The Gary Becker and Richard Posner blog has an exchange this week in which they agree on the desirability of the US allowing a larger number of skilled immigrants. As someone who advocates more liberal migration policies, I agree with them that it would be in America’s interest to relax its immigration rules. But two things caught my eye about the way this was discussed.
First, I was disquieted by the way they expressed their shared worry that immigrants from some countries might be terrorists. Becker says:
I do, however, advocate being careful about admitting students and skilled workers from countries that have produced many terrorists, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Richard Posner says:
I would not describe as "profiling" a system of screening would-be immigrants that, without fixing quotas on a national basis, screens more carefully applicants from nations that are breeding grounds of terrorists. The efficacy of such screening is another matter; the less effective it is, the stronger is the argument for reducing skilled-worker immigration from countries in which terrorists are admired and recruited.
I find it hard to put my finger on exactly why this exchange is unsettling. In part it is because they appear to be judging whole nations as "breeding grounds for terrorists", based on a small number of violent extremists. This is a form of generalisation which we would find repugnant if applied to other nations. (What if Britain concluded that "we should be very careful before we employ Americans: the US is a breeding ground for people who don’t believe in science"?) In part it jars because some of the terrorists come from exotic places like Bromley and Dewsbury. Should UK citizens be regarded as particularly suspicious if they apply for Green Cards because we are a nation in which "terrorists are admired and recruited"? The tone of the exchange has the strange quality of being at the same time unworldly and rather unpleasant.
Second, I was disturbed how little concerned either Becker or Posner appear to be about any obligation the US might have to have regard to the interests of the developing countries that they leave. Becker says:
I believe that it is a winning situation both for the US and for the nations that trained them because these emigrants send back remittances, and some of them return to start businesses based on the experiences they gained in the US.
This is doubtless true, and I am not suggesting for one moment that this concern is a reason for restricting immigration from developing countries. But if we are to benefit from importing skilled professionals from abroad, we might give some consideration to what steps we might take to minimize any adverse consequences to the countries that they leave, which in many cases paid for them to acquire the skills from which we propose to benefit. For example, it might make sense to relax the residence requirements on applicants for Green Cards to allow them easily to return to their country of origin for part of the year, to use (and transfer) their skills there if they wish; or to find ways to help the exporting countries to increase training to replace the skilled workers they lose.
I’ve got a piece up at my Vaccines for Development blog which looks at a new paper summarizing the cost-effectiveness of vaccination as a development intervention.
I don’t normally bother to cross-post from here, but this is a very interesting paper.
Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling has an excellent restropsective look at Margaret Thatcher’s economic legacy. (The title of Mr Dillow’s blog is a total misnomer – it is fluent, well-informed and rarely takes a misstep.) As ever, don’t neglect the comments.
Chris summarizes Mrs Thatcher’s influence on privatisation, labour markets, and macroeconomic policy. He concludes:
She has given a generation of non-economists the impression that support for free markets is equivalent to support for the vested interests of the rich. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I agree with Chris’s analysis, especially the point quoted above – and I would add a few glosses.
- We tend to take for granted some of the really good reforms and policy changes of that era, such as the abolition of exchange controls and the agreement to the Single Market Act. Maybe they would have happened anyway; maybe not.
- It is important to distinguish the period when Geoffrey Howe was Chancellor, which was largely disastrous, from Nigel Lawson, who was pretty good (at least from 1983 to 1987).
- Howe’s budget of 1981 was a catastrophic, unforgiveable mistake, clinging to the wreckage of monetarism long after any reasonable person would have abandoned it, leading to one of the deepest (and least necessary) recessions on UK history; as was Lawson’s expansionary budget of 1988 based on the arrogant belief that he had conquered the business cycle.
- Thatcher and Lawson should be commended for persuading the chattering classes that increasing trend economic growth is primarily challenge for microeconomic policy (ie improving the supply side), whereas controlling inflation is primarily a challenge for macroeconomic policy. This seems obvious today but it was a total reversal of the then prevailing wisdom which saw macroeconomic policy targeting growth (demand management) and microeconomic policy controlling inflation (price controls, wage freezes, hire purchase controls etc).
- Lawson should be commended for his simplification of the tax system (subsequently largely reversed, sadly).
