Maurits muses

Stuff I liked

2012-01-10T06:53:00.000-08:00

Very cool stop-motion animation in a Toronto bookstore: The Joy of Books

Creative use of language by Alabama linebacker Courtney Upshaw, after his team's defeat of LSU yesterday: “I’ve got to say, we outphysicaled them today”

Newest religion officially recognized by the Swedish government: the Church of Kopimi. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are their sacred symbols.

Education as a principal-agent problem

2012-01-06T07:41:00.000-08:00

The Atlantic has an interesting article by Anu Partanen on its website: "What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's schools success." The basic argument is that Finland implemented education reform about a generation ago in order to achieve equity, and that excellence is, in some sense, a fortuitous by-product.

Of course, equity (in this case, equal access to the same quality educational resources for all children, regardless of wealth, ethnicity, location, etc.) is a hard sell in the United States. As a result, Partanen suggests, the dozens of fact-finding missions that come to visit Finland each year almost willfully ignore the key lesson of Finland's model.

Partanen repeatedly cites a top Finnish education official, Pasi Sahlberg, who has written the book Finnish lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? I have not read the book, so I may be kicking in an open door here, but it appears to me that Partanen's representation of Finland's model risks overlooking its most important attribute.

Consider education as a principal-agent problem. The state would like high educational achievement for all its citizens, and can be seen as the principal. The agents who, in the end, make this goal possible are the teachers. (In between are intermediate principals/agents such as state education boards and the like, but I'm ignoring those for the sake of simplicity.)

Assume that being a good teacher has two components: learnable (a skill set) and exogenous (for example, liking children) and that only a subset of the population of possible teachers has the requisite exogenous characteristics. How do you maximize the chances that your agents are all good teachers?

There are two obvious strategies to adopt: require serious training, and offer a salary (plus non-salary perks such as 'prestige') sufficiently high to attract enough people with the exogenous characteristics needed. This is what Finland appears to have done. It is also what some of the better private schools do in the United States, with pretty good success.

Of course, both training and higher salaries cost money. How might you try to achieve the same goal more cheaply? Well, you could try to specify precisely what students need to learn, and how, and then hire agents to do exactly, and only, that. And make sure they do so by administering ever more frequent standardized tests.

These agents won't need as many skills, and they won't necessarily need the exogenous characteristics, because you have specified exactly what they'll be doing anyway. So you can pay them much less. And you'll get a large number of unmotivated, relatively unskilled teachers. You'll still get a bunch of superb teachers as well, of course, but you risk demotivating them too, since they will not be able to deploy their own capabilities to their fullest extent. This situation would seem to exist in rather too many public school systems in the United States.

However, while Finland's focus on equity may be ignored by American educational reformers, the importance of higher salaries (and prestige) and better training are not. Education reformers have been calling for both for years. In contrast to Partanen, I would bet that you could retain the system of public and private schools the United States has at the moment and still achieve much better results, as long as you were willing to commit to paying for higher teacher salaries and more extensive training.

The problem, of course, is that while the state is the principal in my little model, it is also an agent: it is the agent of the American public. So we would need to convince the American public to spend more (perhaps considerably more) on teachers. And that is perhaps an even harder sell than equity.

"He's voted for foreign aid repeatedly"

2012-01-05T08:03:00.000-08:00

Another reason not to support Ron Paul. His son, Rand, going on the attack against Santorum, said on Tuesday, on CBS's The Early Show: "On economic issues, like foreign aid — he’s voted for foreign aid repeatedly."

Now I don't actually have any idea about Santorum's general stance on foreign aid. (I suspect that, like most of the Republican candidates this election round, he's largely opposed to it.) Regardless, I find it offensive that Paul is trying to imply that any support of any foreign aid at any time is obviously wrong.

Interestingly, Paul's statement also illustrates an argument about the framing of aid I make in my book. Paul clearly sees aid as an economic issue. I don't think he is being strategic here (though he might be): he really thinks of aid in those terms. More importantly, I would argue he thinks of it in those terms not because he is a libertarian (many libertarians in Europe think of aid in humanitarian terms, and support it), but because he is an American. Foreign aid has been framed in economic or security terms in the United States for decades, much more so than is the case in other donor countries. As a result, if Americans think aid serves no economic purpose, they're much more likely to reject it than are their counterparts in, say, Denmark.

International intervention: Why Libya and not Syria?

2012-01-05T07:26:00.000-08:00

Philip Gourevitch has an interesting post at the New Yorker on the situation in Syria: The Arab Winter. It is striking to me how much stamina the protesters in Syria have displayed, given how little headway they have been able to make on their own against Assad's security forces, and how little international assistance, or even attention, they have received.

Gourevitch concludes that although the Arab League has taken some action on Syria, and has monitors on the ground now, these are likely to remain toothless. He does not deem it likely that more will happen: "Qadaffi was uniquely reviled, and uniquely disposable, and disposing of him was the easy part of the revolution (as it was with Mubarak in Egypt). With Assad it’s trickier—and the Syrian people remain hostages of that trickiness."

It is also worth thinking about geopolitics here (Gourevitch does so a little, but it is not the focus of his argument): chaos in Libya is much less worrisome to all kinds of key actors in world politics than is chaos in Syria, as a simple look at the map makes clear. What would instability in Syria mean for Israel, for Turkey, for Iraq, and for their various allies?

Still, there cannot be many other countries at the moment where the government is killing its own civilians at the same rate as Assad's troops are doing (an average of about 20 citizens per day since March, Gourevitch calculates). For those who argued for intervention in Libya on purely humanitarian grounds, that ought to mean something.

(Interesting idea for an undergraduate research project: compile data on rates of death-by-government-forces in authoritarian countries and see what kinds of patterns, if any, one can find. There are datasets on total deaths, so rates should be not that hard to deduce. But I can't think, off-hand, of anyone who has looked into them. Be the first!)

Understanding war

2012-01-04T07:44:00.000-08:00

Interesting op-ed in yesterday's New York Times by John Tirman, of MIT: "The forgotten wages of war". Tirman points out that Americans rarely debate, or even think about, civilian destruction caused by their war efforts. This is problematic because, as Tirman argues, "The consequences of how we fight wars reveals [sic] a great deal about how and why others fight us."

Tirman has an important point, but I think he overlooks a deeper issue, one that bears on why the United States has shown rather less reluctance to go to war than have European countries in recent decades. In the American imagination, a war is something you go out and fight elsewhere; for many continental Europeans, a war is something that comes and destroys your country, and nobody is immune. Different experiences during World War II and the Cold War account for most of this difference, so it may be waning. Perhaps that is too bad: as Tirman points out, a greater understanding of what war means to those who have it visited upon them is salutary.

(By the way, Tirman has apparently written a recent book about the issue: The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s War, which looks at American wars going back to World War II. The table of contents looks pretty interesting.)

Democracy, hunger, aid

2012-01-02T19:45:00.000-08:00

The famine in Somalia this fall received a fair amount of press, which likely helped increase aid flows to the country. Aid efforts appear to have helped forestall a worst-case outcome, which is great. Of course, the fact that a famine erupted at all is due in large part to the absence of a functioning government (and continual fighting between groups aspiring to be the government) in the country.

Amartya Sen famously pointed out in his classic Poverty and Famines that famines are exceedingly unlikely under a functioning, democratic government. Hunger, however, does happen; moreover, being less extreme than famine, hunger is generally under-reported. The New York Times performs a valuable service today, highlighting hunger in the Democratic Republic of Congo (in an article by Adam Nossiter).

Congo is, at least nominally, a democracy. Indeed, elections were held in November, albeit with lots of problems and irregularities. The article gives a striking illustration both of Sen's thesis and of one mechanism that might undermine it.

On the one hand, Nossiter notes that the government is interested in enriching itself, not its citizens, investing nothing in the agricultural sector. In fact, one expert suggests that all agricultural projects undertaken in the country are funded by foreign aid donors rather than the national government. This is the kind of behaviour one might expect from autocratic governments that need not rely on public support. Moreover, it is the kind of behaviour that one could imagine leading to a famine at some point in the future.

On the other hand, Nossiter suggests, the daily struggle for sustenance may make it possible for such blatant disregard for the lives of citizens to co-exist with regular (albeit rather flawed) elections. So is a famine possible in democracies with rulers who have farmed out the "caring for the survival of our citizens" to foreign aid organizations? And if so, what can/should aid organizations do about this?

