The United Arab Emirates says it will use robots as jockeys for camel races from next season.

The move comes after widespread international criticism of the use of young children to ride camels during the long and often hazardous races.

Aid workers say there are up to 40,000 child jockeys working across the Gulf. Many are said to be have been kidnapped and trafficked from South Asia.

The issue of child camel jockeys has been an embarrassing one for the Emirates, says the BBC’s Gulf correspondent Julia Wheeler.

Read more here, and thanks to Dylan Alexander for the pointer.

Addendum: Geekpress offers a photo.  And here is yet another photo, with an excellent quotation, courtesy of a new and excellent blog on the Arab Emirates.

Brad DeLong criticizes Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.  First, "because at least half its pages hint that the works of John Maynard
Keynes are an abomination without ever grappling with the Keynesian
argument."

Hazlitt did not say much about Keynes in his famous introduction to economics but he certainly grappled with the Keynesian argument in his lesser-known
The Failure of the ‘New Economics’: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies.

Second, DeLong quotes Hazlitt:

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate
saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of
economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of
these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might
the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all
dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the
ripest wisdom.

According to Brad this quote is "dishonest" and a "misrepresentation," but Keynes did deprecate saving and recommend squandering.  Famously:

To dig holes in the ground,” paid for out of savings, will increase,
not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and
services. (General Theory, Ch. 16).

Brad seems to think that Hazlitt quoted Keynes out of context because "What Keynes actually wrote in his Tract on Monetary Reform" was:

Now ‘in the long run’ this [way of summarizing the
quantity theory of money] is probably true…. But this long run is a
misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in
tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long
past the ocean is flat again.

But the misreading is Brad’s not Hazlitt’s.  Keynes is criticizing classical economics for focusing on the long run and this certainly includes the classical focus on savings as a key to economic growth.  Hazlitt, as Brad notes, is restating classical economics so when Hazlitt points out the long-run problems with using spending to increase short-run aggregate demand, Keynes does, in effect, reply "We are all dead in the long run."

For some, it seems, one lesson is not enough. 🙂

Mark Steckbeck (his blog is very good) writes:

Barry Schwartz believes that Americans suffer from too many choices. (PDF file) The result is that we become overwhelmed with too many choices, become depressed, and consequently lead less fulfilling.

I’m certain that Schwartz did not mean that there are too many ideas from which to choose to believe in, but why not? It’s overwhelming listening to political ads during campaigns or editorials and stories on major topics in newspapers. As Ronald Coase said, the reasons for regulating markets for goods is no different than the reasons for regulating markets for ideas, execpt that there’s probably more reason to regulate the latter.

I wonder which ideas Schwartz recommends we eliminate from the set from which we choose.

Cataracts cloud her eyes and arthritis stiffens her spine, but Maria Luisa Torres, 70, still walks the streets of the Merced selling her body, as do many elderly women in the downtown heighborhood…Among the thousands of prostitutes in North America’s largest city are hundreds of women in their sixties, seventies and eighties who continue to sell themselves to earn cash to buy food or medicine…

Some of the prostitutes are eighty-five years old.

Men know she is not young, but she chooses to think that "an antique can be more valuable than something new," she explained.  She strolled through Jardin Loreto, a nearby park, saying to passing men: "Amor, vamos?" or "My love, shall we go?"  After agreeing on a price — often $5 or less — she leads her customer to one of the many run-down hotel rooms nearby.  She has been doing this for decades, since she left the coconut fields in Western Mexico.  At first she had higher hopes and opened a little sandwich kiosk.  But "not even a fly would stop" at her stand, and she turned to the only sure money she could find.

Here is the full story.

One of my Ph.d. students asked me that question.  Similarly, you might wonder whether Hayek adds to the Arrow-Hahn-Debreu equilibrium framework.  Joe Stiglitz insists no; my answer ran as follows:

The invisible hand theorem assumes some (possibly weakened) version of perfect markets.  It suffices for everyone to simply maximize utility or profit, and then all supply and demand curves will cross.  Under spontaneous order, cross-market externalities are more significant.  Markets are imperfect, so people look to institutions — and other markets — to orient their behavior and to predict the unknowable future.  Market choice is a game of interpreting symbols, drawing inferences, and mapping an understanding of context to the appropriate situations.  The resulting order is greater and more complex than the partial equilibrium story we might tell about any single market.

As for Adam Smith, he was closer to Hayek…But the dilemma of the Austrian School is whether it can tell this story without economic analysis collapsing into pure context-dependence.  How much do we really know about how people interpret economic signals?  So far experimental economics — as exemplified by Vernon Smith — has done the most to bridge these gaps.

Another question I heard this week: "Why is it that older people start going deaf, yet still object more to loud music?"  I couldn’t really answer that one either.

A member of the Canadian parliament apparently required that constituents who wanted his help in obtaining visitor visas first post a bond promising that the visitor would return to the home country.   (It’s unclear whether any actual exchanges of money took place or whether this was a publicity stunt designed to promote a bill implementing a more formal procedure.)

The ethics of an MP offering money for services is questionable but the basic idea is sound.  Australia, for example, has had a Security Bond system for nearly five years.  Family who wish to sponsor visitors may be asked to post a bond which is subject to forfeiture if the visitor fails to keep to the terms of the visa.  The bond system is good for the government which has fewer illegal visitors to track down (note that I am not here taking a position on the merits or demerits of immigration) but it’s also good for prospective visitors.

Under the old system if the government thought that a visitor might violate the terms of the visa they didn’t let him in.  Now the family can post a bond and the visitor is allowed entry – moreover, since the money is returned when the visitor leaves, the system has low costs for honest entrants and their families.  Since implementing the system most visitors (68%) are required to post bonds and the entry rate has increased.  A good deal all around.

Brad DeLong notes:

When can deficit spending in a recession help?

1. When it is part of a stable and sustainable structure of economic policy, so that nobody fears that it is the beginning of a process of rampant inflation or expropriation. In that case deficit spending will have no deleterious effects on investment, and to the extent that it gets more money into the hands of those who are temporarily short of cash it will boost demand and employment.
2. When things are already so bad (as in 1933 and 1934) that there is no investment anyway: if business confidence is already at its nadir, deficit spending cannot do any harm by reducing investment, and does good by putting people to work and boosting their incomes and their demand.

I’ll add further conditions, none of them absolute.  First, it should be accompanied by an expansionary yet stabilizing monetary policy (similar to Brad’s first condition).  Second, the money should be well spent, ideally on durable infrastructure.  Third, fiscal policy should be a signal of a government’s competence or seriousness about fighting the recession.  Fourth, I doubt it does much good if the core problem is bankrupt or otherwise malfunctioning financial institutions.

Mostly I am a skeptic about fiscal policy, if only because discretionary fiscal changes tend to be small relative to modern wealthy economies.