Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Cycling’ Category

A joint project linking the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for Global Development presented recommendations for transforming U.S. foreign assistance this morning.  The recommendation is for a new government department for global development, based on the British model for development policy.

(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.

George Bernard Shaw, so they say, remarked that the British and Americans are two nations divided by a common language.  Now this is normally the time for a lot of tired jokes about "fanny", "fag" and "pants".  (We English think it is very funny when Americans talk about their pants).  But I shall rise above that.  One thing I’ve noticed living in the United States is that there are some words, and some ideas, which mean subtly different things on each side of the Atlantic – nuances you might not notice at first.

• Holiday
  There doesn’t seem to be a word for this in the US. In Europe people take maybe 6 weeks a year of holiday.  Americans have two weeks of something called "vacation" which means they do their email with a blackberry instead of their PC.
• Liberal
  An insult to many Americans but never in Europe. In the US, liberal means left wing and is associated with large-government. To Europeans, liberal means someone primarily concerned with freedom and choice, and is often associated with small government (q.v.)
• Middle class
  When Americans talk about the middle class, they mean the middle class and below. Europeans mean middle class and above.  Europeans aspire to join the middle class; Americans aspire to leave it.
• Privacy
  When Americans talk about whether the Constitution includes a right to privacy, they mean what Europeans would call freedom. For an American, privacy is whether you can do certain things (eg to have oral sex, anal sex, same-sex relationships, abortion, polygamy) without finding yourself in prison.  For Europeans, it is whether you can do these things without finding yourself in the newspapers.
• Quite
  To Americans, this means "very". To the English, it means "not very". Which is quite an important distinction.  When Clinton said that Kerry would make "quite a good President", this was a compliment. It sounded to Europeans like an insult.
• Small Government
    In America, this apparently means a Government small enough to fit in your bedroom.

Other contributions welcome in the comments section.

The Bush Administration plans to introduce tradeable quotas for fishermen.  According to the Washington Post:

The administration’s bill would be the biggest change in fisheries management in a decade. It aims to double by 2010 the number of "dedicated access privileges" programs, which allocate shares of each fishery to individual fishermen, who can then can buy and sell their shares. In Alaska, for example, fishermen are granted a portion of the allowed halibut catch and can trade these quotas among themselves; in most U.S. fisheries, regulators govern the annual catch by limiting how many days fishermen operate and how much they collect each trip.

Good. Almost every expert in fishing agrees that a property-rights based approach to reducing overfishing is exactly what is needed. Furthermore, it is good economics. Nor are there any environmental arguments against using tradable quotas as a way to deliver reductions in overfishing in the most efficient way possible. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Steve Murawski, chief science adviser to the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service, said … the administration recognizes that good fishery management is based on peer-reviewed science, and that the government should help fishermen make better business decisions through the use of fishing quotas.  "In many cases they do not make market decisions that are in their own best interests and the long-term interests of the country because of this race to compete with each other," he said. "This ‘survival of the fittest’ — it generates a lot of conservation issues."

It is good to see the administration turn to peer-reviewed science for support. Now why can’t the Bush Administration apply exactly the same logic to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, by limiting carbon-dioxide emissions using tradable quotas? They could start by supporting the Clear Skies bill which desperately needs Administration support if it is to get through Congress.

<dream> One of the greatest assets that developing countries have today is that they are low emissions economies.  Wouldn’t it be great if we divided the world’s limit for greenhouse gas emissions equally, by head of population, and then let the world’s poor, who are clean, rent to the world’s rich, who are dirty, the right to use their pollution limits? </dream>

Update 22 September:  See the post on this by Jane Shaw at the Commons Blog

Read Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling who explains why the fuel protests are misplaced.