Owen abroad

Archive for February, 2006

I’ve got a post up at Views from the Center – the Center for Global Development blog on development issues, taking issue with Jagdish Bhagwati in today’s Financial Times who says that Bono is noble but misdirected.

Malcolm Gladwell on employer-provided health care:

The closest I can come is to imagine if we had employer-based subways in New York. You could ride the subway if you had a job. But if you lost your job, you would either have to walk or pay a prohibitively expensive subway surcharge. Of course, if you lost your job you would need the subway more than ever, because you couldn’t afford taxis and you would need to travel around looking for work. Right? In any case, what logical connection is there between employment and transporation?

It is good to see Americans questioning the cost and inefficiency of employer-provided health-care. While the analogy is amusing, it does not completely hang together, as the cost structure of the subway (huge fixed costs, small variable costs, and a natural monopoly) is very different from the health industry (high variable costs, and some scope for competition).

It is worth remarking that the absurd US system of employer-provided healthcare is a good example of the law of unintended consequences: it came about because of government imposed restrictions on wages during the Second World War, so employers provided health care insurance instead.

Jowell facing conduct questions

Shadow leader of the Commons Theresa May has demanded a ruling on whether Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has breached the ministerial conduct code. Ms May has written to Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell asking him to make a ruling on the matter.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: it is not the job of civil servants – even the most eminent ones – to judge the behaviour of ministers. If parliament wants to hold Ms Jowell to account it is they who must decide if she has broken the code of conduct and, if so, what they want to do about it.

As the ministerial code of conduct itself says:

it is not the role of the Secretary of the Cabinet or other officials to enforce it or to investigate Ministers

Furthermore, I agree with Brian Barder that an obscure panel of functionaries should not discipline Mayor Ken Livingstone. Politicians are accountable to the electorate, not to bureaucrats.

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

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

Possibly the second worst four words in the English language.*

I was travelling with G to Boulder, Colorado, where she is attending a Business School event. I came along because I’d always wanted to visit this town in the Rockies known for its running and other outdoor sports.

The pilot had announced that we were free to use "electronic devices".  I reached for my laptop – which is my office, calendar, library, address book, photo album, music collection, and main form of communication. And that was when I got a black screen, apart from the chilling words: 

Operating system not found

You do not want to see this on your computer.  It generally indicates a comprehensive failure of the hard disk.

Friends of mine have lost laptops over the last year and have lost everything – their emails, their documents, their diaries, their photographs.  Computer repair shops report heart-wrenching tales of young couples arriving in tears, clutching computers with broken hard disks containing the remnants of their wedding photos, or the only record of the first days of their children, begging for them to be rescued.  G was recently telephoned by a successful and wealthy retired businessman, in tears because his laptop hard disk had failed and he had lost everything.

My stomach churned as I wondered what I had irreplaceably lost.  I knew it would not be too much, as I have a complete backup of all my data at home on two large external hard disks, and I regularly copy across everything from my laptop.  But even if I was not going to lose too much data, how could I work without a computer?

Arriving at the hotel, I used a tiny screwdriver to get inside my laptop, and found that the problem was a faulty connection in the ribbon cable linking the computer motherboard and the hard disk.  I was able to fix the connection, and the computer booted find.

So all’s well that ends well.  But it was a close shave, and a reminder always to make regular backups, especially of laptops.  Mine has taken years of abuse – including being humped around on the back of my bike, being thrown around in airports, and the occasional coffee spill. The hard disk WILL fail one day. 

So if you rely on your laptop, please – take a backup.  Either image your disk, burn your data onto a CD-ROM or DVD, or copy it across to another computer.  Please, do it today.

* The worst four words in the English Language are of course  "Welcome to Heathrow Airport"

Now that the Government has decided to get rid of inconvenient elections, and decided to bypass the tedious business of getting parliamentary approval for new laws, it is good to see them using their new powers to crack down on swearing.

(PS Only one of these is a spoof …) 

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek has an excellent debunking of the myth that employing people in manufacturing is important for prosperity.

He shows that while manufacturing employment has fallen, manufacturing output has increased.   

But we aren’t being hollowed out.  We still make lots of stuff.  Not
that that’s the key to our prosperity.  But even if you think it is,
the basic premise is false.  We’re making more stuff.  We’re just doing
it with fewer people than before, which is good.  It means we can have
more of other stuff.  Productivity along with trade is the road to
wealth.

Go read the full thing. 

