Let’s hope this is temporary, but many of characteristics that made America great seem to be in decline.
- an understanding of science as the key to humanity’s future
instead of which we see the President apparently endorsing Intelligent Design being taught in schools, and banning federal funding for stem cell research - leading the world in technology
the US is now 16th in the world in broadband connectivity, and falling rapidly; it has a mobile phone network that has lower coverage than Ghana. - a society built on justice, liberty and due process
now jettisoned in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and the extraordinarily under-reported (with honourable exceptions) policy of "rendition" - Government by the people, of the people, for the people
… now by corporations, of corporations, for corporations. The passage of the energy bill, and a new law to protect gun manufacturers from being sued for the way their products are just the two latest, most egregious examples. - Commitment to free trade
As the China National Offshore Oil Corporation just found out, the US is no longer interested in investment from abroad from countries that the US does not feel fully comfortable with. It is quite hard to see how they will finance their current account deficit without it, though.
What am I missing?
Another paper has been published showing that fructose (a sugar that naturally occurs in fruit), when used as an artificial sweetener, may be even worse than other sweeteners in inducing a hormal response that encourages obesity.
As I explained in this paper, fructose gets a better press than it deserves, because it has a low glycemic index (GI). The reason is not that fructose is a complex carbohydrate which is metabolized slowly, but because the glycemic index measures the impact of food on glucose levels in the blood, and it happens that the human body does not break down fructose into glucose, so fructose sneaks under the radar.
As a result of having a low GI, fructose is sometimes treated as if it is a healthier sweetener than sucrose or other processed sugars, when in fact the evidence suggests the exact opposite. (Many current diet fads, such as the South Beach diet, involve eating foods with a low GI).
Consumption of fructose has increased by 20-30% over the past thirty years, a rate of increase similar to that of obesity. A sweetener called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is used extensively as an additive by the food industry, for example in soft drinks, baked goods such as cakes and muffins, sauces, prepared desserts, and other processed foods such as syrups added to coffees. While the average consumption per person of refined cane and beet sugars has decreased by 35% over the thirty years to 2000, the consumption of corn sweeteners has increased by 277%. High-fructose corn syrup consumption has increased 40-fold from less than 0.5 grams daily per person in 1970 to 53.9 grams daily per person in 2003.
I am increasingly confident that processing of foods, especially the addition of sweeteners such as HFCS, will be "the new tobacco" in years to come, as we come to realise that we have been deliberately and cynically poisoned by the processed food industry.
There were two separate calls today for the creation of two separate $1 billion trust funds:
- A US Council on Foreign Relations task force published a report In the Wake of War: Improving U.S. Post-Conflict Capabilities which calls for the U.S. to push to create a $1 billion multilateral reconstruction Trust Fund to pay for the costs of nation-building (or ‘stabilization and reconstruction’ as it is known in the Pentagon).
- UK International Development Secretary Hilary Benn has called for a $1 billion emergency fund to tackle humanitarian crises, like that currently afflicting Niger, because the current system by which countries make contributions to respond to emergencies "doesn’t work".
A couple of things occur to me about this coincidence:
- What make governments too slow and inflexible to find money quickly if is needed to address short term need like these? These governments have ready access to capital markets, so there is no intrinsic reason why they should not be able to fund these emergencies as and when they occur. Removing any obstacles to doing so would be a much more cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money than setting aside money in an array of trust funds. Should we also have separate trust funds to deal with things like outbreaks of infectious diseases or international economic instability? Surely it is better for governments to deal with these unforseen costs when they arise.
- My guess is that the US proposal for a "nation building" fund – that is, to give contracts to the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel – will be the beneficiary of more political momentum than the UK proposal to provide emergency assistance to the likes of starving people in Niger. If so, that is a sorry reflection of our values and priorities.
Stephanie Flanders is a cyclist, and the economics editor of Newsnight.
In this article in the Torygraph, she considers why people cycle.