How not to choose a presidental candidate: Ron Paul edition

2011-12-29T15:25:00.000-08:00

(I'm doing some research on the late Dutch libertarian politician Pim Fortuyn; in doing so, I got sidetracked into reading much more about Ron Paul than I would recommend to anyone; I figured I might as well say something about what I read.)

As numerous news outlets have reported in recent weeks, late 1980s/early 1990s newsletters published in Ron Paul's name, with articles written in the first person, featured all kinds of racist, homophobic, and generally bigoted writing. James Kirchick wrote a good analysis of these newsletters in the The New Republic; some pdfs can be found here and here, and transcriptions here.

Paul has long claimed he did not write these newsletters, and that he was unaware of their content. (Julian Sanchez & David Weigel offer a good discussion of who might have written them in Reason.) Paul's protestations seem pretty implausible, given that a) the newsletters brought in a fair amount of income for him during those years, and b) he was even then clearly someone with political ambitions.

Paul also argues that all this is old news, and that this means, in turn, that he should not have to face questions about the newsletters anymore — indeed, he recently walked out of a CNN interview where he was asked about them. At the same time, he has long conceded that he has "moral responsibility" for content that went out under his name (Matt Welch, at Reason, has an overview of Paul's responses to questions about their content). If "moral responsibility" is to mean anything at all, shouldn't it mean precisely that you do have to continue to answer questions about it?

In any case, lots of people like Paul as a candidate because he seems principled and plain-spoken. This appears be at the heart of his support among many college students, as well as of the anguished (semi-)endorsements by Andrew Sullivan (since retracted) and Conor Friedersdorf.

They are attracted to Paul, it appears, despite all that is wrong with him. As Kirchick notes in the New York Times today, he may or may not be bigoted (depending on how one interprets the newsletters), but he is definitely an inveterate conspiracy theorist. Moreover, his economic theories are completely nutty. Still, as John Cassidy pointed out in the New Yorker yesterday, Paul has many supporters who are attracted to him not for his views or his past statements, but because of "his reputation as an outsider, a plain speaker, and a scourge of the political establishment." As one 18-year old student is quoted as saying "He's real. That's what makes the difference for me."

However, shouldn't these newsletters — and Paul's response to questions about them — make it quite clear that he is in fact neither "real" (he is obviously trying to spin those newsletters and their content) nor "principled" (unless the principle is a cynical willingness to spout even the most despicable opinions in an attempt to gain adherents for a nutty economic agenda)?

What we are left with, then is that Paul is better than his competitors at seeming real and principled. Apparently that is the 2012 election's version of 2004's whether one might like to have a beer with someone. Neither, I would argue, is how one should decide whom to vote for to run the country.

The IMF as battering ram?

2011-10-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

Observers of the IMF's actions in international financial crises are fond of quoting former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor as having said that the IMF serves as a "battering ram" for U.S. interests. Google "IMF battering ram US interests" (without the quotes) and you get almost 75,000 results.

Interestingly, it is very difficult to find the original source for this quotation. Most authors either don't bother offering a citation, or simply cite another secondary source. For instance, one of the sources cited most often (indeed, it is the number one hit on the above Google search) is a 1998 article by Devesh Kapur in Foreign Affairs magazine: "The IMF: A Cure or a Curse?" Kapur mentions "former U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor's colorful rendering of the institution as a 'battering ram' for U.S. interests." He does not offer a source for this rendering, however.

A number of authors do offer a citation to the January 14, 1998 issue of the International Herald Tribune. This is the case, for example, with the third hit in the Google search: Paul Midford's article on Japan in the book Globalization and National Security (edited by Jonathan Kirshner). However, a Factiva search of the IHT for the term "battering ram" in January 1998 finds no article dated January 14. This suggests that people are simply copying citations from other secondary accounts without double-checking themselves.

The same Factiva (or Lexis/Nexis) search does find an IHT article dated January 26 (also published in the New York Times on the same date) by Philip Bowring, titled "Toward a different Asia and a less dominant dollar." This article features the line "The IMF, in the words of former U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor, is a 'battering ram' to open up Asian markets to U.S. enterprise" but gives no indication when Kantor might have said this, or in what context.

Some additional digging turns up the original source of the quotation: an article in the Times of London, 5 Dec. 1997, in the commentary/opinion section, titled "America's new Asian model." Kantor, who at that point no longer was U.S. trade representative (nor Commerce Secretary, a post he also held in 1996-1997), spoke in personal capacity at a dinner of the Confederation of British Industry. The relevant quotation from the article is: "the former US Commerce Secretary said that the troubles of the tiger economies offered a golden opportunity for the West to reassert its commercial interests. When countries seek help from the International Monetary Fund, Europe and America should use the IMF as a battering ram to gain advantage."

Note that the article does not imply that those are Kantor's exact words, though it seems plausible that Kantor did indeed use the term "battering ram." As an indication of how few of those who cite Kantor's statement have actually dug down to the original source, a Google search on "the troubles of the tiger economies offered a golden opportunity" (with quotes) produces only about 8 hits. Note, too, that Kantor does not say that the IMF is a battering ram, contra Kapur and Bowring, but rather that he, speaking in his personal capacity, thinks it should be used as a battering ram. (The article does claim that Kantor "echoes views emanating from the IMF to the Federal Reserve" but offers no evidence for this.)

In sum, Kantor's statement was colorful, which explains its popularity, but since he was not speaking in any official capacity, nor claiming to describe an actual (as opposed to a desired) strategy, it is much less meaningful than most people (mis-)quoting it believe or imply.

Men are from Venus, women are from Mars, or ...?

2011-03-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

There's been much to do about the fact that, on the issue of the U.S. military action in Libya, key women on Obama's staff were more pro-intervention than their male colleagues. Maureen Dowd gives a representative overview in a recent NYT column.

Dowd already makes clear just how simplistic this gender stereotyping is, but now Charli Carpenter has an excellent and thoughtful discussion of the issue over at Foreign Affairs, titled Flight of the Valkyries: What gender does and doesn't tell us about operation Odyssey Dawn. One crucial point Carpenter makes: the international context within which political actors come of age likely has far more to do with support or opposition to the intervention in Libya than gender.

A similar message emerges from an illuminating new book by my former colleague Mia Bloom, titled Bombshell: The many faces of women terrorists. The book strikingly illustrates the similarity across genders of most motivations for terrorism (rape is a key gender-specific exception). In fact, gender disparities in terrorist activities appear driven largely by sexism and chauvinism among those who recruit terrorists ('demand'), rather than by gender-based differences in willingness to engage in such activities ('supply').

There is something amusing about the fact that, in this respect at least, the leadership of Al Qaeda appears to have quite a bit in common with the Washington, DC press corps.

How to contribute to disaster relief

2011-03-28T11:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted some critical comments regarding disaster relief aid. These should under no circumstances be taken to imply that I think disaster relief aid is not valuable, or that it is not important to contribute to such aid. The key point is that it is worth thinking very carefully about making sure each contribution actually makes a difference.

Saundra Schimmelpfennig has a very good list of "Dos and don'ts of disaster donations" on her blog; these were written for the 2004 tsunami and updated for last year's Haiti earthquake, but they are no less valuable today, applied to Japan's earthquake/tsunami. I highly recommend reading through these before making any donation.

One important point that comes through in Saundra's list is that disaster aid is most likely to arrive when it is comparatively less needed. Organizations that are already active on the ground are best positioned to provide aid in the immediate aftermath. By the time donations from around the world arrive in the bank accounts of these organizations, they have already incurred most of their startup costs.

At the other end of the timescale, much of the crucial rebuilding work happens after the world media has moved on (when did you last hear or read something about the ongoing rebuilding effort in Haiti?), and thus also after new donations stop flowing in.

This has two implications: it means that it is less important to give as soon as possible than people sometimes believe, and it means that some of the most important donations take place before a disaster takes place. For this reason, I highly recommend not earmarking donations for a specific crisis. If you do wish to earmark a donation for a specific crisis, donate to an organization focused on the rebuilding process, rather than on emergency disaster relief operations.

