What do we want? Evidence based change. When do we want it? After peer review.

More here and here.

Fortunately my partner has reality-based beliefs.

Serves 4.

200g dried apricots
100ml orange juice
400g soaked and cooked (or tinned) chick peas
2 medium onions
2 cloves garlic
3cm ginger
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp coriander powder
1 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)
1 tsp garam masala

Slice the dried apricots and soak them for an hour in the orange juice.

Dice the onions, and fry them until they go soft. Add the garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, turmeric and cayenne. Fry for 2-3 more minutes.  Add the onion and spice mix to the cooked chick peas.

Pour any surplus juice off the apricots (it is delicious to drink, by the way).  Add the apricots to the chickpeas and onions. Add some water if needed and stir.

Cook on a medium ring for 30 minutes. Stir frequently to prevent the mixture from burning.

As well as rice, consider serving with a fresh raita (yoghurt and diced cucumber).

The researchers found that women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die of heart disease, while men who had more than five cups a day were 44% less likely to die.

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

For the last twenty years, U.S. foreign aid funding has done little more than keep pace with inflation. Doubling our foreign assistance spending by 2012 will help meet the challenge laid out by Tony Blair at the 2005 G-8 conference at Gleneagles, and it will help push the rest of the developed world to invest in security and opportunity. As we have seen recently with large increases in funding for our AIDS programs, we have the capacity to make sure this funding makes a real difference.

No commitment to reform the institutions of US Foreign Assistance, however (unlike John Edwards).

In our own work on aid architecture, we asked developing country aid practitioners from 27 countries to rank donors and comment on their strengths and weaknesses. DFID outranked other bilateral and multilateral donors. DFID scored especially highly on efficiency, flexibility, speed of disbursement and alignment with country priorities.

The conclusion to draw from this: ‘don’t panic!’.

Thanks Simon. It is good to have support from such a reputable and independent source.

Just one quibble. Simon says:

Some of these contributions have a whiff about them of competition between DFID and the Foreign Office, which is unfortunate.

That would indeed be unfortunate. I don’t know if there is any Whitehall briefing going on; but if it is, then it all seems to be going one way. There is nothing in the papers to suggest DFID briefing negatively about the FCO. And a good thing too. We are above that kind of thing.

These missions are a major burden on developing countries. Each mission ties up many hours of ministerial and official time. The policies pressed on governments are often contradictory, lack evidence and have little or no legitimacy in local policital processes. That is why donors promised in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness to reduce the burden of missions.

Yet in the 18 months since that declaration there were 11,000 missions to 31 countries surveyed by the OECD – an average of about 350 missions per country per year. Each mission lasts about a week, so on average each country will have about 5 donor missions in country at any one time. This is a huge cost to the scarce administrative capacity of developing countries: costs which are imposed by well-meaning donors but borne by the recipient government.

The costs of missions can be thought of as a negative externality – which suggests that developing countries should adopt the polluter pays principle as a way to control the burden. Using the analogy of cap-and-trade in environmental pollution, developing countries could issue tradable missions permits. Here is how it could work:

• Developing countries would each decide how many donor missions they can absorb in total each year. Suppose that a country decides to accept 50 donor missions a year (a seventh of the number they now receive on average!). The government would then issue 50 tradable missions permits, which they would sell to donors in an online auction.
• Development agencies designing aid programmes that require a donor mission would have to include in their budget the cost of buying one of these permits, either in the auction or in a secondary market. This would mean that the budget of the aid project would include explicitly not only the cost to the donor of providing the resources, but also the cost to the recipient that the project will impose. The donor thus bears the full cost of its decisions.
• Donors would have an incentive to coordinate their programmes and send joint missions, since they could then share the costs of mission permits.
• Donors would also have a financial incentive to decentralize their operations to resident staff, rather than sending missions from HQ.

The key to making this work would be for developing countries to be rigorous in limiting donors’ access to ministers and officials to teams holding a mission permit. There would be strong pressures – including financial – on them to accept an additional meeting without a mission permit. This could be avoided to some extent through the visa regime (visiting staff from donor agencies would have to quote their mission permit number), but to some extent the donors would need to police the system themselves.

