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How many species extinctions is too many?
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Grass-feeding cattle makes sense economically and environmentally, but it’s still the minority option because farm subsidies make corn and soy exceedingly cheap and hence, lower the costs of feedlots.
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“‘the extinction crisis’—the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today—is over, and we have lost”.
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“If matrimony as an institution has declined, it is because fewer people are marrying in the first place … [I]ndividuals are probably making better matches. Perhaps there should have been fewer marriages in the first place.”
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The libertarian critique of mass transit is somewhat flimsy
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Higher inequality in poorer countries tends to mean lower growth, worse institutions and social discord.
links for 2007-04-30
30-Apr-07
links for 2007-04-29
29-Apr-07
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A very welcome addition to the blogosphere
How think-tanks work
28-Apr-07
Those enterprising fellows at the Globalisation Institute announced the other day that they are “now Europe’s favourite think tank blog”. Showing their customary regard for evidence, they neglected to mention on what grounds they were making this claim. So I submitted a comment asking them. So they blocked it.
links for 2007-04-28
28-Apr-07
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“birds appear to be singing at night to avoid competition with high noise levels caused by our cities during the day”
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As Mark Lynas says, if you’re going to kill someone, do it in a car. He could have added that if you only seriously injure them, you probably won’t get prosecuted at all!
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A sordid tale of deeply shabby behaviour from the climate change delusionists.
links for 2007-04-25
25-Apr-07
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“the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.”
links for 2007-04-24
24-Apr-07
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Land tenure in Africa: it’s not as simple as you think, even if you already think it’s very complicated indeed.
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Excellent post on political philosophies and prediction markets vs deliberation as means of decision-making.
links for 2007-04-21
21-Apr-07
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“climate change might further ‘lock’ countries into cycles of low and fluctuating agricultural growth and limited poverty reduction”
links for 2007-04-18
18-Apr-07
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Alarming: “at the margin an IMF program targets only 27 cents of each additional dollar of aid for use towards higher public expenditures… The rest is supposed to go to building up external reserves or paying down domestic debt.”
links for 2007-04-17
17-Apr-07
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Appropriately terrifying. Also makes me glad bowling isn’t a major sport in England.
links for 2007-04-16
16-Apr-07
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In many important respects –not least health– Africa’s post-colonial record remains one of considerable success.
links for 2007-04-12
12-Apr-07
links for 2007-04-11
11-Apr-07
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The delusionists are getting desperate.
links for 2007-04-09
09-Apr-07
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“the Coalition and Iraqi governments’ statements that during the first three years of occupation, Iraq’s violent-death rate was lower than those of Russia, Estonia, Latvia, South Africa and Kazakhstan remain an implausible contrast with our findings”.
links for 2007-04-08
08-Apr-07
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“Once again, an inverse association between wealth and learning appeared”
links for 2007-04-03
03-Apr-07
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Yep, that more or less sums it up for me: “The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to avoid being deceived by economists.” - Joan Robinson.
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“Cambodia, which has an average per capita income of less than $1 per day, pays as much in tariffs on its $2 billion in exports to the United States as does France on $37 billion”.
Open secrets of trade and development
02-Apr-07
Here’s me in comments to Tim’s post yesterday:
the Asian economies that experienced high growth in the 20th century (and I include 1980s-1990s China in this) were typically highly interventionist and only significantly liberalised after the onset of sustained high growth, ie exactly the opposite of what you claim to be the magic formula.
And today I read Dani Rodrik in the FT (via Brad DeLong), saying:
what about China and India, which have taken off in the past quarter-century? Are they not proof that poor nations need the current variant of globalisation instead of the Bretton Woods variant?Actually, no. What is striking about China, India and a few other Asian countries that have done well recently is that they have played the globalisation game by the Bretton Woods rulebook. These countries did not significantly liberalise their import regimes until well after their economies had taken off; they continue to restrict short-term capital inflows. They have used industrial policies - many banned by the WTO - to restructure their economies and enable them to better take advantage of world markets.