On the other hand, if you want to support emergency disaster relief, consider contributing to an organization for which disaster relief is part of the ongoing mission, regardless of where disasters may occur. One excellent example in this category is Doctors without Borders/Médécins sans Frontières (MSF). MSF is acutely aware of potential pitfalls associated with disaster relief aid, and deliberately is not accepting donations specifically earmarked for Japan. Read their statement here.

In the case of Japan, I also want to reiterate the importance of asking what the added value of a contribution to disaster relief there is likely to be, given that:
1. Japan is a rich country which, moreover, can print its own money. This means that shortage of funds is unlikely to be the determining factor in limiting relief operations.
2. Japan is also an open, well-functioning democracy, with a government that cares about the well-being of its citizens. This means that situations in which the government deliberately neglects particular affected groups or areas (and in which relief organizations could play a key role) are unlikely to arise.

In contrast, there are numerous conflict- and disaster areas around the world where neither of these two conditions holds. MSF is active in most of them. So is the Red Cross. Consider giving to these organizations so they can make a difference where they are needed most.

How babies are like natural disasters

2011-03-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, when good friends of mine had just had their first child, I remember talking with them about how one set of grandparents was great to have visit, whereas the other was not. The difference was not that that the second set loved them or the grandchild any less, but that they were unfamiliar with where everything was in the house, with the neighbourhood where my friends lived, and they had their own ideas about what my friends needed to help them through the first weeks with a baby. Because of this, the second set of parents actually made for more stress and sleep deprivation, rather than less.

I think most people readily identify with this problem: just about everyone has friends or family who, however well-intentioned, seem unable to be of any real help — whether they try to help with a baby, with home repair jobs, with yard work, or anything at all, really. They simply require more time and attention to coordinate and point in the right direction than they save by taking some jobs off your hands.

This, I believe, is how one should think about disaster relief aid. No matter how much we want to help in the aftermath of a disaster, we should ask ourselves what our help would be like. Have the people we are thinking of helping asked for help? Do we know their circumstances and "neighbourhood"? Can we provide the kind of help they need? Or would we (or those we fund) simply be in the way and underfoot? If not, those we wish to help might prefer not to receive our assistance, even if they may also be too polite to say so.

In the specific case of Japan's earthquake/tsunami disaster, it is not obvious that Japan needs or wants money. Japan, after all has its own currency, and with current inflation levels very low, the government can simply print more money.

Nor is it obvious that many of the organizations that are now raising funds for disaster relief in Japan are familiar with the area and have the requisite local contacts. GlobalGiving, for example, which has raised more than $2 million so far, is an organization set up to promote projects in the developing world, not in one of the richest countries in the world. In fact, their website indicates that they have never previously been active in Japan. Moreover, they appear not to have quite figured out what they will do with the money they've raised, saying "We will post more details of the specific use of funds as soon as possible."

This seems sort of like hiring an actor who plays a parent on TV to help you out when you have a baby. It could turn out well, but chances seem pretty slim.

It is possible that this analogy appeals to me at the moment only because I am a brand new parent. If it fails to move you (or even if it does resonate), I highly recommend reading the discussion of the issue on the blog of GiveWell.org, an organization whose sole purpose is to figure out the most cost-effective and useful ways to give aid intended to improve the lives of others. They argued about 10 days ago that there appears to be "no room for more funding" and followed this with a clarification last Thursday that further elaborated their position.

Everyone their own charity?

2011-03-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

It has long been a truism in development assistance that aid coordination could go a long ways towards making aid more effective (and less of an administrative nightmare for recipients to manage). Unfortunately, most donors — governments and individuals alike — tend to support aid coordination only as long as others coordinate with them. This means that governments coordinate much less than you'd expect, and that individuals continually start new non-governmental aid organizations.

A similar pattern is evident in disaster relief. It appears that the IRS has, over the past few weeks, received 4500 applications for new non-profit organizations set up to respond to the disaster in Japan. Nor is Japan's case unique: lots of new relief organizations were created in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as well. Although there may be some fraud involved, the vast majority of such organizations are undoubtedly well-intentioned. That does not mean, however, that they are needed.

Even many well-established disaster relief organizations are currently simply standing by, waiting to see whether there is something they can do to help in Japan. The chance that a brand-new organization would be able to accomplish something they cannot is vanishingly small. And the chance that it's presence will be counterproductive is actually quite high (for example, by further taxing an already heavily overstretched local infrastructure).

A recent article in the Guardian by Conor Foley, titled "good intentions are not enough," discusses the case of fifteen British volunteers who had flown to Japan with relief supplies, but who had been refused permission to work in the quake region. In the end, they handed over their supplies to the Salvation Army and were forced to leave. It would have been better for everyone involved if they had contributed those supplies to the Salvation Army directly. They could have then increased their donation by the cost of the fifteen tickets to Japan that they would not have needed to buy.

Post-disaster aid to rich countries: the case of Katrina

2011-03-27T15:00:00.000-07:00

Major natural disasters offer countries an opportunity to rise above the normal standards of international interaction. For example, a large number of countries offered generous help in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Some, such as Cuba, offer aid purely as a public relations ploy, with no expectation that it will be accepted. Conversely, some such aid may be rejected, for similar symbolic reasons.

Still, that leaves a lot of countries. Wikipedia has a page on the international response to hurricane Katrina, listing pledges from more than 100 countries and international organizations besides Cuba, including such unlikely candidates as Vietnam (pledged $100,000), Mongolia ($50,000), and Albania ($308,000).

Interestingly, most of that aid was not claimed by the United States. A Washington Post article by John Solomon and Spenser Hsu, written two years after the hurricane, noted that "Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil."

Sometimes the problem was aid was earmarked for specific purposes where it was not needed. At times bureaucratic red tape was the problem. In addition, some "valuable supplies and services -- such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships -- were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them." Indeed, Administration officials admitted in 2006 "that they were ill prepared to coordinate and distribute foreign aid and that only about half the $126 million received had been put to use."

Some of the problems can be chalked up to incompetence and ineptitude, but it is clear from the article that the logistics of handling and coordinating all these aid offers taxed well-meaning officials to their limit. The article provides sobering reading for anyone thinking about how best to (or even whether to) provide aid to Japan in its current crisis.

One clear conclusion to be drawn: well-established non-governmental organizations with some local institutional infrastructure and specific preparedness in disaster response — most obviously, the Red Cross — are most likely to be able to put disaster relief aid to good use; more so, even, than a government as rich, powerful, and (generally) well-run as that of the United States.

Libya is more than a coastline

2011-03-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

I'm doing some research on disaster relief, and encountering a number of interesting items along the way. Since updates to this blog have been woefully infrequent recently, I'm going to link to a few without too much comment.

First up: lots of people have noted that much of the Libyan population lives very close to the Mediterranean cost. For example, Christopher Hitchens, writing in slate, calls the country "in effect a long strip of coastline, with a vast hinterland of desert." However, that hinterland is not empty.

In fact, it contains both towns and, more importantly, weapons arsenals. Alex de Waal points out that Libya's neighbours are quite concerned about this, since groups aiming to overthrow their governments have long sought shelter in Libya. Now that Gaddafi has made his arsenals available to anyone willing to fight on behalf of his rule, "such rebels have been able to acquire arms and vehicles with ease." Not only that, de Waal reports that "Mercenaries, freebooters and rebels from across the Sahel, and even beyond, are heading for Libya to take advantage of this open-entry, take all you can arms bonanza."

This is not an issue that has been much discussed in the international media, but given the number of long-simmering conflicts in the region, it is a problem well worth monitoring more closely.

Lying on the television news

2011-03-08T08:26:00.000-08:00

A famous 1986 column in The New Republic by Michael Kinsley noted that "Worthwhile Canadian initiative" was perhaps the world's most boring headline imaginable (it was a real headline, from a New York Times column). Boring, in part, because Canada keeps putting forward worthwhile initiatives, again and again. Indeed, Kinsley wrote a column of his own titled "Worthwhile Canadian initiative" on the Atlantic wire just last summer.

The past few weeks, on the other hand, have brought us the worthwhile Canadian initiative-stopper. As RFK Jr. points out in a Huffington Post column, Canadian regulators decided to reject attempts to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news. The country's "Radio Act" forbids the broadcasting of "false or misleading news"; the country's right-wing Prime Minister, among others, wanted this changed, to make possible a Fox News-style channel, as well as right-wing talk radio of the kind that is so popular in the United States.

