Archive for the ‘ Development ’ Category
Watched SiCKO last night. It’s a wonderful political tract. It strikes me as a bit more agit-prop than documentary, but it is effective and on target. The take home message is that it’s easy and effectively free to get exceptionally high quality health care and home care in other developed countries while we have to [ READ MORE ]
William Easterley has a provocative article in Foreign Policy (via). As usual, Sachs is the embodiment of developmentalism, which is dreadful because it imposes uniform solutions from the top down rather than allowing countries to discover their own route to development. The ideology of Development should be packed up in crates and sent off to [ READ MORE ]
A remarkable turn has occurred. According to the NYTimes, China has opted to invest about $4b in nonvoting shares of the Blackstone private equity group. I could be completely wrong about this, but it smacks of the same type of investment we saw in the 1970s (and since) by middle eastern countries. The huge profits [ READ MORE ]
Jared Diamond argues (1987) that we really messed up when we started planting food. [ READ MORE ]
The Pope spoke in Brasil over the weekend, according to the NYTimes. He made the following statements about a just society: Just structures are an indispensable condition for a just society, but they neither rise nor function without a moral consensus in society on fundamental values. Where God is absent — God with the human face of [ READ MORE ]
NYTimes reports that there is a kerfuffle brewing over China’s receipt of about $3b of the $4.8b distributed by the UN for power projects that prove they are displacing the production of greenhouse gases. UN officials say that the purpose of the porject is to prevent greenhouse gas production and that on this basis the [ READ MORE ]
This review at Spiked of Jeff Sachs first Reith lecture for the BBC calls him “a fitting prophet for our miserable age” for his demonstrably low expectations for eradicating poverty. It also curiously refers to his claim that we must attend to poverty if we are to live in a ’safer world’. He must have [ READ MORE ]
“A paper by John Gallup, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Mellinger in the International Regional Science Review in 1999 introduced the concept of “GDP density”, calculated by multiplying GDP per capita by the number of people per square kilometer. Basically GDP density is a measure of the total amount of economic activity that takes place at [ READ MORE ]
NYTimes reports on impact of minimum wage differences along the Washington-Idaho border and finds that higher minimum wages have not harmed–and may even have helped–local businesses. However, it doesn’t tell you why businesses think it hasn’t hurt, just that it hasn’t. [ READ MORE ]
Chavez has announced his intention of nationalizing Venezuelan utilities, thereby reversing their privatization and putting them back in the hands of the people. Thierry A. Wizman at Bear Stearns said, “This is not the first time he has changed the rules for domestic businesses,†as if the privatizations of the previous decade hadn’t radically changed [ READ MORE ]
The Guardian reports that in 2000 one percent of adults own 40% of the world’s $125 trillion in accumulated wealth. The top ten percent own 85%. And the bottom 50% own one percent. Sounds fair to me. (The NYTimes adds more detail.) [ READ MORE ]