In general, it seems to me that many of the challenges in the development industry relate are the consequence of negative externalities of donor decisions. As the number of donors increases, the prospects for solving these problems through coordination and committees seem more and more remote – and we should look instead to decentralized, market-based mechanisms to align incentives to deliver better results.

Under President George W. Bush U.S. assistance to Africa has sharply increased, reaching $4.2 billion in 2005, nearly four times the level of 2000. This rapid growth is partly a result of a renewed sense that aid can fulfill humanitarian objectives and be a useful foreign policy tool—which helped encourage the creation of two major new aid programs, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But the conventional wisdom says that the party of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton is a better friend to Africa than the GOP. Thus the scale of recent aid—and President Bush’s overall enthusiasm for Africa—caught many aid activists by surprise. 

The Republicans have in the past spent more on aid than the Democrats: Todd estimates that, based on past averages, the success of the Democrats in the mid-terms will cost Africa about $800 million. 

I think we forget the importance of the evangelical movement in the Republican coalition; and that the churches have continued to press for more aid for the developing world.  Furthermore, on trade policy, the Republicans are routinely less protectionist and less mercantilist than the Democrats. 

All of which shows that we should not make simplistic assumptions about politics in other countries.

So it is interesting to read Michael Gerson being interviewed in Foreign Policy:

The Bush administration has increased foreign assistance at a higher rate than at any time since the Marshall Plan. A lot of that has gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, but a lot of it has gone to fighting AIDS and malaria and to the Millennium Challenge Account. The increases have been dramatic, but the need for more [aid] is even greater. Congress has not always been cooperative in increasing foreign assistance to the levels we need. So I think there’s a need for constant public pressure to make the point that foreign assistance, when it’s done properly, is not an altruistic add-on to American foreign policy. It’s a centerpiece commitment of our national security strategy. It shows our values in the world. We’re different from our Islamist opponents because we believe that everyone has value, or worth, and that worth is not determined by distance or culture.

Europeans tend to assume – wrongly – that Republican administrations are less generous in foreign assistance than Democratic administrations, because in European politics the left are identified with a more internationalist outlook than the right.  That is not true in American politics, not least because of the moral attitude of the religious right who make up an influential part of Republican support.

Let us hope that in his new role in the Council on Foreign Relations, he will continue to press the case – for which there is growing bipartisan support – that foreign assistance is both a centerpiece commitment of national security and a moral duty.

I repeat, I love America, think we have much to learn from her, am endlessly glad that she exists, I like Americans and enjoy many aspects of American culture. My heart always lifts when I arrive there and sinks when I have to leave again. But I do not regard her as a reliable ally of Britain. And why should I expect to? It was the great British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, who pointed out that great powers had "no eternal friends, only eternal interests".

I pointed out last year that, just as the British misunderstand the nature of their friendship with the United States, so too many Americans have a hazy recollection of their role in two world wars. (Having been late for the last two world wards, they seem determined to be on time for the start of the third.)

Britain is still paying our war debt to America. Our final payment is due in December this year: I wonder if there will be a national celebration.

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 

Human Rights Watch

“For the third year in a row, Darfur will be on the agenda at the G8 meeting,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This year, the G8 must make a decisive public statement. As the killings continue, G8 leaders need to tell Khartoum that it has no alternative but to accept the deployment of a U.N. force in Darfur.”

Take a look at this BBC photoset to see what life is like in a camp in Darfur.

(Full disclosure: I am the author of the chapter of the report which describes the British model which the group recommends.)

The book, Security by Other Means, will be published shortly. The near final version is online here.  This from the website for the project:

In a world transformed by globalization and challenged by terrorism, foreign aid has assumed renewed importance as a foreign policy tool. While the results of more than forty years of development assistance show some successes, foreign aid is currently dispersed between many agencies and branches of government in a manner that inhibits formulation and implementation of a coherent, effective strategy.