Ironically, the vice president of the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada — a union representing more than 20,000 journalists — is Peter Murdoch. Murdoch called the proposal to repeal the law "totally bizarre". I think it is safe to conclude he is not related to Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch. :-)

Taxes and logic

2011-02-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

About 10 days ago, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was the featured speaker here at William & Mary's Charter Day ceremony. The text of his speech can be found here. One usually expects a visiting politician to stick to his standard talking points, and Cantor largely did so. Still, I found him oddly rude to his audience.

First, he did not address his remarks at students at all, except in the sense that one can assume they are friends of William & Mary, opening as follows: "President Reveley, the Board of Visitors, faculty, administration, alumni, friends of William & Mary, thank you."

Second, and more substantively, the core argument of his speech was that high tax rates in this country — especially high tax rates on top earners — are inhibiting the U.S. from maintaining its traditional leadership position in innovation and entrepreneurship. As most people know, Cantor included, tax rates on top earners used to be much higher during much of the post-World War II period, when the United States built its reputation for innovation and entrepreneurship. For example, the top marginal rate did not fall below 70% until 1981. Yet there was a lot of innovation and entrepreneurship in the U.S. before that time. Apple Computer, one of his examples, was founded in 1976.

Logically, then, Cantor was telling William & Mary students that they are either intellectually weaker than their parents, or extremely mercenary in their behavior, since he feels that they will not innovate or become entrepreneurs unless taxes are lowered still further (the top marginal rate is now 35%), even though their parents clearly had no trouble producing innovation and entrepreneurship for less extreme financial rewards. It may just be me, but I found that fairly insulting.

Cantor also seemed to suggest, in his speech, that taxes were independent of government spending. So he complained about both taxes and "runaway debt" (a result, in part, of reducing taxes without cutting spending), as though they were unrelated. And he implied he was offended by the notion that raising taxes might help us deal with the current economic crisis. Well, it is not raising taxes that might help — it is what we do with the resulting revenue. Again, this is basic logic, but Cantor apparently believed that William & Mary students cannot make the connection.

Cantor is obviously a smart guy; having spent several years at William & Mary's law school he should know that our undergraduates are smart too. It would have been nice if his speech had not both assumed and implied otherwise.

Michael Lewis on Greece & Ireland

2011-02-14T08:42:00.000-08:00

Michael Lewis, in the current issue of Vanity Fair, investigates Ireland's debt crisis ("When Irish Eyes Are Crying"). Together with his earlier articles on Greece (October 2010, "Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds") and Iceland (April 2009, "Wall Street on the Tundra"), Lewis has now completed a triptych on the human politics behind the national manifestations of the global economic crisis in the three hardest-hit European countries.

As always with Lewis, both the writing and the anecdotes are excellent. The Ireland story makes clear just how fateful — and how unnecessary — the government's decision to guarantee the banks really was. Investors who had been unable to dump their bonds in those banks at 50 cents on the dollar were suddenly told that the Irish government would pay them the full dollar!

Another key point Lewis makes is that those private creditors have been almost entirely repaid. What is owed now is money borrowed from the European Central Bank to make those repayments. The ECB is not in the business of debt forgiveness, but given how many of those — now happily repaid — private investors appear to have been German and French banks, it might be worthwhile spreading the pain a little.

In Iceland, voters overwhelmingly rejected a deal that would have forced them to shoulder the entire burden of guaranteeing the deposits made by foreigners in the failed Icesave bank. The more recent, renegotiated deal still insists on eventual repayment, but now under more generous terms and over a far longer period. It is not inconceivable that the Irish might be able to extract some similar lightening of their load, but first they would need to rise up to demand it.

As Lewis notes, however, the Irish appear oddly apathetic and compliant — "where's the rage?" asks the introduction to the article. Perhaps the Irish feel that their pain is more broadly self-inflicted than was the case in Iceland. After all, "Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was to buy Ireland. From one another."

Ending terrorism in Sri Lanka

2011-02-13T15:47:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker had a fascinating and disquieting article by Jon Lee Anderson a few weeks ago about the brutal defeat of the Tamil Tigers by the Sri Lankan army: "Death of the Tiger" (partially gated).

The article makes clear that the army indiscriminately shelled LTTE strongholds, knowing full well that these also contained tens of thousands of unarmed civilians. Indeed, the army apparently designated "no-fire zones", told civilians to assemble there, and "then shelled those zones repeatedly, while issuing denials that it was doing so." This brutal strategy was, in the end, successful in conquering the LTTE, albeit at a very high humanitarian cost.

The LTTE was a pretty despicable group, with its frequent use of suicide bombing, among others. Its soldiers also shot civilians that were trying to escape their clutches towards the end of the war, thus behaving no better than the Sri Lankan army. And its leaders, in the end, attempted to get free passage for themselves and one thousand of their fighters, leaving the civilians on whose behalf they claimed to fight to their own devices. (True leaders would have offered to give themselves up in exchange for free passage for all the remaining civilians under their control.)

Still, that does not justify the Sri Lankan army sinking to their level. Anderson suggests, disconcertingly, that "the Sri Lanka option" for counter-insurgency is now discussed with admiration in military circles around the world. It is to be hoped that governments think twice about Sri Lanka's example. The country's government claims that it has "ended terrorism," but that is of course silly. The LTTE may be dead, but the way the government is treating Tamils in the North of the country has produced an excellent petri dish for growing new terrorist groups. Moreover, by the literal definition of terrorism, one might argue that the Sri Lankan army is doing a pretty good job of spreading terror among the Tamils.

Aid transparency

2011-02-13T14:48:00.001-08:00

OK, time to crank up the blog again, after some time away focusing on other stuff. I've gathered up a bunch of stuff over the past month or so, so upcoming posts may occasionally not be à la minute.

First up, the promising new aid transparency blog Full Disclosure, run by Devex, "the largest provider of recruiting and business development services to the international development community," briefly commented on the new IATI global standard for publishing aid information, under the title "The Revolution Begins." Claudia Elliot notes that the new standard (finalized on Feb. 9th) makes it possible for donors to share information on the aid they provide, and recipients can get a better sense of the aid they are getting.

Increased aid transparency is an excellent idea, and is crucial for increasing accountability. But it is hardly the case that no aid information has been available until now. The OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has promulgated aggregate aid statistics for decades now, and its online statistics are invaluable. Superb project-level aid information is available at AidData, a more recent initiative of Development Gateway, the College of William & Mary, and Brigham Young University..

One hopes that this new IATI standard will make a real difference. But I'd hesitate to call it the beginning of a revolution. After all, for a new transparency standard to make a big difference, at least one of two things must be true:

1. Governments have wanted greater transparency than was available through DAC and/or AidData but have been unable to get it until now
2. Publics have wanted greater transparency in order to hold their governments accountable, but their governments have withheld that information from them until now.

It is not obvious that either or both of these conditions hold. Indeed, most historical evidence suggests that they do not. Governments have paid lip service to the importance of aid coordination for a long time, without ever doing much about it. And for decades, governments have gotten good PR out of promising to meet certain aid targets — as specified in the Millennium Development Goals, for example – without actually intending to do so. They may thus have an interest in less than full disclosure, and publics have not historically clamored for more specific information about aid programs.

For a revolution to begin, publics must become both more interested in and better informed about aid policy and projects. Until then, Elliot inadvertently points to one of the things governments may (ab-)use aid information for: "to compliment each others' efforts". I suspect she means "complement", but it is undeniably true that one reason for governments to supply aid is the reputational benefits this may provide Since such benefits won't follow until a government's generosity is widely known, governments will be happy to supply transparent information on the efforts they are most proud of.

Human rights imperialism?

2011-01-08T15:03:00.001-08:00

On the last day of 2010, Stephen Kinzer offered a scathing attack on "human rights imperialism" in the Guardian. In this exceedingly odd piece, Kinzer criticizes Human Rights Watch and other organizations for "imposing western, 'universal' standards on developing countries."

Kinzer makes two key points, related but not identical. First, he believes that the human rights movement "has lost its way" and is using "human rights as [its] excuse" for undermining governments of poor countries and building support for American military interventions worldwide. In other words, the movement is lending itself to becoming used for foreign policy goals that are not driven by human rights considerations.

