Category: Current Affairs

Alex is back, alive and well.  But he still has a raspy voice from sucking in all that air pollution.  Here is one reason why, as explained by Brad Plumer:

China’s central government is well aware that its blackened rivers and
sunless skies are a problem, not just because they’re sparking riots
and social unrest, but because out-of-control environmental degradation
is imperiling the country’s economic growth. Lately, Beijing has issued
a slew of bold–at least on paper–environmental regulations. But the
laws are doing little good because the central government can barely
enforce them in its own provinces. This structural problem will remain
the key to China’s environmental dilemma, and, as countries attempt to
push Beijing toward a cleaner future, they’ll discover that the capital
is the least of their troubles.

The central government has passed some fairly "green" laws but often to little avail:

Beijing is aware of this local lawlessness, but has had little success
handling it. "China used to send in swat teams from the central
government," says Barbara Finamore, who directs the Natural Resources
Defense Council’s (NRDC) China program. "I’ve seen these campaigns
going on for twenty years– they’ll come in, shut down some factories,
and, when they leave, they’ll open up again."

What do you all think?  To me it looks at least ten years overdue.  Here is more information, including pictures of previous logos, hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Dan Rothschild, a co-worker of mine at GMU, writes:

The lesson of Katrina that matters the most is that the promise of federal assistance that will likely never materialize can be as destructive as the initial disaster…

What residents need in this maw of confusion is certainty. They need to know which roads will be rebuilt, and when the power and water will come back online. They need to know that the rule of law will be enforced. In short, they need to know what economists call the "rules of the game" for rebuilding.

These rules are critical to the myriad private-sector decisions that follow and signal whether and how a community will rebuild. Decisions about insurance coverage, when and where grocery stores, banks and numerous other businesses will reopen, and where children will play are vital private-sector decisions that require clear, credible commitments from the public sector to be made efficiently…

What residents of disaster-stricken areas don’t need are vague promises from officials that add to the confusion and force residents to delay the millions of decisions, small and large, they need to make to re-create a viable community. And they don’t need government leaders to make promises that are unlikely to be kept.

The dirty secret of government disaster response is that what’s promised immediately after a disaster seldom comes to fruition. Just ask the 75,000 Louisiana homeowners who are still waiting for their Road Home rebuilding checks, or the Floridians living in FEMA trailers 15 years after Hurricane Andrew.

"Obama is a graduate from a first-class university," the editorial
continued. "He is a symbol of assimilation rather than a representative
of different races coming together. Obama did not break the superiority
complex of white people. On the contrary, his appearance strengthened
the superiority complex of white people."

The article is interesting throughout.

A May 31 Metro article about the Scripps National Spelling Bee misspelled last year’s winning word. The correct spelling is serrefine.

The paper, The Washington Post, had chosen the obviously incorrect "serrifine."  Here is my source.

Addendum: Whoops!  I have corrected my spelling error.  At least I wrote the mistaken spelling of the newspaper correctly rather than vice versa, force of habit took over I suppose.

A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in
his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious
when food mysteriously began disappearing.

Police found the
58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s
closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki
Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

Even better is how he caught her:

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted
images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing
from his kitchen over the past several months.

Hat tip goes to Instapundit.

This war has spread to New Jersey:

There’s East Rutherford, then Carlstadt, then Moonachie, then — whoosh—
faster than the car radio can play the latest hit single, you’re in
Little Ferry, the next borough over. That’s four boroughs in one song.
You pass through Moonachie during the refrain.

Moonachie is small: about 2,700 residents. That’s smaller than some New York apartment complexes. That’s just one-seventh of the seating capacity of the arena at Madison Square Garden.

That’s too small, says New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D).

Corzine, who presided over mergers and acquisitions as chairman of Goldman Sachs, is telling hundreds of New Jersey’s smallest towns and boroughs that they are too small to exist. Multiple
layers of government are financially wasteful, he says, and the
littlest towns and boroughs need to merge with their bigger neighbors
to achieve economies of scale.

Corzine’s incentive — more like a hammer — is a threatened cutoff of state aid.