The current political climate is receptive to a transition toward greater accountability and effectiveness in development aid. Because this transition is clearly an imperative but has not yet been comprehensively addressed, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have conducted a joint study that both assesses the current structures of foreign assistance and makes recommendations for efficient coordination.

Drawing on expertise from the full range of agencies whose policies affect foreign aid, Security by Other Means examines foreign assistance across four categories reflecting the interests that aid furthers: security, economic, humanitarian, and political.

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.

As the second-reading debate showed, there is considerable support for this bill on both sides of the House. 

Update: the Bill passed the House of Commons unanimously. 

Here is me on my morning run in Boulder yesterday. This is at the top of Bear Peak, from which there are great views over the Rockies.

Unfortunately I lost Grethe’s phone somewhere down the trail coming down. But the views were definitely worth the cost of replacing it.

Linux is a free alternative to Windows.  For technically-minded people, it can be more powerful, safer and much cheaper to use than Windows.  It is now widely used by businesses for servers (most webservers run on Linux).  Easy-to-use desktop versions have been slower to emerge, partly because many of the geeks who contribute their time (free) to write, debug, improve and document Linux have not always given a high priority to developing an easy user interface.

If you have been using Firefox web browser (and about 20% of the readers of this blog do) you will know that free, open source software can be considerably more powerful, more reliable, easier to use, and more safe than the proprietary alternatives such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  And what is true for the web browser is true for the entire operating system.

The latest version of SUSE is a joy to use.  I have Windows XP on my laptop, and I can honestly say that I think SUSE is better desktop operating system.  It comes laden with free software, from music players (without any Digital Rights Management) to a free alternative to Microsoft Office which does the job at least as well (and in some ways better).

Installing and updating Linux on my desktop was quicker and easier than installing and updating Windows XP on my laptop.   Installing Windows required me to update the driver for my laptop’s sound card so that I could update successfully to Service Pack 2; install SP2 (which takes an hour or more); and then uninstall various Windows services that I do not need to secure my laptop.  SUSE Linux, by contrast, recognised all my hardware automatically, installed all the correct drivers, and updated itself online in 20 minutes.

I’ve made some notes here about the installation, mainly relating to ensuring that the computer correctly handles multimedia (such as MP3 files and commercial DVDs). 

In addition, I have set up my own IMAP mail server at home.  This is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut (I now have a commercial strength, secure mail server) and is quite involved (just as it would be in Windows).  But it is also rewarding, as it gives me a very powerful and easy to use central mail system which I can access in many different ways.    Full details here. 

It is shameful that, with the honourable exception of Nicholas Kristof, these unfolding disasters have had almost no media attention.
 

Richard Brennan et al report the findings of a nationwide household mortality survey conducted between April and July, 2004.   The national crude mortality rate of 2.1 deaths per 1000 per month was 40% higher than the sub-Saharan regional level – about 38,000 excess deaths per month.   The total death toll from the conflict (1998-2004) was estimated to be 3.9 million.

To put that in perspective, twice as many people die preventable deaths each year in the Congo as died in the Asian Tsunami last year.

The proximate cause of the vast majority of these additional deaths is infectious diseases which could be easily prevented or treated, if security and humanitarian assistance were provided.

Dr Brennan comments:

"This is the fourth in a series of surveys since 2000 that have consistently drawn the same conclusion-Congo is the deadliest crisis anywhere in the world over the past 60 years. It is a sad indictment on us all that, seven years into this crisis, ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal, and that international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need. Major governments, the United Nations, the African Union, humanitarian agencies, and the international media must all play a role: improved security is essential to lower the death toll; greater political engagement is urgently required; the parties to the conflict must be held to account; and the level of humanitarian aid must be increased dramatically. The citizens of DR Congo must finally be given the chance to live their lives in peace and security, and to achieve their full potential".

On these figures, the conflict in the DRC has now taken more lives than any since the Second World War.

