for example); and there is very little primary newsgathering by the blogging community.  Sarah Boxer remarked in the New York Times noted that the Flickr collection of photographs about London were "not about the tragedy itself but about how news is passed."

It is quite remarkable how much blogging is in this third category: commenting on the mainstream media. I’ve been surprised by the popularity of Tim Worstall’s blog, which is sometimes referred to as an influential blog in the print media (how these things come full circle!). Tim has a jovial and popular style, a voracious appetite for the writings of others, and he is never short of an opinion. But the contribution of his blog – and many others like it – is almost entirely based on synthesising and critiquing the work of the traditional print and broadcast press. This type of blogging is no more a journalism than drama criticism is acting. This is not intended to be a criticism of Tim or other bloggers – and the point applies in large measure to my own blog – but an observation on the limits of our contribution.

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."–Theodore Roosevelt.

I appreciate our Attorney General, Al Gonzales, who has joined us today. General, thank you for being here.

Over the last four years, the United States has stood squarely with reformers in Africa on the side of prosperity and progress. We’ve tripled our aid to Africa; we plan to double it once again.

The figures show that from FY 2000 to FY 2005 (estimated), U.S. aid to Africa will have increased by 78% in real terms or 93% in nominal dollars – not quite a doubling, much less a “tripling” of aid. Of this increase, 50% consists of emergency food aid (PL 480 Title II). You can see the full figures here. Second, it isn’t true that aid is only effective when given to good governments. President Bush said yesterday:

Over the decades, we’ve learned that without economic and social freedom, without the rule of law and effective, honest government, international aid has little impact or value. But where there’s freedom and the rule of law, every dollar of aid, trade, charitable giving, and foreign and local investment can rapidly improve people’s lives. (Applause.)

This sounds plausible; but none of the aid-growth regressions find that aid is completely ineffective in poor policy environments, and many of them find that the quality of the policy environment makes little or no difference to the effectiveness of aid. I have no objection to donors choosing to channel their aid to better governments where possible, but they should not mislead themselves or the public into thinking that this is justified by evidence that shows that aid is not effective in badly governed countries, or that it is substantially more effective where policy is good.