Owen abroad

Archive for April, 2006

I am not one of those who believe the World Bank should be shut down.  Indeed, if anything, I would prefer to see the multiplicity of bilateral aid agencies and NGOs shut down, and all the money put through a single world institution instead.    The World Bank is far from perfect; but it is an absolutely vital part of the fight against global poverty.

One problem with the World Bank is that decisions continue to be made on the basis of "one dollar one vote", reflecting the continuing pretense that it is nothing more than a lending insitution owned by its shareholders, rather than the strategic international institution that it is.

Over on the Center for Global Development blog (CGD is my employer), Ngaire Woods makes a very interesting proposal for the reform of the governance of the World Bank.

… for about 174 members of the Bank, there is little incentive to engage in decisions being made by the Board. Eight Directors can marshal a majority among themselves with little if any consultation with others.

This does not have to be the case. If Directors had to marshal not just 50% of votes (which might be just 8 members), but also 50% of members (92 countries) to make decisions, there would be a clear incentive for to consult and bring on board Directors who represent a large number of countries but wield few votes (such as the two Directors who represent over twenty African countries each yet each wield less than 3.5% of voting power).

This is not a difficult reform. The Bank’s Articles already provide for double-majority voting (Article VIII) for any amendment to the Articles. This could be extended to other decisions. Along with transparency of the Board’s process such as publication of the full minutes of any Board meeting so that countries can read exactly what their Director has said in Board meetings, would be first steps towards a more effective Board.

This seems to me a splendid proposal.  We also need to stop the board from micromanaging every decision taken by the World Bank, focusing instead on strategic direction – perhaps a change like that would help to force the Board to move more "upstream" in its deliberations? 

NB: I’ve disallowed comments on this post here: if you agree (or not), visit the CGD blog and comment there.

I have never thought of my gaff in the Elephant and Castle as being in a fashionable part of London – though I personally like the area, and I think it is underrated (and hence relatively cheap, considering how central it is).

But I see from this article in The Observer that, unbeknownst to me, I in fact live on the fringe of a fashionable part of the city.  Gaby Hinsliff and Conal Walsh criticize Sean Woodward for using his MP’s allowance to pay for an appartment "London’s fashionable South Bank".  What is bizarre is that there is no suggestion that Mr Woodward has done anything wrong: he has used his additional cost allowance for exactly the purpose for which it is intended (defraying the costs of a London home that an MP needs to do his or her job) and the article admits that he has claimed no more than he is entitled to.  But Ms Hinsliff, the utterly useless political editor of the Observer, seems to think that because Mr Woodward is rich, he should forgo claiming these allowances.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian-born economist and JFK’s Ambassador to India, has died. 

Galbraith was probably the second most well-known and widely read economist of the 20th Century, after John Maynard Keynes. He was the first pop-star economist, a distinction achieved by few others (Paul Krugman and Jeff Sachs are perhaps the other two).  He spent most of his life at Harvard, though he studied for his Masters and PhD here in Berkeley.

His most well-known work was The Affluent Society, published in 1958, in which he famously contrasted ‘private affluence and public
squalor’.  He argued that public services lag behind private goods and services, in part because there is no mechanism to ensure that part of a nation’s rising prosperity is spent on public goods.  In general, as people become more prosperous they want both extra public goods – such as better schools or a clean environment – and extra private goods. Indeed the proportion of their income they would spend on public goods may well rise as a share of their income.  But in general, public goods and services do not keep pace with this demand because there is nothing like a market mechanism to ensure that public provision keeps pace. Galbraith argued that this is a political failure (though this was later analyzed somewhat differently by public choice economists). A few years ago he said:

There’s no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I
called private affluence and public squalor has become very much
greater. What do we worry about? We worry about our schools. We worry
about our public recreational facilities. We worry about our law
enforcement and our public housing. All of the things that bear upon
our standard of living are in the public sector. We don’t worry about
the supply of automobiles. We don’t even worry about the supply of
foods. Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply;
things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We’re a
world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean
houses, poor schools and expensive television. I consider that contrast to be one of my most successful arguments.

Though he had a distinguished career, and was in many ways a member of the establishment, Galbraith always saw himself as somewhat detached from the political and intellectual classes.  He coined the term "conventional wisdom", which he meant pejoratively as meaning a widely shared view which was often incorrect. 

Galbraith expressed in his autobiography (A Life in Our Times) a thought which must be familiar to every blogger today:

One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought
that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious
position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.

It is easy to underestimate Galbraith’s impact. Like Darwin’s theory of evolution, The Affluent Society seems obvious, almost clichéd, to a modern reader. But it was a revolutionary idea that private markets alone would not deliver many of the goods and services that we value as part of the good life, and we are still arguing today about the implications of this important insight.

He was also a funny man. One of his most famous aphorisms always sticks in my mind:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Tim Worstall’s weekly roundup
of the best of British Blogs is up.

The House of Commons International Development Committee has just published a very sensible and well-informed report which attacks the UK and EU negotiating strategy on the Doha trade round.