Mile for mile, you are 84 times more likely to get killed travelling by bike than by Tube. Cycling is also about 14 times riskier than going by car. But if you are cycling, you feel that you have more control over your fate. And economists know that makes all the difference to the way people evaluate risks.
A recent entry over at Unrestricted Domain raises an interesting and important point which is often ignored in the discussion of the relationship between aid and growth.
Unrestricted Domain says:
To be honest, I’d find it extremely odd if several hundred billion dollars failed to yield any benefit whatsoever.
This is absolutely right. And it highlights that not everyone realises that the various aid-growth studies are an attempt to measure the medium term growth benefit to the economy over and above the direct benefit of the transfer of the aid.
Say, for example, that the UK gives $1 million in aid to Uganda. Even if this aid had no long term growth benefits, the direct effect is to reduce consumption in the UK by $1m, and increase consumption in Uganda by the same amount (assuming that it all arrives – which on the whole it does). If Ugandans get more benefit from the money than we do (economists call this diminishing marginal utility) then the Ugandan gain in welfare from the extra $1m will be bigger than the British loss of welfare, and the world as a whole will be better off. Transferring money from someone who will barely notice the difference to someone who goes to bed hungry is, in itself, a good thing. To my mind, that would be justification enough for aid, even if it did not increase growth but simply shifted consumption from the relatively rich to the relatively poor.
But the aid-growth regressions are a more demanding test of aid effectiveness. The question they ask is: what is the effect of these transfers on the growth of the economy, over and above the direct benefit of the transfer? Clearly, if aid is invested in transport infrastructure, commercialisation of state utilities, or in improving agricultural productivity, it might be expected to have long term benefits above the simple increase in consumption that it permits.
The most recent, careful study finds that aid does have a considerable positive impact on growth. On average, aid worth one percent of national income increases annual growth in the recipient country over the medium term by about a quarter of a percentage point a year. Or, viewed as an investment in the growth of developing countries, the average rate of return from aid is at least 13% – which is higher than many other uses of public funds. These rates of return are additional to the direct benefit of the aid transfer.
In other words, aid would be justified even if there was no long term impact on growth, as it would still increase incomes of people who need the money most, at only a modest cost to those who pay. The fact that a whole raft of studies find that, on top of this, there are long term benefits for the recipient economy strengthens the case, but the case for aid does not depend on this finding.
I recently migrated my Dad's blog from Blogger to WordPress.
To transfer the content, I used Andy Skelton's import tool, which seems to have worked perfectly, especially when combined with Catstutorials' illustrated guide. Many thanks to both of these.
I managed to find a way to get Blogger to redirect to the correct post on the new WordPress site. Here is how I did it.
First, I made a backup of the Blogger template.
Second, replace the Blogger template with this (you'll need to change this to match your domain):
<html>
<Blogger>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<script language="javascript">
var blog_root="http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/";
document.location.href=blog_root;
</script>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<ItemPage>
<script language="javascript">
var process_page="http://www.yourdomain.com/from_blogger.php";
var newpage=process_page;
var oldlink="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>";
newpage+="?p="+oldlink;
newpage=newpage.toLowerCase();
document.location.href=newpage;
</script>
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>
</html>
And then put the following PHP file into www.yourdomain.com/from_blogger.php:
require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/blog/wp-blog-header.php');
$title = $_GET['p'];
$vars = explode('/', $title);
$num = count($vars) – 1;
$filename = $vars[$num];
$slug = str_replace(".html", "", $filename);
$SQL = "SELECT posts.* FROM $wpdb->posts AS posts WHERE posts.post_name = '$slug' LIMIT 1";
$posts = $wpdb->get_results("$SQL"); if ($posts)
{ foreach ($posts as $post) {
$found_link = = get_permalink($post->ID); }
} else {
$found_link = "http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/";
}
header("Location: $found_link");
It works for me …
Update: thanks to Tom Sherman for correcting my typo.
James Chaney has been a member of the Republican Party for 20 years. In a blog entry today, he explains why he is quitting the party.