Second, he suggests that many of the most prominent human rights NGOs "promote an absolutist view of human rights permeated by modern western ideas that westerners mistakenly call 'universal'."

There is little or no evidence to support either of those points. Kinzer's claims are hardly novel — human rights activists have long struggled with the danger of succumbing to either of these risks. (Consider, for example, Michael Ignatieff's excellent Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, published in 2003, which, as the title deals with precisely these two issues.) As a result, it is silly to suggest that the leading human rights NGOs have now succumbed wholesale.

The key problem is this: in any given issue area, multiple human rights are at stake, and the United States is likely to have a strategic interest. Any HR organization will thus need to think carefully about the relative priority of different rights, and the risk of appearing to be pushing for change that — for different reasons — fits US strategic goals. Difficult choices are unavoidable.

Kinzer apparently disagrees with some of those choices, and translates this disagreement into a wholesale condemnation of the human rights movement. His two specific disagreements are very poorly chosen, however. First, he argues that human rights organizations in Darfur have served as "useful idiots" to extend a conflict by reacting to massacres strategically provoked by rebel groups.

This claim is pernicious for three reasons. First, Kinzer implies that massacres in Darfur were, from the very beginning, strategically provoked, which is a severe accusation for which I do not believe there is evidence (not only that — given the degree to which the world ignored the conflict in South Sudan, which festered for decades and cost about two million lives, Darfur rebel groups would have to have been rather stupid to count on useful involvement from the outside). Second, he suggests that massacres that have been "provoked" (he does not specify how) cannot constitute serious human rights violations worth monitoring and protesting. Third, he seems to believe that any group that cannot win on the battlefield cannot have a human rights complaint worth getting involved in — realpolitik at its worst.

Kinzer's second complaint is no less problematic: He takes issue with complaints about Paul Kagame's increasingly authoritarian rule in Rwanda, given that Kagame's government has brought peace, stability, and economic growth back to Rwanda far more successfully than anybody could have dared hope fifteen years ago.

Again, there are three serious problems here. First, I am not aware that any human rights organization denies Kagame's achievements. The "evidence" Kinzer's online article links to in support of the claim that "Human Rights Watch... portrays the Rwandan regime as brutally oppressive" simply documents official intimidation of opposition parties; it does not state nor imply that HRW thinks "giving people jobs, electricity, and above all security is not considered a human rights achievement." Second, the evidence is fairly straightforward, so Kinzer's opposition to publicizing it suggests that he feels Rwanda's economic and security achievements have earned it a free pass to commit a range of "minor" human rights violations. Third, Kinzer takes a primordial view about Rwandans and their "ethnic hatreds", suggesting, with no evidence whatsoever, that all opposition parties that are being intimidated by the Kagame regime a) are connected to genocidaires, and b) would, if they came to power, unleash another genocide.

Judging by his website, Kinzer seems like an interesting and fairly thoughtful guy. He must have been in a particularly sour mood around the holidays to pen such a profoundly misguided attack on the entire human rights movement. I hope he comes to his senses in the new year.

Estonia's euro bet

2011-01-08T14:05:00.000-08:00

Just a brief follow-up on my earlier mention of Estonia's adoption of the euro. The Economist's last Charlemagne column of 2010 discussed "Why fiscally prudent Estonia wants to join the troubled euro." In addition to the standard economic reasons — reduce interest rate premiums, lower transaction costs, attract investment — Charlemagne also mentions Estonia's goal of tying the country ever more closely to (Western) Europe (and underscoring its separation from Russia). I suppose there is some symbolic value in adopting the euro, but I am not so convinced that "[t]o many Estonians, the euro also means security" in the sense of protection from Russia. Currency policy is important, sure, but not that important.

Charlemagne acknowledges that Estonia was able to attain this milestone in part by implementing severe austerity policies when the global economic crisis hit. Its economy shrank by 1/7 during 2009 alone, and the unemployment rate averaged about 17.5% in 2010. Not many governments are secure and stable enough to survive that kind of an economic shock. As Charlemagne suggests, it may be all the more difficult for those states that have already adopted the euro and face similar calls for austerity.

Estonia may calculate that even if such countries end up forced out of the euro, a rump euro-zone will continue, participation in which will continue to be valuable. This is not such a bad guess to make; after all, the Estonian kroon has been pegged to the German mark and the euro since its re-introduction, and apart from the recent (admittedly severe) economic shock, the country has benefited nicely from this choice.

P.S. As an interesting side-note, the author of the column has evidently read (or read about) Timothy Snyder's excellent new book Bloodlands, about Stalin's and Hitler's murderous regimes and what they did to the areas that lay between Germany and Russia. The book has nothing to do with monetary policy, but does bear reading for anyone interested in that region (which includes the Baltic republics). Two informative (and glowing) reviews are here and here.

Ireland and sovereignty in an integrated Europe

2011-01-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

Geoffrey Wheatcroft discusses the non-existence of Irish independence in a brief article in the Dec. 30 issue of The New Republic (partially gated). Protesters in Ireland have been bemoaning the fact that their government appeared to be "handing over our sovereignty", but as Wheatcroft notes, there was never that much to hand over. Or, to put it differently, the idealized notion that sovereignty means a state has full control of its own fate is utterly unrealistic for any country actively involved in the global political economy, let alone one that has joined joined the European Union and adopted the euro as its currency.

The problem for Ireland is that it is particularly sensitive about its sovereignty and its independence, for understandable historical reasons. Norway is in a similar position, which is one of the reasons it has not (yet) joined the European Union. Wheatcroft draws a parallel with a different Nordic country, Finland, arguing that "Finland has achieved the things that Ireland aspired to": its own language, real neutrality, and economic success.

Wheatcroft overplays the comparison a bit. Finland may have resisted Soviet military aggression for four months in 1939, but it was severely constrained in its international relations from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, in ways that Ireland wasn't. I am sure many Finns would have been happy, at any time between 1945 and 1989, to exchange their "neutrality" for Ireland's. Nor is it fair to suggest that Ireland's economic success amounted to little more than the combination of a construction bubble with striking corruption.

Nevertheless, the parallel does raise an interesting issue. Finland was not able to join the European integration project until the end of the Cold War, because the Soviet Union would not have allowed it. Perhaps the experience of real political constraints has made the Finns more realistic about which features of sovereignty and independence are important, and which are not. One could argue Finland gave up one form of dependence for another when it joined the EU, but this was a dependence that was voluntarily chosen, and it was one that offered great benefits as well (unlike the dependence on Soviet goodwill).

In Ireland, in contrast, public debate is deeply focused on sovereignty as an end in itself; the issue comes up every time the European Union treaties need to be revised. It is a serious failure of the country's political leaders that they have never conducted an honest debate about what sovereignty means in a globalizing economy, nor what its value or purpose are in an ever more closely integrated Europe.

Eurozone grows

2011-01-04T14:25:00.000-08:00

With all the doom-saying about the euro, it is worth noting that January 1st saw an expansion of the eurozone, with Estonia officially adopting the euro. Its fellow Baltic republics Lithuania and Latvia are also eager to join, and aim to meet the prerequisites by 2014 at the latest

Estonia's conversion was easier than most, since its national currency, the kroon, had been pegged to the euro since 2002. Still, having the same currency as neighbour (and linguistically closely related) Finland ought to provide an economic boost. In Finland, there were some immediate benefits, as the Mint of Finland had received the order to mint Estonia's euro coins earlier this year.

The greatest curiosity in the world

2011-01-03T07:22:00.000-08:00

The release of diplomatic cable traffic by Wikileaks has occasioned an enormous amount of discussion about the implications for diplomacy if communications cannot be guaranteed to remain secret. This is hardly a new problem: for centuries, innovations in cryptography were generally driven by attempts to keep diplomatic messages secret.

Sooner or later, encoded messages became publicly available anyway. However, the kind of semi-confidential gossip that distinguishes the cable traffic released by Wikileaks was often not considered important enough to encrypt or keep confidential.