The rich countries could, with pitifully little effort, step in to prevent further conflict, provide security for the people of DRC, and provide the essential humanitarian support needed to end this slaughter.  But we won’t.

To his credit, Alex seems to be softening his position.  He says

But I’ve increasingly found being a critic of Fairtrade somewhat uncomfortable. … Let’s face it, the Fairtrade scheme – despite its provocative name – is not the opposite of free trade. It can go hand in hand with free trade – after all, it’s about consumers being free to choose to be altruistic when buying coffee.

Quite so.  It is a sign of his intelligence that Alex is willing to be convinced, and it reflects well up on him that he is open about changing his mind.  

The Globalization Institute’s new position will be set out in a report next year, including suggestions for improving the scheme.

I know it is unfashionable, but I am much less convinced than the GI that their beloved microcredit schemes do any good.  But that is a discussion for another day. 

Intellectually, I find it hard to justify a smoking ban in private businesses.  It should be for the owner of a bar or restaurant to decide if he or she wants to allow smoking or not, and for customers to choose the establishment that meets their preferences. 

Here in California, smoking is not allowed in bars or restaurants, and the improvement in quality of life for me is substantial. I can go out to a bar and have a few drinks without coming home smelling like an ashtray and having to wash everything from my jeans to my sweater.  I actually enjoy spending time out in clubs now; with the result that I go out to bars more often here than I would in London.

You would think that there are enough people like me who would choose a smoke-free environment that some pubs and clubs would allow smoking and others would not, and then we could choose where to go to.  Something like this works for coffee bars already: in London, Starbucks does not allow smoking and Caffe Nero does: it is a free market, and I can choose which I want to go to.  So why doesn’t it work the same way for pubs, restaurants, and clubs?  But for some reason it doesn’t happen – I am not aware of any non-smoking pubs and restaurants in London.

I am with Third Avenue on this (perhaps not surprisingly, as we are both Brits living in America).  Though intellectually I think there should be a choice, the improvement in quality of life from a smoking ban is much larger than I would have expected; the market does not in fact provide the choice; and I would vote for a ban.

I don’t understand why the UK is finding it hard to put together legislation.  There are well-functioning examples here in New York and in California, and as I understand it, the ban in Ireland works OK too – so how hard can it be?

As usual, Russell Southwood at Balancing Act gets it right:

Try going to the informal settlements of most major African cities and explain to potential customers why they might want a cheap PDA or indeed a cheap laptop. Negroponte is giving them away because he knows what an unbearably difficult task it would be to have to actually sell the things to people who might actually want them and have the money to buy them.

Somehow I don’t think Negroponte’s plan is going to work any better than Simputer.

But take a look at Ndiyo.  (The BBC reported it in April.)  That looks to me as if it might be a real success.

More from World Changing and Ethan Zuckerman. 

This comprehensive analytical and statistical study finds that high adult mortality induces people to invest less, accumulate less human capital, have a large number of children rather than fewer, children who are likely to survive and have be economically productive. This, in turns, lowers economic growth. The effect is economically very substantial. The linkage with fertility is particularly strong: as countries develop, the reduction in mortality precedes, and appears to cause, the fall in fertility (and not the other way round).

In my view, this has important policy implications. We should be careful about blaming Africa’s poor performance on its governments and institutions: this paper finds that the whole of Africa’s poor economic performance can be explained statistically by higher levels of mortality.  Some of this may be an indirect result of poor governance; but the burden of tropical disease is also substantially higher in Africa; and the paper points out that poverty can be self-perpetuating, because countries are too poor to be able to devote resources to fighting diseases and reducing mortality. This suggests that we should focus on fighting disease as a significant investment in reducing poverty and helping to break out of this vicious circle. The proposal  to create market incentives for the development of new vaccines for malaria, AIDS and TB, by promising to buy them if they are developed, would be an excellent start (full disclosure: this is what I work on).

It is also worth noting that this analysis tends to back Jeff Sachs’s claim that there is a poverty trap, as opposed to Bill Easterly’s scepticism which I reported last month.

