1. Economics art gallery, at Cornell.
2. Contribution to Economist Roundtable on European banking regulation.
3. Paint can block wireless signals.
4. Interview with Tony Judt; excellent throughout, especially on Russia.
5. When should new Nobel Prizes be added?
Honestly, I think at least one Nobel-like prize should be eliminated.
Regarding Russia on Tony Judt link.
What is really missing is considering ability to influence Russia via addressing not to leaders but to population, or to reasons which cause imperial behavior ( and which are absolutely unrelated to history ).
There are many ways to influence population ( and it is possible – as if to study world values survey results – russians have great potential to be changed – and even more – these studies shed light why it goes now as it goes now – just people get out of shock of 90s and these shock is tunneled into hate towards west, instead of those who were really in charge of all those bad deeds ).
Most obvious is to teach foreign languages. US and Europe ( BBC etc ) spent a lot money to offer western view by radio broadcasting, still at a fraction of that cost it is possible to develop online learning courses ( using Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX etc ), and now it is known – online education is more efficient than face to face and this really can significantly boost penetration of western culture to Russia ( reading such blogs as yours’ for example ).
Next – recent wide genomic studies show very close Russian genetic affinity to Europeans ( especially Poles ), as genetic tests getting cheaper – the knowledge to Russians that they are Europeans could ease relations ( and the reason to use this argument is that 1) Russian officials try to make population to think them as of ‘different’ to Europeans ( as a tool in politics ), knowledge of very close relationships ( so that at genetic level poles and most Russians are hardly distinguished ) brings more hearty relationships ).
Next regarding resolving reasons why russian leaders are imperialists
These reasons are hardly historical in nature. They are based on the fact that there are two easy tools in their hands – gas and oil.
So the solution here is not to try to find something in history ( which can not be altered anyway ) but to pursue those technologies which effectively destroy most important imperial motives ( the control over simple raw goods – gas and oil ).
There are actually solutions – maybe not in few years, such as Craig Venter synthetic organisms to produce fuels. Without motives to keep hold on two simple and ‘powerful’ sources of revenue – Russian officials will have to behave less imperial-style.
as you might see – though my suggestions are not what easy to implement – still they provide tool to change the situation. While Tony Judt provides thoughts on how to deal with his essentially static picture of the world, where the solutions are only political.
Just to add to my comment above, it appears that the website also offers limited edition sets of 20 sheep stickers for $20 per set ($1/sheep), and it looks like most if not all of the sets have sold out. That’s a pretty good profit margin, considering they only paid $0.02 per sheep through the Mechanical Turk.
ЗдравÑтвуй Sergey,
read something by Richard Pipes to learn something about your country’s historical and political culture
))
Мы в Чехии уже знаем – и нет, ÑпаÑибо, нам уже не надо знать более.
RE: New Nobels
What are these soft-headed liberal scientists thinking? Global environment? That is just a code word for the sheer fantasy that is global warming. What about “public health”? That’s ridiculous. Don’t these professors understand that if you reward a field like “public health” it creates incentives to create multilateral institutions (like the UN, need I say more???) to deal with such fanciful things. Are they not familiar with libertarian scholarship? All you need to do is privatise everything and get government out, then these “externalities” will just disappear.
What about the Nobel prize itself? it’s just another example of rampant political correctness. I mean, imagine rewarding someone for making ground-breaking discoveries in physics and chemistry. Outrageous. After all science is only useful if it conforms to our world view – not when MIT science professors give credibility to the ideas of global warming and public health. If the Nobel committee were serious it would only award prizes to Chicago economics professors and perhaps to GMU economics professors every now and then – like they used to in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Nothing would do more for the credibility of the Nobel prizes.
To paraphrase a famous quote, if the big banks owe the taxpayer a few million, then the taxpayer “owns† the big banks; but if the big banks owe the taxpayer hundreds of billions, then they own the taxpayer.
Bail-outs increase the political influence of the big banks. Indeed, they turn the notion of a public interest as distinct from the private interests of the banks themselves into an oxymoron.
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