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.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser debunks the idea that businesses (or the IT shops of a business) should be focused on what customers say they want.
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.
So it sounds as if everyone in London has taken to their bikes since the terrorist outrages of July 7.
Why not give your old bike to Re-Cycle? They will refurbish it and ship it to Africa. There are collection points in Colchester and Glasgow, and new points are planned in London, Oxford and Bristol shortly.
Hat tip: Hippyshopper
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.
Much has been said and written about these seven leaked documents.
These minutes have been discussed extensively in the United States because of the light they shed on the way in which the Bush administration came to the decision to invade Iraq. But they also offer a unique insight into the making of British foreign policy. What they show is policy-making by intelligent amateurs who are hopelessly out of their depth.
It is true that the UK was asking some important and sensible questions – in particular, officials identified clearly that the US had no plans for establishing a democratic government in Iraq after the war. For example, the Foreign Secretary’s minute says:
We also have to answer the big question — what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than in anything. No one has satisfactorily answered . . . how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better.
But they also reveal that UK policy-makers had a very slender grasp of the detail of the issues with which they were dealing. For example, David Manning’s memo says:
Will the Sunni majority really respond to an uprising led by Kurds and Shias?
You might think that the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser would know that Shi’ite, not Sunni, Muslims form the majority in Iraq – or that he would have taken the trouble to find out before minuting the Prime Minister on the subject. But not our boys from the British Foreign Office. We don’t need to know anything very much about a country before we take part in an invasion to set it on the road to democracy.
What is most alarming is that the discussion in these memos is all about how Britain will build public support for participating in an inevitable US-led invasion of Iraq. Not for one moment does anyone step back and ask whether this would, or would not, be an effective or ethical foreign policy.
It is worth reading the memos in full:
- Minute of March 8 2002 from the Cabinet Office, known as the Options Paper.
- Minute of 14 March 2002 from the Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy Adviser (broadly equivalent to the US National Security Adviser) David Manning which details a meeting with Condeleeza Rice.
- Minute of March 18 2002 from Christopher Meyer, then British Ambassador to Washington, reporting a meeting with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
- Minute of March 22 2002 by Peter Rickets, then the Political Director of the Foreign Office, that weighs the political implications of marching to war with the Americans.
- Minute of March 25, 2002 from Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to the Prime Minister in advance of Blair’s trip to Texas.
- Minute of July 21, 2002, known as the Cabinet Office Paper, which details "conditions for military action" for the Prime Minister’s meeting of July 23 2002.
- Minutes of the Prime Minister’s meeting on July 23 2002, known as the The Downing Street Memo.
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.
Bryan Caplan discusses the economics of a cruise ship as a metaphor for trade and labour mobility in this thought provoking post.
At one level, economic theory tells us that the exploited workers on the cruise ship are better off than they would be if we boycotted the cruises. But at another level, they are having to do this because our immigration laws prevent them from getting other, better paid jobs in rich countries.
Undoubtedly most of my fellow passengers fully supported our immigration laws. So when I looked at their faces, I couldn’t help thinking: You people really do exploit and oppress the employees of this cruise ship. As consumers, you expand the workers’ job options and help them build a better life for themselves. But as voters, you have done everything you could to keep these poor people from competing in First World labor markets on equal terms. In a just world, your diligent assistant waiter from India might be your boss.
As I pointed out here, free traders who believe in free movement of capital and goods should, for the same reasons, believe in free movement of people.
Perhaps one day it will be recognised that our unjust and illiberal immigration policies have made a major contribution to human suffering and avoidable death.
There are people who think that there should not be a significant expansion of aid to developing countries; of these, some believe that all aid harms the recipient, while others believe that aid is generally effective, but that there are diminishing marginal returns which mean that expanding aid significantly beyond current levels would not be effective.
One concern about increasing aid is that there might be adverse macroeconomic effects from large aid inflows, broadly comparable to the Dutch Disease effects associated with export earnings from natural resources. These resource inflows lead to an appreciation of the exchange rate, which can make domestic industries internationally uncompetitive. Recently, some literature has focused on the negative impact that large external resource flows might have on governance and accountability. If there are small benefits from additional aid, then it is possible that these negative effects might outweigh the benefit of marginal extra aid dollars.
In a very interesting new paper, Is Aid Oil?, Paul Collier compares the impact on African countries of aid inflows with the impact of revenues from natural resources. Collier finds that the way in which aid is given makes it vastly better than resource rents as a source of finance.