Source: Death and Development, Peter Lorentzen, John McMillan & Romain Wacziarg NBER Working Paper 11620 (registration required; send me an email if you want me to send you a copy)

Hat tip: Stationery Bandit

I argued in an earlier paper that the intellectual property regime is increasingly unsuitable for balancing the needs to create incentives for innovation, and to ensure that as many people as possible have access to the benefits of that innovation once it occurs.  In the past, technology transfer from rich to poor has been an important mechanism to allow poor societies to "catch up" and so limit the growth of inequality; as patent and copyright laws have been extended and been applied more exhaustively, and as the importance of knowledge as a factor of economic production has increased, so the intellectual property system has made it harder for poor countries to keep pace with rich countries.   As I explain in my paper, this is not an argument against intellectual property per se, but rather a case for thinking more creatively about how we can create incentives for innovation while ensuring that we do not unnecessarily and ineffeciently exclude the majority of the world’s population from the benefits.

Here is an extract from the transcript of the press briefing, given on Air Force One on the way home, by Faryar Shirzad, the Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics. He’s also the United States G8 Sherpa (that is, the official responsible for representing the President in the run-up to the summit).

Q I believe there was an agreement on Africa aid to go up to $50 billion — was it $50 million or — does the administration support that, because I know in the past the President didn’t want a specific number agreed to.

MR. SHIRZAD: It’s a good question. The question had to do with that there was a $50 billion aid commitment to Africa. What the document reflected was a — what the leaders’ text reflected was that the individual G8 countries, as well as the European Union, had together committed to increase aid by $25 billion in a year to Africa. So there wasn’t a new commitment reflected in the text, but it was an articulation of previous commitments that were already made. …

Q So there’s no promise of new money from the U.S. in that statement.

MR. SHIRZAD: No, I think what that portion of the leaders’ text was supposed to highlight is that while the leaders came to Gleneagles to press the issue of Africa, there’s also a broader development challenge that they reflected in their leaders’ text, and that is the challenge that the OECD has, in their estimation, said they expect development assistance will increase by $50 billion. So it’s not a commitment, but it’s a reflection of an outside estimate that’s been made on that issue.

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.

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.

• invest in regeneration of the Lea Valley
• improve our transport infrastructure
• promote sports among young people
• upgrade sporting facilities across London

What I don’t understand is this: if we all agree that these are good things to do (which I do), why couldn’t we do them anyway?  Why did we need to host the Olympics to force us to do them? 

(And if, conversely, these are not good things to do, why have we just spent a lot of money bidding to host the Games so that we are forced to do them?) 

I enjoy watching the Olympics and I hope the Games are a success. But I don’t think that the Government should be devoting its scarce resources to organising an entertainment spectacle.  We have more important things to spend public money on, and the fewer things the Government has to focus on getting right the better. Why couldn’t the private sector organise the Olympics?

Bah: humbug! 

He asks for nominations for favourite places in Ethiopia. This is tough, because there are so many to choose from.  I nominated Lalibela, which Grethe and I visited on our cycling trip through Northern Ethiopia.

These views reflect a common theme: they leave the rich world blameless for Africa’s multitude of problems. I greatly fear that Live 8 is inadvertently strengthening the notion that we in the rich world must be missionaries to save Africans from themselves. The truth is already being lost– the deep, comprehensive responsibility of western nations and western financial institutions for so much of Africa’s continuing underdevelopment and poverty.

“Resistance was truly impossible,” Georg Ratzinger said. … Some locals in Traunstein, like Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, dismiss such suggestions. “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others,” she said. “The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.” In 1937 another family a few hundred yards away in Traunstein hid Hans Braxenthaler, a local resistance fighter. SS troops repeatedly searched homes in the area looking for the fugitive and his fellow conspirators.

You can say we should forgive him the choices he made as a young man. But don’t tell me he didn’t have a choice. He did, and he chose wrong.

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune… to lose both seems like carelessness." The Importance of Being Ernest, Oscar Wilde