Fifty years from now, the Republican Party of this era will be judged by how we provided for the nation’s future on three core issues: how we led the world on the environment, how we minded the business of running our country in such a way that we didn’t go bankrupt, and whether we gracefully accepted our place on the world’s stage as its only superpower. Sadly, we have built the foundation for dismal failure on all three counts. And we’ve done it in such a way that we shouldn’t be surprised if neither the American people nor the world ever trusts us again.
It is widely known that economists predict that, under certain assumptions, competitive markets are efficient – that is, nobody can be made better off without making somebody else worse off. This result – which is knows as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics – is the basis of the view held by economists since Adam Smith that competitive markets result in a socially desirable outcome, even though the market is composed of individuals acting in their own self interest.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
But there is a less well-known Second Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics which is, in my view, even more important. This theorem states that any efficient allocation can be achieved as a result of competitive markets, given a suitable allocation of initial endowments. Why is this important? It tells us that there are many possible efficient market outcomes, not a single, pre-determined equilibrium; and the one we end up with depends on where we start. If you have a large endowment at the outset, you will probably be better off in the resulting market outcome. It tells us that we can and should think about what sort of society we want to live in, and that we can move towards that outcome that by changing the hands we are all dealt, and then allowing the free market to do the rest. In other words, growing inequality and economic injustice are not the necessary and inevitable outcome of liberalised markets. The First Fundamental Theorem tells us that a competitive markets will lead to a pareto-efficient equilibrium – but there is an infinite number of such outcomes. The Second Fundamental Theorem tells us that we can choose what sort of society we want, and that, when we have done so, we can still rely on competitive markets to deliver an outcome that is economically and socially efficient.
It is sometimes argued that developing countries should protect their firms from international competiton (or should be allowed to do so) so that the firms can get big enough and efficient enough to compete in global markets. This is called "infant industry protection". Sometimes people say that the East Asian countries used this policy successfully. The trouble is that the firms often become dependant on the protection from competition, and do not ever become truly competitive. The result is that the population of the country have to pay more for those things than if they could buy them on world markets; and the industry never becomes a viable proposition. Penelope Hawthorne has posted a very good introduction to the infant industry debate. As she says, the overwhelming evidence from the postwar period is that open economies with more liberal trade policies grow faster and have more success with poverty reduction than closed economies.
Jonathan Power writes in Prospect about his return to Tanzania.
There is no doubt that aid works. The proof of that can be seen in both Tanzania and Uganda from the times when they were given little or no aid. Nothing moved. Look at both countries now and you can see aid projects delivering. Even the Asian tigers, with their undemocratic but capable "development" states, could not have got going without aid—the Americans put South Korea and Taiwan on the road to success.
Hat tip: my Dad’s blog.
An estimated 300 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century. As a result of a global international effort, financed by foreign aid, the disease has been eradicated. In the middle of the 20th Century, there were approximately 10 to 15 million cases of smallpox in more than 50 countries, and 1.5 to 2 million people died of the disease each year. Smallpox killed about a third of the people it infected. In 1965, international efforts to eradicate smallpox were revitalized with the establishment of the Smallpox Eradication Unit at the World Health Organization and a pledge for more technical and financial support from the campaign’s largest donor, the United States. Endemic countries were supplied with vaccines and kits for collecting and sending specimens, and vaccination was made easier by the provision of bifurcated needle. An intensified effort was led in the five remaining countries in 1973, with a concentrated effort of surveillance and containment of outbreaks. By 1977, the last endemic case of smallpox was recorded in Somalia. In May 1980, after two years of surveillance and searching, the World Health Assembly declared that smallpox was the first disease in history to have been eradicated. The annual cost of the smallpox campaign between 1967-1979 was US$23 million. In total, international donors provided US$98 million, while US$200 million came from the affected countries. The USA saves the total of all its contributions every 26 days.
Links
- Center for Global Development, "Millions Saved", by Ruth Levine and the Millions Saved working group (pdf)
- BBC website on the eradication of smallpox
Some rights reserved