For example, the Dutch newsweekly Vrij Nederland noted in its December 4th issue (gated, sorry) that John Adams, on a tour of Europe, wrote to Abigail on Sept. 15, 1780 offering some opinions on the Netherlands. Vrij Nederland displays a facsimile of the letter, which unfortunately I could not find reproduced online. Amusingly, the Pieter Groet, the author of the accompanying note, has trouble with Adams' handwriting, and believes that Adams called the Netherlands "the greatest country in the world." Adams' handwriting is quite legible, however, and it is quite clear that he considered it "the greatest curiosity in the world" (emphasis mine).

Adams' complete assessment reads:

"The country where I am is the greatest curiosity in the world. This nation is not known any where, not even by its neighbors. The Dutch language is spoken by none but themselves. Therefore they converse with nobody, and nobody converses with them. The English are a great nation, and they despise the Dutch because they are smaller. The French are a greater nation still, and therefore they despise the Dutch because they are still smaller in comparison to them. But I doubt much whether there is any nation of Europe more estimable than the Dutch in proportion. Their industry and economy ought to be examples to the world. They have less ambition, I mean that of conquest and military glory, than their neighbors, but I don't perceive that they have more avarice. And they carry learning and arts, I think, to greater extent."

On balance, Adams was pretty positive — a good thing, since he would become the U.S.'s first official ambassador ('minister plenipotentiary', actually) to the Netherlands two years later. The quip about language is only partially correct: as continues to be true today, almost nobody but the Dutch speaks Dutch.

But the Dutch have always reacted to this by learning multiple languages, even back then, making it possible for them to converse with more people, not fewer. Indeed, Dutch poets of the age revelled in writing poems with words or phrases in multiple languages (Constantijn Huygens' "Olla Podrida" contains 8 languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek).

U.S. census results

2010-12-15T11:40:00.001-08:00

The NYT takes advantage of GIS to generate a map based on data from the Census Bureau for "Every City, Every Block", showing colour-coded patterns in race & ethnicity, income, education, and housing and families. The data is apparently from 2005-2009, so this is not the latest official census (at least, I don't think so). But it is extremely interesting — even apart from specific colour codes, it gives quite an illuminating view of population concentration and distribution across the country.

The link is to the default map, which is a view of greater New York City broken down by racial and ethnic groups, but you can zoom out and scroll over to any other part of the country, and click on the "View More Maps" button to see the other mapping options.

Conflict minerals - naming and shaming

2010-12-14T13:30:00.001-08:00

The Enough project today released a report, "Getting to Conflict-Free", about corporate action on conflict minerals. The report is described in a blog post by Aaron Hall at the Enough project's website.

The most famous campaign to reduce the profitability of the mineral extraction industry in conflict zones is of course the one on conflict diamonds, which over time became visible enough to be referenced in several hit movies (including Blood Diamond, with Leonardo DiCaprio, and the James Bond installment Die Another Day) — a sign of high public awareness, if not always knowledge :-).

Unfortunately, the minerals that help fund the conflict in Eastern Congo are less photogenic as well as harder to track than diamonds. Gold, tin, tantalum, tungsten, coltan — all can be melted or ground down, so that physical tracking becomes impossible. The only way to track them, then, is to have a completely transparent supply chain which accounts for every gram of gold, tin, etc. that corporations use.

The Enough project's report is a first attempt to investigate how well corporations are doing in moving towards such transparency and accountability. The report ranks major technology companies on "percentage of progress toward responsible sourcing on conflict minerals". The top performer is HP, at just 32%, followed by Intel, at 24%. Worst on their list are SanDisk and Toshiba.

Although the blog post gives the key take-away findings, the report is worth reading for its discussion of the many challenges associated with achieving "progress toward responsible sourcing". (The report is not very clear, unfortunately, on the ranking methodology, but more detailed rankings can be downloaded from the Enough website here.)

Variation in educational achievement in the U.S.

2010-12-14T13:09:00.000-08:00

Very interesting article in the Atlantic monthly by Amanda Ripley: "Your Child Left Behind". The article references a study, just published in EducationNext, by Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann which compares national educational performance (in mathematics) in several countries around the world to state-level educational performance in the United States (a more extensive version of the study is here).

The motivation for the research was that it is well-known that the United States as a whole performs poorly on such international comparisons (for the latest example, see here), but the United States is so large that it might well be the case that individual states within the U.S. outperform most countries. The researchers' finding, unfortunately for the U.S., is that the best performing state, Massachusetts, comes in 17th, followed by Minnesota in 20th place, with no other state in the top 25.

The study is interesting (and disturbing) in its own right, but it is also a nice example of bringing good social science methods to bear on questions that many people have impressionistic beliefs about but which are often difficult to test systematically. [As Hanushek notes in Ripley's article, one explanation for poor U.S. performance he often hears in his hometown of Palo Alto is "We're a very heterogeneous society — all these immigrants are dragging us down. But our kids are doing fine.")]

Numerology for idiots, EU version

2010-12-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

While doing some research on the composition of the European Parliament I ran across a conspiracy theory so silly it is surprising anyone believes it. It is an outdated theory, but it continues to survive on the internet (nothing ever really dies on the internet, after all).

Here's the claim: seat 666 at the European Parliament is empty, waiting to be filled by the Antichrist (666 being the number of the beast). One source of this notion is Ian Paisley, the radical anti-Catholic Ulster politician, in an article dating to 1999. (Interestingly, 11 years earlier Paisley had denounced Pope John Paul II as the Antichrist when the latter addressed the European Parliament in its previous building). Other sources are here and here.

The allegedly incriminating list of seat allocations (with an empty spot at 666) dates to 1999, when seat 666 may indeed have been unallocated. So, however, were quite a number of other seats: the European Parliament in 1999 had 626 members, but occupied a debating chamber with seats for 750 (since expanded to 785) legislators (its previous home had seats for 600 delegates, so no number 666 there). This means that 750-626 = 124 seats were unoccupied, about 1 in 6.

The claim that the number of one particular unallocated seat is anything other than coincidental is of course idiotic. But it continues to survive, even though the actual seat has been occupied for years now (first, apparently, by Sajjad Karim, a British Liberal, who when asked about the significance of his seat number in 2006 was completely flummoxed :-). Current seating plans for the Strasbourg and Brussels hemicycles can be found here.

Still, a search on the terms "european parliament", "seat", and "666" yields about 108,000 results according to Google, and plenty of websites confidently assert that the seat has never been filled. (On the other hand, the European Parliament is just one part of the EU — a search on "European Union" and "antichrist" gives about 841,000 results!)

More crowdsourcing, London

2010-12-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

In the UK, Parliament is considering increasing university tuition fees. Students are protesting, as one might expect. Some from University College London (UCL) are maintaining a blog about it here. They have also jury-rigged their own crowd-sourcing setup with Google Maps: see their input form & the map itself.

Given the obvious promise and appeal of using Google Maps for such purposes, one wonders whether Google is working towards incorporating a similar set-up as one of Google's own products (of which they have more and more). It is probably not a coincidence that they're already a partner of Ushahidi, the non-profit interactive mapping initiative I mentioned last month.

The illusion of secrecy

2010-12-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, students at Columbia's International and Public Affairs school were advised not to discuss any WikiLeaks material online. The recommendation came from a Columbia alumnus who now works at the State Department, and who argued that ""Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government."

As the linked article notes, Columbia's administration quickly reversed itself on this issue, fortunately. Nonetheless, the episode reminded me of Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, in which Soviet scientists must lock away their top-secret research documents in a safe every night, so the imperialist spies won't be able to steal them — except this top-secret research consists mainly of Western science journals, since Western science is far ahead of the Soviets. (It's been years since I read Solzhenitsyn, so apologies for a somewhat hazy description)

It is similarly absurd to pretend that the material leaked by Wikileaks is still in some way secret or confidential. Fortunately for Columbia students, their administration is a little less delusional than the Soviet regime was; still, their instinctual reaction is telling.

Seasonal migration as foreign aid

2010-12-09T07:38:00.000-08:00

David McKenzie at the World Bank offers an intriguing suggestion about "The Most Effective Development Intervention We Have Evidence For": under certain conditions it appears that seasonal migration trumps any other intervention. New Zealand has a short term migration program which, apparently, comes "with minimal displacement of native workers, and overstay rates of less than 1%."

