Very funny parody of second life: www.getafirstlife.com.
I particularly enjoyed the recommendation to “fornicate using your actual genitals“.
I said in June that the national identity register should be a federation of connected computer systems, not a single database.
Very sensibly, that is what the Home Office has now announced in the Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Register.
So far so good. There is one protection, however, that the government has not yet been persuaded to implement. Each citizen should be able to log in, see their own information, and see the names and job titles of every government official who has accessed that data.
Very interesting paper by James Harrigan and Geoffrey Barrows at NBER which quantifies the benefit to the United States of ending the Multi Fiber Agreement (which had regulated the global textile trade), and which was ended as part of the Uruguay Round.
The paper finds that this change in trade policy was worth approximately $12 billion a year to American consumers.
That is in addition to the benefits to many people in China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who are now better able to earn a living producing and exporting goods to to the United States. (The paper does not seek to quantify these benefits).
Via Trade Diversion
Sebastian Mallaby writes in the Washington Post highlighting the possible gains to developing countries of a relaxation in the migration policies of rich countries.
In ” Let Their People Come ,” a new book published by the Center for Global Development, Lant Pritchett reports that if rich countries permitted extra immigration equivalent to 3 percent of their labor force, the citizens of poor countries would gain about $300 billion a year. That’s three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all remaining trade barriers, four times more than the foreign aid given by governments and 100 times more than the value of debt relief.
Quite so. Development assistance is only a small part of what developed nations can, and should, do to reduce global poverty.
Hat tip: Pienso. More from Arnold Kling.
Alex Singleton at the Globalisation Institute writes:
Over the past couple of years there has been a growing consensus that conditionality does not work. … It has failed because imposing good policies on countries that don’t want to do them just results in countries taking the cash and then not doing the agreed policies. … Instead of conditionality, the approach should be to set minimum levels of governance and anti-corruption that countries must attain before receiving budgetary support – those countries are likely to absorb the money well and pursue good policies, thereby not needing the conditionality.
This is exactly right. (It is also what I argued in a presentation I gave in a meeting at the Africa Centre in December 2001, what the British Government set out in its policy paper of March 2005, and which I described at greater length here in December 2005.)
Alex goes on:
DFID currently pays lip-service to governance, but in practice just writes the cheque. In countries where money is likely to be misspent by government, that is a mistake. Instead money should be spent through local, domestic NGOs, and through other bottom-up mechanisms like aid vouchers.
I don't agree at all that DFID only pays lip-service to governance. DFID has just published an entire White Paper about Making Governance Work for the Poor. It has recently reallocated its aid in both Uganda and Ethiopia in response to concerns about governance. That is why DFID refuses to give budget support in countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe.
The UK Government is today hosting a conference on the proposed Arms Trade Treaty. The treaty is being promoted by Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Japan, Kenya and the UK and it would create a framework to regulate the arms trade so that all countries adopt similar standards.While the treaty is not perfect, it would be a significant step forward in the control of the proliferation of weapons. Ambassadors from more than 50 nations will meet to discuss the proposal, which the UK aims to take to the UN General Assembly later this year.
Alex Singleton at the Globalisation Institute reports that all is not well, in at least some fair trade cooperatives
Sadly, for too many farmers in poor countries today, they are trapped in not terribly voluntary co-operatives. Out in rural Kenya last week, I found that there was some scepticism towards the traditional view the co-operatives are always forces for good. In fact, in Kenya, the coffee co-operatives have suffered from significant mismanagement, with individual farmers often exploited by the leaders of the co-operatives. In fairness, Kenya has been trying to help rebalance the situation, for example introducing six year term limits on co-operative leaders. I do worry that spokespeople for the Fairtrade movement suffer from a myopic romantic vision of the coffee farmer in a co-operative, which the truth such an existence is backbreaking and mired in exploitation.
It would be a cruel irony if the fairtrade movement itself became a new form of expoitation. The principle of fair trade – that people should be able to spend more buying products that they know to have been produced without exploitation – is a good one. But the recent articles in the FT and Alex's report from Kenya suggest that more needs to be done to ensure that the fair trade certificate means what it says.
See also today's FT leader.
Update: the Fair Trade Foundation replies here.
The Wall Street Journal reports a new paper by Paul Collier about the reasons why growth in Africa has been slower than elsewhere.
“African performance has been far worse than that of any other region,” Collier has written. “The explanation for this is not that African economic behavior is fundamentally different from elsewhere, but rather that African geographic endowments are distinctive.”