- One of the defining features of Mrs Thatcher’s economic policy was her ambivalent relationship with the exhange rate. I think – though without much conviction – that we should have joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the EMS sooner than we did; and had we done so we might not have suffered the humiliating ejection that occured under the Major government. Mrs Thatcher had a largely instinctive set of opinions about the exchange rate – she believed in keeping sterling independent and "strong" – without any very sophisticated underlying analysis.
- The Thatcher Government has not got the opprobrium it deserves for breaking the link between the state pension and the growth of wages. Allowing our old people to fall behind rising living standards of the rest of the community year after year, creating a generation of retired people living in poverty, was unforgiveable.
- I think Mrs Thatcher did, in some undefinable way, change our attitudes – largely for the better - to the role of the state in private enterprise. Before her, there was a widespread assumption, under both Labour and the Conservatives, that the state should step in to prevent the collapse of particular firms or industries. That was mainly an expensive mistake, and Mrs Thatcher was robust in refusing to come to the aid of many sunset industries. (She was, however, not entirely consistent on this: her friends in industries such as aerospace continued to receive large public subsidies.)
See also New Economist, who has some good links to further commentary.
Update 17 October: See also BrightonRegencyLabour for 20 reasons why he hates Thatcher. Also the comments below have a lot of good stuff.
There are so many people fleeing from the new attacks on villages that all we can do is scramble to keep up with registrations and emergency distributions for the new arrivals: people are coming to the camps, particularly the bigger ones clustered around state capitals, in droves.
Families – mostly women and children – have just plopped themselves down underneath some shady trees with their meagre bundle of belongings, usually some sleeping mats and a few old cooking pots. They hang their clothes and blankets in the branches and wander around the camp looking for the rest of their family and their tribe. It’s obvious they need services – food, water, medical attention – but when you speak to them all that they ask for is security. "It’s good to be here. No we are safe."
Jack Straw, at the UN Summit on 17 September:
I believe that it will be the agreement on our Responsibility to Protect that will be seen in the future as the decision of greatest significance. If we follow through with that Responsibility to Protect, then never again will genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity be allowed to take place under our noses with nothing done.
Boris Johnson has a wonderful turn of phrase:
for the most part this answer has so far drawn a look of anxious blankness, the look you see when people are sure that they ought to have read some classic work, and are in two minds whether to bluff it out or admit ignorance.
That is such an acute observation of the human condition. It reminds me of a great book from more than 20 years ago, the Meaning of Liff, by John Lloyd and the sadly missed Douglas Adams, about "many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist". Here is a sample:
BENBURB (n.)
The sort of man who becomes a returning officer.CORRIEARKLET (n.)
The moment at which two people approaching from opposite ends of a long passageway, recognise each other and immediately pretend they haven’t. This is to avoid the ghastly embarrassment of having to continue recognising each other the whole length of the corridor.DORRIDGE (n.)
Technical term for one of the lame excuses written in very small print on the side of packets of food or washing powder to explain why there’s hardly anything inside. Examples include ‘Contents may have settled in transit’ and ‘To keep each biscuit fresh they have been individually wrapped in silver paper and cellophane and separated with corrugated lining, a cardboard flap, and heavy industrial tyres’.IPING (participial vb.)
The increasingly anxious shifting from leg to leg you go through when you are desperate to go to the lavatory and the person you are talking to keeps on remembering a few final things he want to mention.
There are more examples here.
Polly Toynbee thinks that immigration is bad for low-skilled British workers:
Globalisation does not apply to the service sector, where 20 million people work. It is a term used to disguise the hard truth that GDP growth is irrelevant to those who don’t share in it. GDP per capita is a meaningless statistic that pretends all wealth is equally shared. Class-blind economics conveniently celebrates growth even when it enriches the well-off at the expense if the low-paid.
Ms Toynbee was writing in response a new Social Market Foundation pamphlet by Conservative MP John Bercow, called Incoming Assets: why Tories should change policy on immigration and asylum. I can’t find the pamphlet online, but you can read his article in the Independent. He says
Ministers must reiterate that economic migration is not a burden but an indispensable feature of a successful trading nation.
I have written the following letter to the Guardian – I have no idea if it will be published:
Polly Tonybee reports a fragile consensus that is emerging across the spectrum of mainstream politics that there would be economic benefits from a more open immigration policy (Of course the wealthy want an immigration free-for-all, October 11, 2005). Ms Toynbee is concerned about the impact on British workers.