Here are some Danish products you might want to add to your shopping basket this week, as a way to stand up and be counted:

• Lurpak butter
• Anything sold by Arla Foods
• Tuborg beer, or Carlsberg beer if you must (either is 8 times better than Budweiser)
• Danish movies (I don’t recommend Lars Von Trier if you want to stay happy)
• Aalborg Aquavit (that’s schnapps to you and me)
• Havarti cheese (excellent on a bagel – try the dill or cumin ones)
• Toms chocolate and Royal Dansk biscuits
• That Bang & Olufsen hifi or TV you always wanted
• Some new H2O clothes
• Ecco shoes
• Some Bodum kitchenware – give up bad design for good 
• Lego for the kids
• A poster of Helena Christensen – every house needs one.

Full disclosure: my partner comes from a family of Danish dairy farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by this boycott.

Update: See also:

• Danish.com
• Danish Food Shop
• Danish Deli
• Danelink.com

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill now before Parliament apparently grants ministers the power to make or change legislation by regulation.

"Henry VIII powers" is the Westminster slang for legislation which confers on Ministers the ability to amend Acts of Parliament by regulation. (If anybody knows why, please let us know in the comments.) 

Some Bills contain Henry VIIIth clauses to enable ministers to amend the operation of the new policy in the light of experience.  Parliament has been sceptical of any proposals to grant such powers, unless they are very tightly defined and limited, as they can provide the Executive with powers to amend legislation to implement policies which have not been scrutinized by Parliament. Such Henry VIIIth clauses are often either thrown out, or amended to limit the circumstances in which the powers can be exercised.

Presumably because they had become frustrated at their inability to sneak such powers into each piece of legislation, the government appears to have decided to go for the sledgehammer approach instead, by proposing a general Henry VIIIth power.  I am not a lawyer, but the new bill seems to me to be drawn very widely:

A Minister of the Crown may by order make provision for either or both of the following purposes—

(a) reforming legislation;

(b) implementing recommendations of any one or more of the United Kingdom Law Commissions, with or without changes.

There are some conditions on the use of these powers, but they do not offer much reassurance:

(a) the policy objective intended to be secured by the provision could not be satisfactorily secured by non-legislative means;

(b) the effect of the provision is proportionate to the policy objective;

(c) the provision, taken as a whole, strikes a fair balance between the public interest and the interests of any person adversely affected by it;

(d) the provision does not remove any necessary protection;

(e) the provision does not prevent any person from continuing to exercise any right or freedom which that person might reasonably expect to continue to exercise.

To my eye, this seems to be the mother and father of all Henry VIII powers.  I expect we will be told that, like the abolition of local council   elections which has been floated this week, these changes will make the business of government much more efficient and streamlined.  No doubt there is some truth in that; but there are other criteria which are also important in determining the arrangements by which we want to be governed.

See more at The Last Ditch, Bishop Hill and Talk Politics

From today’s news.

I intended this as a spoof,
on November 3rd last year,
not as a recommendation!
 

Sometimes I am very proud of the UK Department for International Development (full disclosure: I am on sabbatical leave from DFID).  Today is one of those days.  Sarah Bosely in the Guardian today:

The British government will today publicly defy the United States by giving money for safe abortion services in developing countries to organisations that have been cut off from American funding. …

The "global gag" rule, as it has become known, was imposed by President George Bush in 2001. It requires any organisation applying for US funds to sign an undertaking not to counsel women on abortion – other than advising against it – or provide abortion services.

The UK will today become the founder donor of a fund set up specifically to attempt to replace the lost dollars and increase safe abortion services.

via gendergeek

Update: BBC has the story here 

Grethe and ran the Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon yesterday. 

A beautiful cool, clear day, with sunshine as the race ended and we went for brunch in the city. 

G ran 1:34:04 – a bit slower than last year but she finished feeling strong, so she could have run faster.

I ran 1:18:03, 14 seconds slower than last year (but an improvement in age-graded terms.) Got overtaken by Caroline Annis with half a mile to go, exactly like last year.

<geek> 

Memo to self – this was how I cleaned up my Lacie 500Gb external backup drive which was giving read/write errors.

umount /dev/sdg1
e2fsck -fyc /dev/sdg1


Then go out for 3 hours …

</geek> 

This should not need saying.  Where did anyone get the idea that they have the right to "respect" for their religion? 

The right to religious freedom is the right to have and express beliefs and to worship as believe your religion demands.  But there is no right to be free from criticism or ridicule for what you believe.  Nor is there any right to require others to share your superstitions, or behave as if they did.

If you want to believe that wine turns into blood, that it is wrong to turn on a light on Saturday,  that it is immoral to draw pictures of prophets, that virgins give birth, or that Taurus should not marry Pisces, that is fine by me.   Gather on hillsides waiting for the second coming, get together and sing songs, or throw salt over your shoulder if you want.  Such are your rights.