Note that geography, rather than corruption, explains the difference from Europe. (Or, as Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson pointed out a few years ago, geography may have influenced the pattern of colonisation and subsequent development of effective institutions.) Not much support for Jeff Sach's view that the problem is disease.
See the discussion over at Greg Mankiw's blog.
Update: Praguetory in the comments asks for my views. They are:
a. I do not put as much weight on these cross country regressions as others. They are statistically weak; though they do have some use as a way to check the validity of generalisations (eg 'most poor countries are in the tropics').
b. Africa's geography does seem to be an important determinant of its poverty. I think Collier and Sachs may both be right: the burden of malaria in Africa's lowlands has pushed a lot of settlement into highland areas, which in Africa are mainly inland, so exaggerating the geographic limitations of small, landlocked countries.
c. I believe that corruption is an effect more than it is a cause of poverty and weak institutions. If corruption is higher in some countries in Africa than it is elsewhere, this is because economic institutions have evolved more slowly, and I think both geography and disease are part of the explanation for that. The geographic endowment has been made worse by the legacy of colonialisation, both by creating inappropriate political boundaries and by corroding Africa's own mechanisms of accountability and political economy. So while I think corruption is a significant problem that has to be tackled as part of the development process, I do not think that Africa is poor mainly because of corruption, but rather that the root causes of Africa's poverty are also the causes of corruption.
This article in The Onion is very funny:
"If they want to ensure that millions of children receive immunity shots for typhoid, whooping cough, or diphtheria, we will ensure that country's medicine is never received."
Added Negroponte: "This bill gives us the power to take on these extremists before they create positive global change that will haunt us for generations."
According to congressional testimony, the CIA sees Gates' intention to bring improvements in health and learning to the poorest corners of the world as the most serious threat to American foreign interests since the wave of independence-granting that plagued Africa in the 1960s and '70s.
Enjoy this cartoon book about the development relationship from Survival International.
HT: Curious.
Senator Lieberman says he is going to run as an independent, having lost the Democratic Party nomination in Connecticut.
I don't know much about how party discipline works in the US, but in the UK running against an official party candidate would lead to automatic expulsion from the party.
As far as I know, Senator Lieberman is currently the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security committee, and he sits on the Armed Services, Small Business, and Environment Committees. According to the BBC:
Meanwhile Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen Chuck Schumer of New York – the chairman of the party's Senate campaign committee – have pledged their full support for Mr Lamont.
I wonder if Senator Reid's support for Mr Lamont includes removing Senator Lieberman from his committee posts?
Jackie Ashley is good in the Guardian today:
To be a liberal does not mean shrugging your shoulders at those who loathe you and hoping that somehow everyone will get on. A world divided between Christian bible-belt fundamentalists, powered by US military and oil interests, and Islamist Qur'an-belt fundamentalists, ruled by misogynistic mullahs, is a bad world, period.
Quite so. But let's be clear: the battle of ideas is not between Christian and Islamic religions and cultures. The real battle of ideas is between rational, reality-based thought and religions of all kinds.
Another Britblog Roundup from Mr Worstall.
This week's Economist asks why there is an invisible hand on the keyboard:
Not all economics bloggers toil entirely for nothing. Mr Mankiw frequently plugs his textbook. Brad Setser, of Roubini Global Economics, an economic-analysis website, is paid to spend two to three hours or so each day blogging as a part of his job. His blog, rgemonitor.com/blog/setser, often concentrates on macroeconomic topics, notably China. Each week, 3,000 people read it—more than bought his last book. “I certainly have not found a comparable way to get my ideas out. It allows me to have a voice I would not otherwise get,” Mr Setser says. Blogs have enabled economists to turn their microphones into megaphones. In this model, the value of influence is priceless.
Not up to the usual high standard of The Economist.
Economists blog because most of us believe that information and knowledge are more valuable shared than kept secret. As knowledge workers, we are valued by the information we share, not the secrets we keep. Blogging is a hugely efficient way of sharing some kinds of information.
Santigie Kamara writing in allAfrica.com yesterday may be overstating the case, but only a little:
Reports reaching this press indicate that the consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture is a "square peg in a round whole" and yet still he is there, receiving thousands of dollars while our brothers and sisters who are more qualified are earn less than a million leones per month.
The objectives of technical assistance are noble; the execution is dismal. Even before Elliot Berg's landmark report in 1993 we have known that the expert-counterpart model of long term ex-patriate technical assistance is generally neither effective nor good value for money. In no other walk of life do we try to train people by parachuting in an expert to do their job for a couple of years. You do not learn skills by watching over someone's shoulder: you learn through a combination of on-the-job training, coaching, mentoring, and formal structured training courses. So why is that not the way we should provide technical assistance?