In the nineteenth century, well-meaning people tried to protect jobs by resisting the use of machines. The Luddites were wrong: as mechanization replaced manual labour, there was still plenty of work left to do; and we have all shared in the higher standard of living that increased productivity brought about. Migration is no more a threat to jobs than was the introduction of the steam engine. Allowing workers to move to where their skills are valued makes us all richer. This is not just textbook economics: careful studies of the evidence both in the UK and the US find that immigration raises wages of both native and foreign workers.
Even if, despite the evidence to the contrary, the wages of some workers were depressed by migration, it would not follow that we should close our borders. The proper response would be to redistribute the overall benefits so that everyone shares in the rising prosperity that results. Ms Toynbee also ignores the huge benefits to the migrants themselves, and the transformative impact remittances can have on their families at home.
Sometimes we face a quandary about how much we should be willing to sacrifice to help others more in need. On this issue there is no such dilemma: we would be better off ourselves, and we would help the world’s poor, by relaxing restrictions on economic migration.
(I didn’t bother to respond to Ms Toynbee’s idea that globalization does not apply to the service sector: try telling that to call-centre workers, data entry operatives and software engineers competing with companies in India and China. And what about the hospitals offering cosmetic surgery in South Africa?).
If you want more explanation and evidence you might want to take a look at:
- Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling
who makes many of the same points as my letter – in particular, highlighting the likelihood that wages will increase, not fall, as a result of increased migration. - This report by the Performance and Innovation Unit
on the social impact of migration – which finds that migration has had positive effects both on growth and on growth per capita. A one per cent increase in the population through migration is associated with an increase in GDP of between 1.25 and 1.5 per cent. - This Home Office report
on the effects on the local labour market of immigration in the UK, which finds that there is no strong evidence that immigration has any large adverse effects on employment prospects or wages of existing residents. - This new NBER working paper by Ottaviano and Peri looking at the impact of immigration in the United States, which finds that immigration generates a large positive effect on the average wages of U.S.-born workers. (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen)
- This paper by David Card here at Berkeley, which finds that there is no evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives. (Hat tip: Chris Dillow)
You may also want to check out Tim Worstall, and Talk Politics who makes a somewhat over-the-top comparison between Polly Toynbee’s views and those of the British National Party.
And finally: hasn’t John Bercow come a long way in a short time? If I remember rightly, he was once secretary of the Monday Club "Immigration and Repatriation Committee". (Really.) Good for him for having the guts to change his mind.
A propos of not much – some meta-blogging thoughts:
- The irrepressible Worstall will be wetting himself to be in the running for this - The Blooker Prize, a prize for books based on blogs or websites. (I have never understood the value of dead-tree versions of the internet myself.)
- On the subject of Timothy, is it just me or is his site now so laden with advertisements, sitemeters etc that it takes an age to load? Most of the time it doesn’t matter, because I see all I need in my RSS reader; but it has become a real deterrrent to going to the site itself. Or is that just because I am many thousands of miles away?
- Typepad seems to be down quite a lot recently?
- As well as being very slow to load, Truth Laid Bear rankings seem very volatile.
- Google’s new online feed reader is way too slow to be useable
- Not so many blogs quote the New York Times columnists now that they are behind a $50 a year TimesSelect barrier – Krugman, Kristof et al must be in a rage
I am full of admiration for Justin at Chicken Yoghurt – he writes brilliantly, and is full of passion about all the right things. But I do want to challenge his criticism of the use of consultants by DFID before it enters into the blogosphere as an accepted meme.
I know what you are thinking – in the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies – "well he would say that, wouldn’t he?". Yes and no: I do have some criticisms of DFID’s use of consultants, but the issue is more nuanced than Justin suggests.
Supporting international development is about more than merely transferring resources. One of the things we can do is "transfer knowledge" – for example, by providing specialist expertise which is not available in the developing country. In the words of the famous cliche: "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." Many people who are sceptical about the value of aid in general are more ready to support the use of development assistance for skills transfer, and to support building institutions and help implement reform programmes that will benefit the recipient country in the long run.
And that is, for the most part, what consultants employed by DFID do. They go to developing countries and advise on everything from the best type of tarmac to use on a road to the IT system needed for the administration of courts. They develop training materials for teachers, or design supply chain logistics to get vaccines to remote rural areas. They advise Governments on how to create an environment for small businesses, priorities for trade liberalistion, improvements in tax administration, how to set up independent electoral systems, or how to train farmers to use fertilizers and new seeds.