But do not think that, just because you hold those beliefs dearly, that they are immune from criticism or ridicule.   You do not have the right to expect others to respect your beliefs, even if you label them as your religion.  You may be insulted by the knowledge that other people do not share your beliefs, or by their behaviour; but that is their right.  You do not have the right not to be insulted.

I am offended when the Pope argues against using condoms in Africa, even though they would help to prevent the spread of AIDS.  I am offended by the treatment of women by Christian and Islamic religious traditions.  I am offended by the way that Judaism treats homosexuals.  But just because I am offended by these things does not give me the right to prevent others from believing them, or to try to stop them from acting in accordance with their beliefs.

The limitation on free speech is that there is no right to incite violence against you.   This limitation protects you if you have religious views, or if you have none.  It follows from respect for you as a person, not respect for your beliefs.

So what was Jack Straw thinking of when he said this?

Let me say this about these cartoons. I make no comment about their
original publication, that is a matter for the Danish public,
parliament and Danish law. But there is freedom of speech, we all
respect that, but there is not an obligation to insult or to be
gratuitously inflammatory, and I believe that the re-publication of
these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has
been disrespectful and it has been wrong. And if I may say so, I place
on record my regard for the British media who have shown considerable
responsibility and sensitivity in this regard.

What we also have to remember is that there are taboos in every
religion. It is not the case that there is open season in respect of
all aspects of Christian rights and rituals in the name of free speech,
nor is it the case that there is open season in respect of the rights
and rituals for the Jewish religion, the Hindu religion, the Sikh
religion, and it should not be the case in respect of the Islamic
religion either. So we have to be very careful about showing proper
respect in this situation.

(my emphasis)

It would be ludicrous to say that there is an obligation to insult or be gratuitously inflammatory. But there is a right to insult or be gratuitously inflammatory.

Straw’s metaphor of "open season" is unfortunate.  Open season is a hunting term denoting a time of year when it is lawful to hunt or trap.  It is never right to harm people, whether religious or not.  But as far as I am concerned, it is always "open season" if that means being able to criticize or ridicule rituals and superstitions, whether they are Christianity, witchcraft, Moonies, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, astrology, belief in Santa Claus, or faith in homeopathic medicines.  I feel no tinge of regret about insulting people who hold these superstitions.

People who have been offended by the publication of cartoons have every right to boycott whatever products they like.  They do not have the right to call for violence against those who have published them.

I think it is a pity that the British newspapers have not reproduced the cartoons.  There is a charming myth that when the Nazi authorities instructed that Danish jews should wear a Star of David armband, the King of Denmmark appeared the next day wearing a Star of David himself, in solidarity.  I hope that every newspaper that believes in free expression of ideas will publish the cartoons, and that we challenge those who are offended by that to boycott products from every one of those countries. 

Update: The US State Department has joined the debate:

We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it
must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds
in this manner is not acceptable.

So much for our allies in the fight for freedom.

Anatole Kaletsky in The Times:

While America has been run by one of the most doltishly ineffectual governments in history, it has forged ever further ahead of Europe in terms of wealth, science, technology, artistic creativity and cultural dominance.

Why does America’s prosperity and self-confidence seem to bear so little relationship to the competence of its government? The obvious answer is that America, founded on a libertarian theory of minimal government, has always had low expectations of politicians.

This much is true. But he completely fails to provide evidence to support his main conclusion:

American politicians may be incompetent and venal, even by European standards, but this is not true of the public realm as a whole. America has a host of public institutions, ranging from government bodies such as the Federal Reserve and the National Institutes of Health to charities such as the great universities, museums and hospitals, that are driven by a sense of public service that puts British and European bureaucracies to shame.

The American system recognises that a capitalist economy has areas of market failure where incentives alone will not produce socially desirable results. But American public institutions try to maximise private activity and incentives, rather than rein them in, within their realms — whether it is universities encouraging professors to start businesses, or health administrators creating incentives for drugs companies to do medical research.

So is Kaletsky right that America has a quasi-public sector run on private sector principles and which produces better results than European nations?

Let’s look at his example of the National Institutes of Health.  This is a public sector body in America, not a private sector body (unlike, say, the Wellcome Trust in the UK).  Furthermore, the people who I know who work there say that it is like any other public sector bureaucracy. It is true that the US has more success in medical R&D than Europe, but then the US spend more than twice as much on R&D as Europeans (much more, in the case of medical R&D).  Furthermore, it isn’t just the private sector that spends more: the US taxpayer spends twice as much on R&D as the OECD average for government spending, even as a share of GDP.  The reason the NIH gets good results is that they have a budget of $29 billion a year – all of it taxpayer dollars.

So what does the NIH example prove? Not Kaletsky’s proposition that the US has successful, semi-private bodies providing public services.  All this shows is that some public sector bodies can produce good results if you give them enough money.