A fifth of all aid – some $20 billion a year – is currently spent on technical cooperation of various kinds (though much of it may not be spent on this sort of technical assistance). About 40% of US aid is spent this way. Some – perhaps a lot – of this money is wasted. We know that this approach to technical assistance is not generally effective, and yet we go on doing it, presumably because the development-industrial complex is too powerful for us stop.
The transfer and sharing of knowledge and skills is a very high priority for development. Technical cooperation has an important role to play. But we need to do it much better.
Full disclosure: I myself was an ex-pat technical adviser in an African country for two years. I know of what I speak.
<geek>
You may not have heard of service oriented architecture yet; and if you have have, you may think it is just a lot of hype.
But if you believe in SOA, you will have noticed that it could be the foundation of a solution to the UK Government's woes in the use of information technology. I have written before here about the potential for a service-oriented architecture to enable government to deliver the benefits of integrated information systems while limiting the civil liberties risks of a large identity database. And in a chapter in a new IBM book about transformation of government services, Capability, Capacity and Reform, I argue that instead of the government's vision of data processing warehouses, the way to create more efficient and customer-oriented public services is to build smaller and more flexible shared service modules based on a common, cross-government IT architecture.
So I was interested to see that Accenture has bet $450 million of its own money over the next three years in developing new service-oriented architecture functionality. That suggests that Accenture agrees that this is more than just hype.
Hat tip: Enterprise Web 2.0
</geek>
The Wasington Post reports on a federal program to support cattle farmers:
At first, livestock owners were required to be in a county officially suffering a drought to collect the money. But ranchers who weren't eligible complained to their representatives in Washington, and in 2003 Congress dropped that requirement. Ranchers could then get payments for any type of federally declared "disaster." In some cases, USDA administrators prodded employees in the agency's county offices to find qualifying disasters, even if they were two years old or had nothing to do with ranching or farming.
If this were happening in an African country, there would be all kinds of complaints about corruption and poor governance. There would be demands that we cut off aid until this kind of corruption be ended.
Contrary to popular belief, agricultural subsidies in OECD countries are not the most damaging part of the rigged international market for agriculture – that honour goes to import tariffs. But they are a colossal waste of taxpayer money, and they contribute to the difficulties faced by agricultural producers in poor countries to make a living. It is hard to understand why voters in developed countries put up with it.
G and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, which is a documentary about Al Gore's efforts to increase awareness of the threat of climate change.
I thought that I was pretty well informed about climate change, and frankly expected to be a bit bored. I did not really see how a film of somebody giving a powerpoint presentation was going to be all that interesting. Boy, was that wrong. I found the film informative, gripping, even entertaining in places. I learned a lot, and the film increased my (inexpert) opinion that climate change is one of the most serious challenges facing the planet.
The film is more than just a presentation of charts and figures. It cleverly weaves in Al Gore's personal narrative: the journey he made, as a student, as a Congressman, a Senator, as Vice President and as a Presidential candidate. He comes across as smart, funny, likeable and utterly sincere. His story, and his insights into how public opinion gradually understands serious social challenges of this sort, give the film a liveliness, pace and emotion, instead of just a worthy-but-dull recital of the science.
The film finishes with an upbeat message: there is much that we can and should do to address global warming but we are fast running out of time.
Even if you think you know all about climate change, and are already committed to doing something about it, please go to see this film. Take a friend. You will enjoy it much more than you expect, and you will learn something.
Human Rights Watch says that the G8 must act on Darfur:
“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.
Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, has died.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd's first album, must rank as one of the finest debut albums of all time, and it is a testament to Barrett's genius.
As Barrett became more unreliable, possibly because of his use of drugs, the group hired Dave Gilmour so that there would be somebody playing the guitar when Barrett stopped.
When Barrett left the band (they simply decided not to pick him up in the tour bus on the way to a gig in Southampton), he had a wholly unsuccessful solo career, and ended up a recluse, living with his mother in Cambridge.
Shine On You Crazy Diamond was recorded by Pink Floyd in 1975, on the album Wish You Were Here, as a tribute to their lost friend, Syd Barrett.
Remember when you were young
You shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there's a look in your eyes
Like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom
blown on the steel breeze
Come you target for faraway laughter
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
Coincidentally Barrett made an unannounced appearance at the recording studio while the band was recording this track. They didn't even recognise him.
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