Now DFID could employ an army of civil servants to do all this. But it makes more sense to use consultants. Many of these are specialists in their field. Many have themselves been successful in business or other walks of life, and now choose to spend some or all of their time transferring their expertise to developing countries. Demand for these skills fluctuates, according to priorities in developing countries, and depending on the latest trend in development thinking. As I pointed out in my recent paper, in the 1960s there were about 16,000 British staff working on contract to developing countries, receiving a salary supplement from the Overseas Development Ministry. By 1990, this had been reduced to almost none. Those roles were instead being filled by consultants.
I expect there are some people who take the view that employing staff in the public sector is always better than using private sector contractors. Civil servants do not look quite so cheap when you take into account the expectation of job security, a public sector pension, and all the costs of recruitment, training, sickness, holidays, maternity and paternity leave, and administrative overheads – all of which are bundled together in the price we pay for consultants. Some would prefer to use public employees for ideological reasons. I would prefer to maintain the flexibility to use scarce aid resources as efficiently as possible – buying in just the right mix of skills that are needed in a particular place at a specific time.
Justin says:
We have know way of knowing if £270m of our money has been spent in any way efficiently.
That just isn’t true. DFID has an extensive system for tracking how money has been spent, and for appraising the individual impact of each aid project and programme. It has an independent evaluation unit, which analyses the effectiveness of DFID’s approach and makes recommendations for improvements in the future. And it has both internal audit and external audit and value for money analysis by the NAO and the Public Accounts Committee. But it makes sense to analyse the cost effectiveness of each project and programme, including all the resources used, not to try to measure the impact of the use of computers, or secretaries, or consultants across the whole of the organisation.
Chris is right when he remarks in the comments at Chicken Yoghurt that the public sector rules do often lead to perverse incentives. For example, the current limit on headcount in civil service departments recreates an incentive to contract out activities that could be done more cheaply internally – whereas a limit on "running costs" would prevent the bureaucracy from growing but would be neutral about whether it was more cost effective to use civil servants to perform those tasks or buy in the services needed.
I do not mean to imply that there is no room for improvement in the way that we provide technical assistance. The UK still spends a relatively large share of total aid on technical assistance. We should be better at considering whether we can use those resources to help developing countries develop and retain their own skills (for example, by providing incentives to offset the brain drain); and facilitate south-south learning. We do not have good systems for appraising the skills of technical experts (by definition, they know more about their subject than we do). We are not particularly good at training technical experts in the more general skills of communication and skills transfer, and we do not have good metrics to measure their performance. This agenda was identified by the Berg Report back in 1981, and it still remains to implemented.
But while there is clearly room for improvement in the provision of technical assistance, that is quite different from the suggestion that all the money spent by DFID on consultants is wasted, or used to peddle privatisation. Knowledge transfer is an important component of the support we can provide to developing countries, and it is entirely rational for DFID to make extensive use of consultants to deliver that goal.
One of the difficult questions in the economics of developing countries is why poor countries are not closing the gap on rich countries. With both more rapid policy convergence and deepening globalization, most economists would have expected poor countries to grow more rapidly than rich countries, so closing the gap.
An interesting new paper by Branko Milanovic looks at this question. Branko is on leave from being the lead economist in the World Bank research department.
Branko finds that the main cause of slow growth in least developed countries (LDCs) is that they are much more likely to be involved in wars and civil conflict. He estimates that this factor alone accounts for an income loss of about 40 percent over 20 years. Wars alone explain the entire relative decline of least developed countries compared to middle-income countries. In other words, had prevalence of war among LDCs been at the same level as elsewhere, the LDCs would have at least kept pace with the rest of the world.
Branko finds that the delay in reform in LDCs – which undertook comprehensive economic reforms from the mid-1990s, about ten years after middle income countries – has made virtually no difference (at most 1 percent in total over 20 years).
Neither can slow growth be attributed to lack of democratisation nor failure to create the conditions for direct foreign investment; as according to Branko’s results, neither of these have made any statistical difference to growth rates.
There is some, rather marginal effect from trade policy reforms. Exchange rate liberalization appears not to have positive effects; and (paradoxically) countries with high tariff rates do better than countries with lower tariffs, but—for a given country—reducing tariff rates is marginally helpful.