The blog posting links to the actual research paper, as well as some other related links. Comments on the posting note that it is likely to be much more difficult to find political support for such an intervention than it is for foreign aid. Moreover, keeping the overstay rate low requires active involvement and monitoring on the part of the home as well as the host country. The United States currently has a seasonal worker visa program (H2A), but it is not clear how much monitoring takes place — I was unable to even find estimates of overstay rates, for example (but plenty of law offices willing to advise those who have overstayed on what to do next :-).

Aid and public opinion

2010-12-05T14:20:00.000-08:00

The general political wisdom in Washington DC is that the public does not like foreign aid. However, it has long been known that the public does not actually know much about the U.S. aid program.

For example, surveys consistently find that while a majority of Americans would like to see the U.S. aid budget cut, a majority of Americans also wants the U.S. to give much more aid than it does. This apparent contradiction arises from the fact that most Americans believe the U.S. gives far more aid than it does.

The pattern has been familiar since 1995, when the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that the median estimate of the U.S. aid budget was 15% of the total federal budget, at a time when the actual outlay was a little under 1%. The median preferred share of the federal budget to be allocated to aid was 5% (i.e. on average 1/3 of what people thought was the current level but 5 times the actual current level).

A follow-up study in 2001 found "no decline in the public's extreme overestimation of the amount of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid." Indeed, in this second study the median estimate was that 20% of the federal budget went to aid, while the median desired allocation was 10% of the budget. Meanwhile, the actual aid budget had not changed much and continued to be just under 1%.

(The follow-up study also noted that in a different survey, 66% of respondents said that t00-high foreign spending was a "major reason the economy is not doing better than it is.")

Little has changed in the past decade, as poll results just published by World Public Opinion.org show. Indeed, the overestimation of U.S. aid continues to increase: now the median estimate of the share of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid is 27%, with the median desired allocation still at 10% (actual aid volume continues to be close to 1% of the federal budget).

The survey also found that the lower one's education attainment, the higher the median estimate of aid's share of the budget — "Among those with less than a high school education the median estimate was that foreign aid represented an extraordinary 45 percent." This may help account for the erroneous belief in some circles that it should be fairly easy to cut the federal budget in difficult economic times such as these. In practice, of course, even a complete elimination of the foreign aid program (something few people advocate) would have only a small impact on the deficit.

Good links

2010-12-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

Just cleaning out some bookmarks:

Very funny Mad Lib satirizing ICT4D arguments (see earlier post here).

Egypt has a second round of elections this weekend (the first round was last week). Good article by Gwynne Dyer on "Why elections are a charade in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak", and some background by Eric Trager on "Egypt's Machiavellian electoral gambit" (from just before the first round).

Critical article by Marlise Simons in the NYT a week or two back about problems the International Criminal Court has encountered in pursuing its first trial, that of Thomas Lubanga, who stands accused of committing various war crimes, including the conscription of child soldiers.

Funny article in the NYT by David Segal about how there is no such thing as bad publicity on the web for ecommerce businesses.

Preventing genocide

2010-12-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

Interesting review by Richard Just at the New Republic of Geoffrey Robinson's new book “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor. The book's title is an obvious allusion to Gourevitch's classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, only in East Timor's case genocide was (largely) avoided.

Just notes that "the ability to ignore human rights, to regard mass killing coldly and cynically, is not the province of any one political party or even any one ideology," a conclusion that echoes Samantha Power's argument in her devastating A Problem from Hell. He also points out that, in the end, preventing genocide was not particularly costly, either in economic terms or in political (good-)will. But it does require that the regime sponsoring a (potential) genocide be vulnerable, as Indonesia was in the late 1990s.

The obvious question is whether the Sudanese government is similarly vulnerable, should things get out of control in Southern Sudan after the scheduled referendum on independence a few months from now. Richard Just thinks not, and I am inclined to agree. But that does not mean genocide cannot be prevented; only that it requires a stronger commitment (and some advance preparation, for example in terms of lobbying at the UN) on the part of those who would do so. An opportunity, perhaps, for the Obama administration to improve its standing on human rights? Hope springs eternal!

"Psychological waterboarding"?

2010-12-04T07:46:00.000-08:00

It turns out that post-9/11 prisoners at Guantanamo were routinely given a controversial malaria drug (mefloquine) known to carry a serious risk of side effects including paranoia and ideas of suicide. Seton Hall's law school has published a report discussing the case (press release here). Mark Denbeaux, director of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, comments: "At best it represents monumental incompetence. At worst, it’s torture."

If the administration of the drug did not arise from incompetence, the report suggests that not only would this policy "likely satisfy the legal definition of torture" (p. 4), but also, if used as part of a program of enhanced interrogation, "would be the psychological equivalent of waterboarding."

TruthOut.org has a parallel article on the issue, which quotes Remington Nevin, a Major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps as calling the policy "pharmacological waterboarding." Nevin has been doing a lot of research on the adverse effects of mefloquine, so he knows of what he speaks.

I buy the argument that, if deliberately administered for non-medical reasons, the policy can be characterized as torture. But there are many types of torture, and I am not convinced that waterboarding is the physical "instrument" whose effects are most similar to this medical "instrument". One sort of suspects that both Nevin and Seton Hall latched onto the comparison because of the resonance of the term waterboarding in the public discourse.

Either way, this is rather disturbing news, and it is important to get some answers about the motivations for the administration of mefloquine. Of course, given the Obama administration's reluctance to pursue such answers in other torture-related areas, there is little reason for optimism.

P.S. Interesting discussion of the Army dispensing mefloquine to its own soldiers in the Army Times here. Given the available evidence at this point, I'd put the odds of incompetence vs. torture at about 50-50.

(Information) technology and development

2010-12-02T12:43:00.000-08:00

The Nov/Dec issue of the Boston Review has a great forum on "Can Technology End Poverty" about the promise and the limitations of the clunkily named ICT4D sector (information and communications technology for development). In the lead article, Kentaro Toyama argues that, contrary to the hype, ICT4D can only magnify the effect of motivated and capable human beings working on development — it cannot substitute for or replace them. (For a similar point about the promise and pitfalls of crowdsourcing, see earlier post here).

A number of prominent academics and participants in various ICT4D initiatives offer their responses. Archon Fung's argument about the possibility of exploiting the socio-economic biases of technology is particularly intriguing. The final contribution in the forum is Toyama's, who responds to the comments from the other contributors. Toyama is not optimistic about Fung's suggestion that technology be specifically designed to help improve the lives of the poor, but thinks he may be on to something in suggesting that technology be used to support public goods.

I think Toyama is right in pointing out that "inevitably, the rich, skilled, and socially connected will make better use of [technologies] than the rest." But this need not be as big a problem as he seems to believe it is. Fung's argument, I believe, is that one can develop specific technologies that the rich, skilled, and socially connected would not have a strong incentive to use, because the technologies supply something (possibly a public good, but not necessarily so) that they do not need (either because they already have it, or simply because it is not one of their needs).

The challenge, of course, is that this requires a lot more thought than simply throwing laptops or cellphones at a developing country problem. But promoting such an approach would be a good complement, I believe, to Toyama's central prescription: that, "when deciding how to allocate resources between technology and human capital, [we] invest first in the factor that is most lacking," which, in a developing country, will often be the latter.

Repaying sovereign debt

2010-12-01T07:40:00.000-08:00

Ireland's EU/IMF bailout plan places the full burden of the crisis on the borrowers, rather than making the lenders pay something too (something that should have been judged both fair and prudent). For both economic and political reasons, this is going to make successful resolution of Ireland's crisis that much more difficult. Barry Eichengreen has a scathing piece in Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper on this today (translation here; the German title is far better than the English one, though).

Given the high likelihood that Ireland will need to return to the negotiating table for some new solution, concerns about the handling of potential similar problems in other eurozone states are mounting. Willem Buiter, Chief Economist at Citigroup, has a good economic overview of the problems facing European sovereign debtors in particular: Sovereign Debt Crisis Update. Figure 34 in this article is particularly interesting (or worrisome).

Key points from Buiter's conclusion: "There is no such thing as an absolutely safe sovereign," "the distinction between public and private balance sheets can become blurred in a crisis." Not grounds for great optimism, in other words.

