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Among those polled by AP, the median estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths since the war began in 2003 was 9,890. A third of respondents think less than 5,000 have died.
links for 2007-02-25
25-Feb-07
links for 2007-02-16
16-Feb-07
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Listen online for free to Nigerian music, in this case the highlife legend Rex Lawson. Possibly completely illegal, but considering his records are next to impossible to find I consider it a public service.
links for 2007-02-11
11-Feb-07
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It’s true: you learn more spending an hour with The Wire than you do with almost any blog or book.
links for 2007-02-10
10-Feb-07
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More economists should blog about their grandparents
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EconLog, Milton Friedman on Big Business vs. Freedom, Arnold Kling: Library of Economics and LibertyMilton said “Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others”. I’m confused - did he think he wasn’t an intellectual, or did he think he was the exception?
links for 2007-02-09
09-Feb-07
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Pedestrianise, design places where people can meet and hang out, widen footpaths, put in cycle lanes. Above all, stop designing cities for cars to drive through and make them places for people to be in.
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Excellent series of articles (in audio or print) on slums around the world: their problems, their benefits, and the complicated business of trying to improve conditions without messing about the people who live there.
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Excellent piece about the bravery of the Iraqi cameramen who film the aftermath of Baghdad’s endless bombings, risking attack and even death at the hands of angry crowds and militias
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Lomborg still can’t help spinning the numbers. No Bjorn, the forecasts for sea level rises have not dropped, because the new estimates are not comparable to the old.
links for 2007-02-08
08-Feb-07
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Tim responds, cluelessly as usual, but this time with extra lashings of self-contradiction.
links for 2007-02-07
07-Feb-07
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Argues the PWE doesn’t explain much once you control for levels of education. I’d like to see a similar test applied to the ‘Confucian Work Ethic which many suggest explains much of East Asia’s relative success.
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“the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding more quickly to climate change than our current generation of models indicates.” Another reason to think the new IPCC sea-level forecast may be an under-estimate.
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I wish I could understand Danish. Fascinating (even the pictures alone) pre-history of manga, with some great examples of early work by Osamu Tezuka.
The morality of inequality
06-Feb-07
I’ve had a go at Tim for claiming that world inequality is falling in spite of evidence that it isn’t, while PGL points out that Tim is using a radically oversimplified model of international trade. But let’s assume for a second that the theoretical and factual flaws in Tim’s argument do not exist and that he is right to say that poverty is falling fast in poor countries, that inequality is rising in rich countries as the rich get richer and the rest either stagnate or get poorer, and that the single force causing all this is ‘globalization’ (undefined), a natural and entirely ungovernable process.
Tim’s conclusion from all this is to proclaim his crushing triumph over Leftists everywhere, because if they oppose globalization due to its effect on inequality they must also oppose lifting untold billions out of poverty. They must embrace either inequality (and higher relative poverty) or hypocrisy. This is all finely entitled “The Morality of Rising Inequality”.
Tim might describe this kind of shift, wrongly, as a Pareto improvement, but it isn’t. It’s a win-lose-win situation for the rich-country rich, rich-country lower classes and 3rd world poor respectively. And that’s what creates the complication, because the fact is that globalization is not a completely intractable process: the free movement of goods, services and people can quite clearly be reduced or blocked completely. And in democratic societies the decision effectively lies with the losers in Tim’s scenario, since they outnumber the relevant group of winners. Well, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and as much as Tim thinks the plebs should sacrifice their futures for the benefits of their plutocrat compatriots and the distant destitute, each individual is understandably reluctant to do so, because - I think I’ve read this somewhere before - incentives matter*.
This is one reason why we do not have completely free movement of goods, services and people across borders. Left alone, it hurts too many people, even as it benefits others. Simplifying greatly, there are two potential responses to ‘globalization’ in this general framework (in reality there tends to be a mix):
- One is to erect barriers, which effectively produces a win-win-lose situation, since rich-country capitalists continue doing fine, the rich-country workers keep their jobs and the 3rd-world poor don’t get access to rich-country markets.
- The other, which I think is probably preferable, is to lower barriers but distribute enough of the gains accruing to the rich countries from the winners to the ‘losers’ that they no longer lose, producing, finally, a win-win-win situation.
Of course, the latter process already happens to some degree in most rich countries: the brute force of the market producers winners and losers, and the gains are redistributed to some degree to soften the blow and prevent bloody revolution. What many free-marketeers don’t seem to appreciate is that trying to crank up the degree of exposure and thereby creating more underlying inequality and insecurity will simply increase the demand for redistribution. Experience tells us that the short-sighted or simply greedy rich and their cheerleaders will probably do their very best to fight this, but they run the risk of provoking an even greater backlash against free markets. Ultimately, if they want those free markets, they have to embrace ever-greater redistribution. As Tim might ask, isn’t that a price worth paying?
*And so does people’s sense of justice, which may be offended by getting progressively less for the same amount of work while others get more.
links for 2007-02-06
06-Feb-07
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Fine rhetoric, but dead wrong when she tries to make any falsifiable claim: “You are moving towards disaster until and unless all those welfare state conceptions have been reversed and rejected”. Er, no.
links for 2007-02-05
05-Feb-07
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Tim says those who would trade liberty for safety deserve neither. I say people do this all the time or else millions would have migrated to no-government, no-safety Somalia. And what free-marketeer would stop people trading one thing for another?
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Surprisingly enough, this is not a story from The Onion.
Johnathan Pearce, possibly the last reality-based Samizdatista, tries vainly to explain to his colleagues and readers that environmentalism is not actually a vast leftist conspiracy:
The fact may be that the planet is genuinely getting warmer and that human activity has helped to cause that. Pollution of the air, seas and rivers is a problem for someone who is polluted. The destruction of ancient woodlands and the loss of flora and fauna is bad.
If this seems to you like stating the blindingly obvious, that is because you are not used to posts like this, which see a proposal that we educate children about climate change as the slippery slope to a Soviet-style police state . This illustrates what Jonathan is up against, and why I think he cannot win: the implications of admitting the reality of environmental problems have driven Samizdatistas (like many other free-marketeers) crazy with fear and paranoia, and they have taken refuge, ironically enough for “a blog for people with a critically rational individualist perspective”, in relativism, groupthink, and a heartfelt attachment to the doctrine of individual irresponsibility. The tragedy of it is that a pragmatic rather than a fundamentalist belief in the power and importance of markets is not just compatible with but some would say essential for an environmentalist perspective. But as their regular hate-filled attacks on Muslims suggest, fundamentalism is taking over Samizdata HQ.
links for 2007-02-04
04-Feb-07
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Conversely, I think that the problem of coaxing economics out of the cave of religion is worth thinking about. One idea would be a methodological audit conducted by climate scientists, physicists and others who are outside the economic science field.
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“Conservatives aren’t sure whether inequality is rising, and they don’t really care if it is. Their primary concern is that newspapers treat the question as a matter of dispute rather than a settled fact”. And the same goes for global warming.
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Seriously, why does anyone actually read Instapundit? Is ignorance better in smaller doses or something?
links for 2007-02-01
01-Feb-07
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“The Beautiful South have split up due to musical similarities”. Now I’m even more glad I saw them last year at Glastonbury, where they were great.
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Great post: “Countries with poor or non-existent labor standards seem to do particularly well, it seems. Saudi Arabia, for instance, doesn’t allow workers to organize … and yet it receives a very high score in the “Employing Workers” category.”