Interestingly, Branko finds that lending from the World Bank and IMF has also had an indifferent effect on LDC growth. He does not find evidence to support the suggestion from some quarters that aid has been harmful; but nor does it appear to have made a positive contribution. (His analysis does not include aid from bilateral donors.)
If you believe this analysis, the the lesson is that reducing war and civil strife is the key to enabling poor countries to catch up and share the benefits of globalisation. In the absence of peace, there are unlikely to be a signficant benefits for economic development from increases in aid, democratisation, investments in higher education, economic reforms, the environment for inward investment, or trade liberalisation.
My own take on this analysis is that it provides a useful reminder that helping to end to conflict and wars is an absolutely essential pre-requisite to economic development. But, as with all such cross-country growth regressions, it is almost impossible to divine causality, and to distinguish the underlying causes. Both extreme poverty and poor governance are causes of conflict, as well as caused by it. And poor governance and extreme poverty are causes of each other. It would be a mistake to look for a single lever we can pull to make the problem of extreme poverty go away. We can tackle this, but to do so requires a long, sustained and commited campaign on all fronts: to break into the vicicous cycle of extreme poverty, high mortality, low investment, low growth, poor governance, and protracted conflict by providing support for positive change at every point in circle. Branko is right to say that while conflict continues, pretty everything else is hopeless; and to point up the lack of evidence for the supposed miraculous powers of any other silver bullet solution.
If you are British, you can donate through the Disasters Emergency Committee here. In America, you can donate through the Red Cross.
(However, I would feel more inclined to help Pakistan were it not for it’s decision to buy at least two dozen F-16 fighter planes. I’m not thrilled about the the decision of the US to sell them either. )
Lionel Shriver had an interesting piece in the Guardian on September 17th. I’ve only just caught up with it, by way of Natalie at Philobiblion (with whom I completely agree).
Shriver says that as we have become richer, we have become less interested in having children, choosing instead to do other things with our lives. I certainly recognize some of myself in some of these thoughts:
We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life. We are less likely than our predecessors to ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask if we are happy. We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don’t especially care what happens once we’re dead. As we age – oh, so reluctantly! – we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not ‘Did I serve family, God and country?’ but ‘Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat?’ We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun. … In deciding what in times past was never a choice, we don’t consider the importance of raising another generation of our own people, however we might choose to define them. The question is whether kids will make us happy.
But Shriver is completely off beam with her suggestion that there is something virtuous about having children. She talks of her decision, and that of her thinly disguised pseudonymous friends not to have children as an "economic, cultural and moral disaster". She describes a decision to be childless as "the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all" which "ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy", and concludes:
When Islamic fundamentalists accuse the west of being decadent, degenerate and debauched, you have to wonder if maybe they’ve got a point.
So Shriver apparently believes that people who have children are selflessly perpetuating the human race, while those of us who choose not to have children are selfishly living for today, putting our own enjoyment before the well-being of the planet and the spieces.
This is complete balderdash. I have nothing against people choosing to have children: for many people it is a very fulfilling and important part of their lives. Furthermore, I would generally support people’s right to have children. But it is not a selfless sacrifice on their behalf for which I should be expected to express gratitude. Parents choose to follow the strong instinct to propagate their own genes, and they enter into parenthood anticipating an enormous pleasure resulting from bringing up children. In some countries, parents also see children as an investment in their own future. Few people have children out of a sense of the social good of doing so; and if that were their motive, they would have made a miscalcuation about where the greater social good lies. Increasing the number of people with whom we have to share the earth’s finite resources does not make us, or future generations, better off. So while I am happy to tolerate the decision of people to have children, I do not accept that those who have children are selflessly acting in the interests of humanity.
Conversely, it is true that some people have chosen to remain childless because they think that children are would interfere with their trekking holidays or marathon training. But there are also many people who feel that the contribution they can make to the world is much greater if they do not spend their time and money raising children. Many such people are are sacrificing the chance to have their own children in order to create a better world, including for the children of others.
All of which makes it particularly galling that those of us who choose to remain childless should be required to subsidise so heavily those who choose to propagate their DNA.
None of this is meant to argue for, or against, having children. Make up your own mind, and do what you prefer. But don’t give me any moralistic lectures about the sacrifices that parents make, or the selfishness of choosing to remain childless. And don’t expect me to pay for the expensive choice that you have made.