I would be disappointed if they did away with East Rutherford and Moonachie.  Here is the full story.

Check them out.

Right now I’m sitting in a country ryokan, listening to a very serious old man play the harmonium for a group of appreciative Japanese senior citizens, all dressed in kimonos, all next to a very large stuffed deer.

1. Brazil has become a net creditor nation for the first time in its history.

2. About 15% of the Congress is under formal investigation for crimes, ranging from attempted homicide to money laundering.

3. Since 2005 more than 20 million people have entered "the middle class," defined as a monthly income of $635.  The percentage of middle-class Brazilians has grown from 34% to 46%.

Those facts are all from "Brazil Joins Front Rank of New Economic Powers," in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.

Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Vernon Smith, Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Steven Davis, Francis X. Diebold, Martin Eichenbaum, Martin Feldstein, Kevin Hassett, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Anne Krueger, Deepak Lal, Burton Malkiel, Paul W. McCracken, Allan Meltzer, Tim Muris, June O’Neill, Michael E. Porter, Kenneth Rogoff, Richard Roll, Harvey Rosen, George Shultz, Beryl Sprinkel, John Taylor, and Arnold Zellner.

I was sent that list in an email.  The opening of the statement reads:

We enthusiastically support John McCain‘s
economic plan. It is a comprehensive, pro-growth, reform agenda. The
reform focuses on the real economic problems Americans face today and
will face in the future. And it builds on the core economic principles
that have made America great.

His plan would control government
spending by vetoing every bill with earmarks, implementing a
constitutionally valid line-item veto, pausing non-military
discretionary government spending programs for one year to stop their
explosive growth and place accountability on federal government
agencies.

No, I don’t do endorsements but if I were tempted to (and I’m not) I would this year be even more suspicious than usual.  I feel that the candidates are trying to trick me and the one who isn’t — Hillary Clinton, whose negatives are too transparent to my eyes — has been trying to trick everyone else. 

I’ll put the rest of the letter in the first comment, but in the meantime my advice — at least for this year — is to vote on the basis of foreign policy.

By 2015, Moscow will boast the 10 tallest office buildings in Europe–and already prime office rents in Moscow are going above $2,000 a square meter, 50 percent higher than the most prestigious skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan.

Here is more, interesting throughout, and thanks to John Bailey for the pointer.

Addendum: Don’t forget this part — about corruption — either:

Indeed, by some estimates, Russia’s GDP growth should have been closer to 14 percent–after all, Russia is the world’s largest energy exporter at a time when prices have tripled during the last half decade.

… it is important that presidential candidates fear economists…

Brad DeLong, writing about why what a politician says about a minor policy like the gas-tax matters. Of course it is even better if the public are informed and on the gas-tax they seemed to have made the right decision.

Yes, the first is about agricultural productivity, that still-neglected issue:

Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.

Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC’s village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers.

Knowing the fair market value of crops allows farmers to fetch better prices and circumvent local traders who used to dictate terms. Farmers can also sell wheat and other crops to ITC.

The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.

Here is the link.  Here is the second story, with photos at the link:

Mukesh Ambani, the fifth richest man in the world, is building the most expensive single family residence ever, a $2 billion — yes, BILLION — 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai.

Here is one obituary.  Tilly was a historical sociologist but he had an influence on economic history as well, including the New Institutional Economics:

Dr. Tilly mined immense piles of original documents for raw data and
contemporary accounts – including municipal archives, unpublished
letters and diaries – that he used to develop theories applicable to
many contexts. A particular interest was the development of the nation
state in Europe, which he suggested was partly a military innovation.
In his 1990 book “Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990”
(Blackwell), he argued that the increasingly large costs of gunpowder
and large armies required big, powerful nation states with the power to
tax.

In 1985, he gave early indications of his argument that war
made states in an article that said nation states, with their
monopolies on violence, function like gangsters’ protection rackets. He
said that governments emphasize, create and stimulate external threats,
then ask their citizens to pay for defense.

I think of his mid-career work as being most important, such as his The Formation of National States in Western Europe.  In any case America has lost one of its leading social scientists.  Wikipedia offers good links.  Here is Tilly on how to do social science work, recommended.