Aid evidently has very different effects from resource rents. Indeed, when aid is introduced alongside resource rents in the Collier-Hoeffler growth regressions described above, the hypothesis that they have the same effect can be decisively rejected. This suggests that the superior average results of aid are not simply due to better allocation among countries: within a given county aid and resource rents have distinctive effects. In turn, this tells us that the in-country modalities of aid have made an important difference.
Aid agencies are adding value to the transfers that they administer, and indeed doing so to a very considerable degree. The evidence of oil implies that aid agencies face an intrinsic problem: the baseline effect of resource transfers is negative and the agencies have to offset this by purposive allocation and complementary inputs. Nevertheless, such an activity need not be forlorn: an analogy with the effects of hospitals might help to clarify the point. The baseline for hospital activity is also significantly negative. By bringing patients with a variety of illnesses together in a single building, a hospital transmits disease. Even in well-run hospitals, many people contract illnesses from others while there, and spread these illnesses when they leave. Nevertheless, societies rightly see hospitals as vital: the value-added of a well-run hospital far offsets this negative baseline effect. This seems to be the story with aid agencies. The radical critics of aid are correct in the sense that the effects they point to are adverse and important, as demonstrated by oil. But their overall assessment is as wrong as would be a proposal to close hospitals. Indeed, their critique would be far more usefully directed to reforming the governance of oil revenues: the task of making oil work more like aid is far more promising than thetask of making aid work better.
Full disclosure: the author is an official of the UK Department for International Development, currently on unpaid leave to work at the Center for Global Development.
More than 2 and a half million people are at risk from starvation in Niger, because of food shortages caused by drought and locusts.
According to today’s Guardian:
The UN first appealed for assistance for Niger in November and got almost no response. Another appeal for $16m (£9.2m) in March got about $1m. The latest appeal on May 25 for $30m has received about $10m but "it’s still too little", the UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, said.
"We are having now an acute humanitarian crisis in Niger in which children are dying as we speak," he said. "We could have prevented this and the world community didn’t."
Tyler Cowen says that the debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid has improved in the last ten years. If so, then things must have been really bad a decade ago: it continues to astound me how many people are allowed to get away with peddling their prejudices without any meaningful evidence.
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.
Read Humanitarian Hijinks by an aid worker in the Darfur region of Sudan:
The children are the worst because they are already weak and often malnourished, their little bodies are just completely overstretched. Most are eerily quiet despite their obvious discomfort, and it pains me to think that maybe they just don’t know anything different. Having lived in the camps for more than two years now, they are growing up to think that this is a normal state of being, a regular part of life.
Hat tip: Ethan Zuckerman
I expressed some doubt here about President Bush’s claim that US aid to Africa had trebled.
My colleagues at the Center for Global Development, Steve Radelet and Bilal Siddiqi, have now done the numbers. They find that total U.S. aid to Africa has doubled, but not tripled, since 2000, continuing an upward trend that began in 1996.
The pledge to double aid implies an additional $4.3 billion in aid to Africa by 2010. This is accounted for by existing projected increases in the Millennium Challenge Account ($2.0-$2.5 billion), the global AIDS program (PEPFAR) ($1.5 billion), and the recently announced malaria program ($0.5 billion). The pledge to double aid that was made at Gleneagles should therefore be seen as confirmation of existing pledges, rather than an announcement of something new.
The A2K initiative is an effort to change the priorities of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to encourage it to pay more attention to the needs of developing countries, and balance the benefits of easier access to knowledge and knowledge-intensive products such as medicines and software, with the benefits for greater innovation of copyright, patents and trademarks. The website brings together a group of international non-governmental organizations, governments, scholars, acticists and individuals which has been working on a proposed treaty.
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.
It being Friday, another great cycle ride in the Berkeley Hills, finishing at the Cheeseboard in North Berkeley, where the fresh scones have to be tried to be believed.
The White House is clear that it did not agree to any additional aid for Africa in Gleneagles.
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.
Ed Harriman’s article in the London Review of Books is a thorough review of financial mis-management by the coalition forces in Iraq. (For those who do not want to read the full article, The Guardian carried an edited version.)
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.
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.
Normally I tried to avoid blogging about blogging – it is all too self referential. But three recent articles (see below) got me thinking.
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 am very glad that, as a result of hosting the Olympics in 2012, we will
- 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!
Meskel Square has an evocative post about Lake Langano in Ethiopia. When we lived in Ethiopia, we used to visit Langano (in part to get away from the high altitude in Addis Ababa). We stayed in the cottages in his picture.
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.
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