More commonly, the trend in the US that Kaletsky describes of America’s reluctance to build effective public institutions has led to significant failures, which were brutally exposed by Hurrican Katrina.  From health care to broadcasting, America’s distrust of institutions that are socially funded and managed by public servants who are accountable to government has left gaping holes in its social fabric.  Not, as Kaletsky would have us believe, a system of genius.

I’ve been critical of Google’s decision to operate a censored search engine in China. Since then, there have been three important contributions to the debate, which I think are worthy of a reply, as they are all based on a false premise.

First, Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s Senior Policy Counsel, posted this explanation of their decision.  He says that this was a difficult judgement, but that Google wanted to

provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people

and, crucially, that

Filtering
our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer
Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however,
does so far more severely.

Second, my Dad, Brian Barder, posted this comment which argues for constructive engagement:

The best policy for dealing with authoritarian states which impose
censorship and other illiberal restrictions on their citizens is almost
always to encourage them to open up by maximising their contacts with
the outside world.

Finally, this debate was picked up by MatGB, who quotes my father’s argument and adds:

The more people in China are exposed to the rest of the world, the more likely that change will come

The premise which underlies all three of these arguments is that the result of Google’s decision to establish their google.cn service is to provide citizens of China with more access to information than they would have had otherwise, albeit censored according to rules set by the Chinese Government.  Then, it is argued, the benefit to the Chinese people of the increased information might justify the collaboration with Chinese censorship that is required, because this greater openness encourages China to open up and maximise contacts with the outside world.  Some contact, even if constrained, is better than none.

But the premise is false.  The result of Google’s decision is not an increase in the amount of search information available in China. From inside China, it used to be possible to access the main Google search engine in Chinese at http://www.google.com/ig?hl=zh-CN  It is true that some of those searches were blocked by the Great Firewall of China, and the user received an error if they searched on "Tianamen Square".  Most searches were not blocked.  Now that google.cn has been established, anyone trying to access google.com from a Chinese IP address is redirected to the censored search engine.   So the effect of Google’s decision to establish google.cn has not been to increase the amount of information available to the Chinese people; it is merely that Google now does the work of the Chinese government by censoring the searches according to the same rules.

It is therefore a barefaced lie for Andrew McLaughlin to claim that the alternative to establishing google.cn was "Failing to offer
Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population".  As he  knows, there was an alternative in place, namely a Chinese language search on Google’s US servers, sometimes filtered by the Chinese Government. 

If it were true that the censored google.cn search engine provides more information than the old google.com searches as seen through the Great Firewall, then Google might be able to defend the justification that this is a form of constructive engagement.  Even then, there would be a balancing act required to judge between the good of somewhat better access to search results against the harm of collaborating with Chinese censorship.  But google.cn does not provide search to people who were otherwise denied it; it just makes the experience of having your internet searches censored a bit more slick and less obvious.

Google’s decision was not motivated by the hope that it would make China more open, because it won’t.  It was a purely commercial decision, based on Google’s desire to curry favour with the Chinese authorities, the need to recruit China’s talented and cheap engineers in the future, and  the fear that they will lag behind other, less principled companies in building market share in China unless they begin to build their brand and market share today. 

What could Google have done instead?  They could have supported and promoted anonymous web proxies outside China, such as Tor, so that users in China could have had uncensored search results.

I agree with Andrew Shieh at Stanford, that if Google is to continue to censor search results on behalf of the Chinese Government, and if their goal is more openness, then they should take the following steps:

1. The minimum that Google must do is to show the "Local regulations prevent us from showing all the results" disclaimer on the top
   of the search results, rather than hiding it away on the bottom.
   Everyone who is receiving censored search results deserves to know that
   the results are tainted.
2. In addition to the disclaimer, Google.cn could promote anonymous web browsing proxies such as Tor, so users in China can view the uncensored web rather than the filtered and often deceptive results that Google.cn displays.
3. Google
   could further expand the disclaimer, by describing precisely what
   criteria are used to remove sites from the Google.cn search listings.
   If Google is filtering sites based on government regulations, it
   shouldn’t be afraid to show us the criteria it is using. I’d personally
   like to see a list of sites that government regulations are forcing
   Google to remove; it would be far more interesting than Wikipedia’s list of terms blocked by search engines in China.

4. Google
   should continue to allow users in China to access the Google.com site,
   rather than forcing China IP addresses to be redirected to Google.cn.

Of course, they won’t do any of these, because despite the fine intentions attributed to them by my father and MatGB, and despite their own protestations, their goal is not to open China to more information, it is to build a closer relationship with the Chinese authorities to secure the future of their business there.