I’m genuinely curious why such basic facts about some remarkable development success stories are so widely ignored by professional economists.
links for 2007-04-02
02-Apr-07
Climate change and poverty
01-Apr-07
I’ll leave aside the intellectual dishonesty of Tim’s feeble attempt to paint the IPCC as prescribing policies for higher economic growth in poor countries, as Stuart does a good filleting job in the comments. I’m more interested in Tim’s last paragraph:
But if we are indeed concerned, as perhaps we ought to be, with the effects of climate change upon the poor, the best solution would seem to be that by the time the climate change comes, there are no poor?
The implication being that if climate change was affecting the poor right now, then we should do something about it right now instead of sitting around and waiting for neoliberal economics to work it’s as-yet-less-than-obvious magic. This is a clarion call to action, even if Tim didn’t mean it that way.
The problem for Tim is that climate change is already happening, as he admits in comments (but without feeling the need to change his post - nice!). He just thinks that it hasn’t caused any ’substantial ill effects’ yet.
Well, he should have a gander at this research by Luisito Bertinelli and Eric Strobl into the effects of shifting rainfall patterns on growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. They estimate that a fall in rainfall since the 1960s accounts for up to a quarter of the gap African GDP per capita and the rest of the world (and thus a very big chunk of the gap in growth rates that widened over the same period).
If more drought, starvation, conflict and poverty aren’t ’substantial ill effects’, I don’t know what are.
I’m guessing the decrease in rainfall was linked to warming since the 1960s but the point stands even if it wasn’t: poorer countries are far more vulnerable to climate change of any kind so we should urgently do what we can to help them avoid the worst consequences, as we do for ourselves. This sense of responsibility, which Tim implicitly endorses, is independent of the extra moral obligation we have as the main culprits behind what is by now certainly the most important driver of climate change, anthropogenic global warming.
Since Tim also conceded that his favoured policy solution of generalised ‘liberalisation hasn’t helped Africa very much so far, partly due to the problems posed by its geography, surely he has to face the facts, hold his nose and agree that - horrors! - increasing (and improving) aid to Africa might not be such a bad idea after all?
All that money - and for what?
01-Apr-07
William Easterly, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal (reproduced by Mark Thoma), said little to add to his usual well-worn spiel (summary: Jeff Sachs is a dangerous communist and aid does more harm than good). Much of it repeats the errors or sleights of hand I’ve discussed before, but I thought I’d take a new look at the claim I dubbed “Easterly’s Fallacy“, namely that despite receiving around $450 billion in aid Africa got poorer so aid doesn’t work. Easterly repeats a version of it in the WSJ, claiming that “aid amounted to 14% of total income year in and year out in the average African country since independence”*.
What puzzles is why Easterly (and other aid critics) focus so much on the money given to poor governments by rich ones, and so little on the money given by poor governments to rich ones. After all, at the same time as billions of dollars flowed to African governments in the form of aid, billions of dollars were flowing the other way in the form of debt service, a flow which increased massively when interests rates spiked in the early 1980s and African countries found themselves saddled with enormous debts. I’ve run some data here, and the results (shown in the chart below) are striking: the net value of aid over debt service is frequently very low and occasionally negative - at these points, it was more a case of Africans financing us rather than the other way around. Maybe they should be the ones asking what they’ve got to show for it?
*By the way, this is a very misleading way to represent the importance of aid in Africa, since it gives tiny and highly aid-dependent countries such as Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe the same weight as Nigeria. Aid as a % of total Sub-Saharan Africa GNI, a much less distorted figure, has tended to be in the low single figures.
Addendum: Before anyone points it out, yes I know that there are other flows going on at the same time, such as the loans themselves, not to mention capital flight. But (a) I don’t know how to net all the flows off against each other, (b) this is mainly to illustrate that the story is not the simple one of rich countries simply funneling vast quantities of money to poor ones.