They attack the EU for trying to negotiate a "grand bargain" between the rich countries and the global south:

We consider that the Government is on the one hand defending the right of developing countries to choose their own policies, while at the same time arguing that movement in EU agriculture, which is crucial for the developing countries, is dependent on certain developing countries providing greater access to their nonagricultural markets and making offers in services. Neither the Commission nor the UK should be pressing developing countries in this way, nor should they be making EU policies dependent on actions of the developing countries. This is contrary to the idea of a development round in general and to the idea of policy space more specifically.

The EU position comes in for particular criticism:

We consider that the Commission has been inconsistent
in its advice to the developing countries. The Commission’s refusal
to practice what it preaches in respect of liberalisation threatens
the EU negotiating position. The Commission would have much greater
credibility in the eyes of developing countries if it were more
consistent. The attempt to argue that further liberalisation of
European agriculture would be harmful to the interests of the
G90 is disingenuous. The EU made a commitment to a development
round which would redress the imbalances of previous rounds by
opening its agricultural markets for developing countries. It
should not attempt to renege on this. The Commission’s offer was
insufficient to move the negotiations forward. The grand bargain
which the EU sought — with progress in agriculture being
dependent on access to developing country and US markets —
was a ‘northern agenda’ and not a development one. The Government’s
support for it was a negation of its commitment not to force liberalisation
on developing countries.  …

The Commission position must change, and there is good reason
for the Commission to act pre-emptively on this since, in the
WTO, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Such action
would demonstrate leadership and political commitment to a development
round. The developing countries have much to gain from an ambitious
outcome. The EU must not become the cause of failure.

This report is an excellent primer for anyone who wants to understand the current trade negotiations.  It is an example of the British Parliament at its best: a serious, well-informed look at the issues, reaching a cross-party consensus with clear, practical recommendations.  The Committee could easily have taken a short-term, narrow view, dominated by protectionist instincts; instead it recognises the UK’s broader and longer-term national interest in the the successful completion of a trade round which could contribute to economic growth in developing countries.  The report is a damning indictment of both EU and UK policy.

With my sister Virginia visiting from Brighton, England, we have been touring the California wine region, which is an hour north of here.

Here is a photo of me and my sister drinking champagne at the Korbel cellars at 10am in the morning, at the start of a hard day’s tasting. Grethe made the ultimate sacrifice of being the designated driver.

I have just caught up with this very interesting paper by Rod Boothby looking at the way that new web technology will affect knowledge workers.

Today, many knowledge workers feel overloaded because they are forced to react to a constant stream of email, phone calls and instant messages. Email, the phone and instant messaging have one thing in common – they are all push work flows. In other words, they interrupt what you are doing. Theoretically, people can ignore all three, but generally, socially, it is difficult to get away with ignoring all three when you are at the office. Web Office will change that. With Web Office, knowledge workers can pull the information they need when they need it. They can use directories to go straight to the right People Page or Project Page. If that doesn’t work, they can use enterprise search tools. Knowledge workers can also post information, and know that their colleagues will find it when they need it. Gone is the need to blast out an email to everyone in a large group, providing them with information they might need in the future. My colleague, Dan Hoover, puts it this way: “Web Office replaces the current manual processes of reacting to emails, and organizing emails with a system that lets the computer do the filtering and organizing for you.”

There is a revolutionary change going on here.  The kids graduating from college today regard email as my generation regarded carbon paper: it is their parents’ technology. The new generation uses instant messaging, MySpace, and wikis, not email and read-only websites.

As a manager, everything I have been taught, and everything I have learned on the job, has been about the management of people in an office – sharing information in meetings, with back to office reports, exchanging comments on draft papers, implementing central systems.  But the office of the 21st century will be different: staff will work flexibly, from home or on the road, maintaining shared knowledge for others to access as they need it.  We have not begun to understand how to organise and manage the enterprises of the future.

A self-confessed sex-fiend, the Girl with a one-track mind reports her experience of a marathon runner (not safe for work):

… I had a fling with a marathon runner for a while – damn that boy had stamina. Stamina like you wouldn’t believe. … 

But it just goes to show that there is a correlation between fitness, stamina and endurance in training, and the ability to last all night whilst shagging. I’m not saying that being able to run 26 miles will ensure your cock stays hard when you want it to – but surely it must help.

Well, possibly. The ones who aren’t too knackered from running 80 miles that week, perhaps.

According to CNN, President Bush said that reports that his administration has considered nuclear strikes against Iraq are “wild speculation”.

“And by the way, I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend. It was just wild speculation, by the way. What you’re reading is wild speculation. Which is, kind of a — you know, happens quite frequently here in the nation’s capital.

I have been around press offices long enough to know when someone is choosing their words carefully.  When a government calls says that a press report of a new policy is “speculation”, it means they are still considering it. If they were not considering a nuclear strike, or had ruled it out, they would say it is “false”.

The gang that G and I go biking with has got itself matching jerseys.  This was us this morning at Peets Coffee, before 50 miles in the hills round Lake Chabot.

My Vaccines for Development blog, which I have been maintaining for a year, has morphed into a group blog on global health policy.  Go take a look.