It seems that the UK Government’s proposed ban on smoking in public places is faltering.
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?
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine, Boston’s Irish community unveiled a memorial park on June 28,1998. The park is in downtown Boston, along the city’s Freedom Trail. The text on the plaque reads:
Lest we forget. The commemmoration of the Great Hunger allows people everywhere to reflect upon a terrible episode that forever changed Ireland. The conditions that produced the Irish famine – crop failure, absentee landlordism, colonialism and weak political leadership – still exist around the world today. Famines continue to decimate suffering populations. The lessons of the Irish famine need to be constantly learned and applied until history finally ceases to repeat itself.
The lovely lady and I were at a conference in Sonoma on Thursday and Friday, so we decided to spend the weekend at Harbin. Harbin is a California institution – a hippy commune, established in the early 1970s, where people come for yoga, organic vegetarian food, thermal springs, wandering around naked, escape, and generally wearing tie-dye kaftans in the evening.
As you all know, I am reality-based, and I don’t go in for transcendental bullshit of any sort. I can tolerate yoga only if there is guaranteed to be no chanting – so not even the prospect of topless girls doing yoga persuaded me to take part at Harbin.
Ignoring the spiritual stuff, the place is very relaxing – we loved the combination of sunshine, running on remote trails and cappuccinos by the pool. The hippy culture is fascinating to observe, and mostly harmless. There were lots of naked bearded men meditating in the sunshine, and a large number of somewhat neurotic, new-age women of all ages.
For those of us brought up with English sensibilities, there is something odd about having dinner in the café and knowing what everyone you are eating with looks like naked.
Harbin does not allow cellphones, and the only internet connection is dial-up (no wifi). There are no televisions either. That is nice enough for a few days, but I was beginning to feel cut off by the time we left.
Lots of people go to Harbin to escape, to de-stress and de-tox. I would have expected that some moderate exercise – for example, jogging, hiking or swimming – would be part of a strategy for improving your sense of well-being. But physical exercise, other than yoga, isn’t part of the Harbin culture at all, and we were the only people out on the many miles of trails in the hills of the Harbin property and beyond. In my view, running in the early morning sunshine on completely empty trails is a perfect way to start the day and set yourself up for a huge, vegetarian, organic breakfast, and then many long hours by the pool with a stack of books that you are overdue to read.
Verdict: great fun, if only as a spectator, as long as you can do without the internet for a few days.
One of the more significant risks of running on trails in Northern California is that there are Mountain Lions. You hardly ever see them; but they do occasionally attack, kill and eat joggers, so they are best avoided if possible.
So we were somewhat alarmed to stumble across a mountain lion on a remote trail in Harbin, near Calistoga, on Saturday.
The guidebooks say you should look it in the eye, make yourself appear as big as you can (for example, by opening your jacket and waving your arms), make a loud noise (“holler”, as they say here) and generally try to intimidate the poor creature. Apparently if you turn your back, crouch, or run away, you will be deemed weak and you are likely to end up as cat food.
Fortunately, we didn’t need to do any of those. The lion saw us long before we saw it, and decided to head away from the trail. Which is just as well, because it was much bigger than I expected, and I would not have enjoyed looking it in the eye and yelling. What would you say to it?
Joseph Kony, leader of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court.
The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), formed in 1987, is a rebel paramilitary group operating mainly in northern Uganda. The group is engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government in what is now one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts.
It is led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself a spirit medium and apparently wishes to establish a state based on his unique interpretation of Biblical millenarianism.
It is estimated that around 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the group since 1987 for use as soldiers and sex slaves. The group performs abductions primarily from the Acholi people, who have borne the brunt of the 18-year LRA campaign. The insurgency has been mainly contained to the region known as Acholiland, consisting of the districts of Kitgum, Gulu, and Pader, though since 2002 violence has overflowed into other districts. The LRA has also operated across the porous border region with Southern Sudan, subjecting Sudanese civilians to its horrific tactics.
Up to 12,000 people have been killed in the violence, with many more dying from disease and malnutrition as a direct result of the conflict. Nearly two million civilians have been forced to flee their homes, living in internally displaced person (IDP) camps and within the safety of larger settlements, sleeping on street corners and in other public spaces. The plight of these people has received little media coverage in affluent countries.
These are the first indictments by the International Criminal Court.
I have mixed feelings about this. It is good to see the ICC up and running, despite the opposition of the United States. It is good to see bad men like Kony on the wrong end of international legal proceedings.
But it is hard to see how there can be a peaceful settlement to what is effectively Africa’s longest running war now that Kony faces trial in the International Criminal Court. The international community owes it to the people of Uganda to provide resources, logistics and military support to bring the war to an end and to bring the leaders of the LRA to justice.
But perhaps our commitment to a war on terrorism does not run that deep?
Google has launched a new online blog reader (known to techies as an RSS feed reader).
I’ve been playing with it this morning. My preliminary view on this beta version are:
Pluses:
- nice look and feel – using Ajax to scroll through blog entries
- allows you to tag posts yourself so you can group them later (rather like GMail’s virtual folders)
- allows you to import your feeds in OPML
Minuses:
- OPML import doesn’t seem to work
– It is slow (too slow to be usable). (For example, it does not seem to pre-load my feeds before I come to read them, and appears to load them in real time.)
My conclusion is that when this works, it will probably become my feed reader of choice. But it isn’t there yet. In the meantime, I’ll stick with akgregator. As ever, more suggestions in Wikipedia.
More generally, this is yet another example of how Google is gradually (actually, not very gradually) taking over from Microsoft. The web will be the new desktop.
Update: October 7th – I’ve been playing and find I can import OPML files if I first edit them and remove all the categories, and change the header to:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<body>
<outline type="rss" … etc
But the whole thing is painfully slow. Not switching yet.
Paul Mason, a Newsnight correspondent, was blogging regularly in the run-up to the G8 summit. He largely ignored the BBC rules and set up a blog at typepad.
His blog came to an end on July 12th – his last entry was a thoughtful post about the relationship between blogs and the mainstream media:
The whole reason I was keen to do this was to emulate some of the people I worked with during the time large corporations were embracing dot.com. There would be policy papers, theology, huge diagrammatic expositions but nobody was actually doing it. The people who made it through the dot.com transition were the people who adopted the JFDI principle, where the JDI principle stands for just do it: even if you fail you will accumulate intellectual and moral capital.
He has announced today that the Newsnig8t blog will return – no details yet.
There have been rumours for a while that the BBC has been developing its own in-house blogging software – it will be interesting to see if the return of the Newsnight blog will be part of a broader entry of the BBC into blogging.
What Tony Blair said in Parliament after Gleneagles is not true:
On aid and debt relief, in respect of the new money aspect, I am somewhat puzzled by some of the people who have been claiming that it is all recycled money. It is absolutely clear to me that the EU commitment is additional, the Japanese commitment is definitely additional, and as far as I am aware, Canada and the US are agreeing to double their aid from their present position. Although people keep saying that there is an issue about whether it is new money, it seems to me certainly true that it is, at least the vast bulk of it.
…
If we deliver on what has been promised, yes, we can say that the millennium development goals will be met; but, obviously, we have got to deliver on it.
Here are the numbers of the additional pledges made during 2005. The UN Millennium Project estimated that in 2010, ODA would need to be $152 bn (in 2003 prices) That’s about $160 in 2004 prices.
My estimate based on DAC projections is that $114 bn had been pledged by September 2004 for 2010; which has been increased during 2005 to pledges totallying about $128bn. That is an increase in pledges during 2005 of just $14 billion. Of that, the bulk ($9 billion) is due to promises from Germany and Italy, both of whom have cautioned that their increases are subject to fiscal priorities at the time. There would need to be an additional $33 billion pledged by 2010 to reach the UN Millennium Project estimate of what is needed.
It is true that if $128 billion were achieved, this would be an increase of around $50 billion compared to 2004 levels. But at most $14 billion of that increase is additional money pledged during 2005, and it is not safe to count on about half of that.
A Guardian poll reported today on the use that young people make of the internet shows some revealing trends:
But among those with a web connection at home, 31% said that they had launched their own personal site or blog. Those aged 16 to 17 have taken most avidly to personal online publishing, with a female bias.
Guardian Leader on blogging:
Blogging is now a mainstream activity for politicians, economists and, increasingly, corporations, plus the army of bloggers around the world who call governments and companies to account with instant rebuttals and who are setting up heir own form of "citizens’ journalism" to provide a grassroots alternative to what is perceived as the corporate-driven agenda of many media organisations.
"Politicians and economists"? How did we get lumped together?
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