More Civil War disingenuousness

2010-11-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

We're coming up on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, and the NYT's Katharine Seelye has an article in today's paper about "Celebrating Secession without the Slaves." The article is interesting enough, but falls into the common reporting trap of presenting two sides of an issue as roughly equivalent in defensibility. Especially on such a sensitive issue, it would be nice if a newspaper that aspires to quality journalism would point out that one side on the issue is being deeply disingenuous.

For example, the article quotes without comment a spokesperson for the Sons of Confederate Veterans who says "We're celebrating that those 170 people [who signed South Carolina's ordinance of secession on Dec. 20, 1860] risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government."

However, all it takes is one quick glance at South Carolina's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes", which explained secession, to realize that what they believed in was slavery, and if self-government was necessary to sustain slavery, then they were happy to believe in that too. The document mentions slaves or slavery more than a dozen times, and the key statement of grievances is quite unambiguous:

"We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection. "

And what prompted secession right then? Here, too, the document is clear: the fact that a man had been elected "whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery" and that in March 1861, his party would come into office, with as one of its goals "a war... against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States." Not a war against self-government, not a war against state rights, but a war against slavery.

Is it too much to ask that the NYT offer some factual evidence, rather than just competing opinions?

Aid and Haiti

2010-11-29T19:52:00.000-08:00

Short and intriguing note in the current issue of Foreign Policy by Paul Farmer: "5 Lessons from Haiti's Disaster." Farmer is basically calling for "development, not relief." He is entirely correct in pointing out that creating jobs, even temporary ones, will do more than offering handouts to help rebuild Haiti, that building government capacity and offering people basic shelter, health care and education are crucial, and that too much aid never reaches recipients.

However, these are not "lessons from Haiti's disaster"; they are insights that have been around in the aid community for quite a while. At best the Haiti case illustrates their enduring validity. More importantly, building on these insights is not nearly as easy as Farmer implies.

Unfortunately, successfully building government capacity is very difficult. So is offering decent healthcare to all, as Farmer himself knows better than anyone (he created Partners in Health in 1987, in part to sustain his work with a healthcare project in Cange, Haiti). Creating a widespread public works program or a universal-access education system are not trivial either.

Farmer's appeal ought to be read not as lessons to be applied to the next 'disaster', but rather as a call for continued aid to Haiti even after the immediate post-quake emergency has passed. As one of the poorest countries on earth, there is a fair amount of "low-hanging fruit" in Haiti in terms of development initiatives that offer excellent bang for the buck. Taking advantages of these opportunities now can mean that the next disaster in Haiti will be far less devastating.

India's microfinance crisis (2)

2010-11-29T19:38:00.000-08:00

Some more info about India's microfinance crisis (see earlier post here). David Roodman at the Center for Global Development is writing a book about the history and impact of microfinance. He offers a summary of his views on the crisis today, and a long and excellent interview with B. Rajsekhar, the CEO of the Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty yesterday. Both are well worth reading.

It is worth noting that not the entire microfinance sector of India is in crisis. About 10 days ago, the Times of India reported on the awarding of the "prestigious Microfinance India Award 2010" to the Shri Kshethra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project (SKDRDP). This organization is apparently well-known for its low interest rates, which are comparable to commercial bank rates. It is also quite good on transparency: annual reports for 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 are easily found online.

Ahhh, modern travel...

2010-11-28T11:50:00.000-08:00

As we all know, the physical infrastructure of the U.S. is in pretty poor shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave it a D in its latest report card. Unfortunately, the policy dimension of that infrastructure is not doing much better. Exhibit B: reactions to real and perceived terrorist threats in aviation.

Wielding a little power is a dangerous thing, as I mentioned in an earlier post on the DMV. It should not be a surprise that the TSA is similarly vulnerable to the temptation to abuse its own power, as is shown in this striking video of TSA agents in Phoenix (mis-)handling a woman's request that her breastmilk not be X-rayed. Even when the TSA simply implements its own rules, ludicrous situations ensue, such as the random selection of toddlers for more detailed screening. James Fallows has several good posts on this here, here and here (with internal links to several others).

The bigger issue, of course, is whether any of these policies actually increase safety and, if they do (which remains unclear), whether the marginal increase in safety is worth the marginal cost of the safety measures. In other words: how much do the added safety measures cost, and how many lives do they save? (a related musing on this by Sam Savage here).

The TSA's annual budget is about $7 billion, but there are additional costs in terms of the time lost going through the ever more invasive process, which are much harder to estimate. (Interestingly, in a New York Times debate on the issue of body scanners a few days ago, only one contributor, Bruce Schneier, even hinted at the cost-benefit question.)

Over at Salon.com, Patrick Smith, on his "Ask the Pilot" blog, offers some valuable context, noting that "Deadly terrorism existed before 9/11," and that, moreover, we reacted to it in much saner ways in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Jeffrey Goldberg already argued 2 years ago in the Atlantic monthly that "Airport security in America is a sham — 'security theater' designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists." Of course, there are plenty of stupid terrorists around, so security measures that catch only stupid terrorists are not worthless. But are they really worth as much as they cost? At this point, I suspect that the resources allocated to catching stupid would-be terrorists could be used more productively to try to catch smart and stupid terrorists alike.

Torture and transitional justice

2010-11-26T13:28:00.000-08:00

How should governments handle criminal acts committed by their predecessors? Over the past two decades, the academic study of transitional justice has been a growth area.

In the early 1990s, post-Communist East European governments deliberated on whether old security archives ought to be opened, and what punishment ought to be meted out to functionaries in the old regimes. Only a few years later, South Africa created its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, inspired by Desmond Tutu's fervent belief in the possibility of finding out the truth and achieving reconciliation regarding the crimes of apartheid. Around the same time, the wars in the former Yugoslavia led to the rebirth of Nuremberg-style tribunals: first the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, then a tribunal for the genocide in Rwanda, and finally the International Criminal Court.

One of the intriguing features of transitional justice is the pervasiveness of "gut instincts" and assumptions with virtually no empirical verification (David Mendeloff published an excellent paper on this issue in 2004 [gated]). Just a few examples:
• Finding out the truth promotes (or is even a prerequisite for) reconciliation
(How do we know? What if it reopens old wounds and a desire for vengeance?)
• Prosecuting former high-ranking officials will lead to political instability
(Why? Maybe even their alleged political allies will be happy to see them removed from the scene)
• International tribunals are less likely to be biased than national tribunals
(Why? Bias probably depends more on how the tribunal is set up than on who pays the bills)

The literature has concentrated on countries subject to serious political instability, but of course the same issues arise in stable political systems as well. A striking example is Obama's handling of the Bush administration's torture of alleged terrorist suspects. Obama's position, announced most clearly in a television interview with George Stephanopoulos in January 2009 (transcript here), is that "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards"

The result, as we know, is that Obama has quite systematically avoided holding anyone in the Bush administration accountable for the torture policies. This raises the obvious question: Based on what assumptions did Obama think this was the right approach to take?

The Stephanopoulos interview suggests three key assumptions:
1. "When it comes to national security," it is necessary to make a choice between "getting things right in the future" and "looking at what we got wrong in the past" — they cannot be pursued at the same time.
2. If CIA employees feel as though they need to look over their shoulders and look for legal protection in deciding how "to keep Americans safe", their effectiveness will be reduced.
3. Not pursuing past injustice has no bearing on (or implications for) the future pursuit of justice. In other words, impunity and lack of accountability at the highest level are not a problem.

To my knowledge, we have no empirical evidence that any of those 3 assumptions are justified, and in fact there is reason to doubt that any are. Perhaps in an unstable political context, with tenuous rule of law and not much state capacity, the first assumption might be reasonable. But in the United States? That does not suggest much faith in the capacity of the American government. Indeed, as David Cole points out in a recent New York Review of Books blog post, the United Kingdom and Canada seem to be able to pursue both goals at the same time just fine, without overtaxing their system.

On the second assumption, there is no evidence that the CIA has been able to do its job better since being allowed to torture, nor does it appear to have been difficult prior to the Bush administration to place legal limits on what the CIA was allowed to do with (and to) suspects.

On the third assumption, finally, Cole notes that "the fact that we tortured and did nothing about it will periodically raise its head—in a failed prosecution, a foreign court judgment, or a terrorist incident inspired by images from Abu Ghraib."

It is often noted that Obama is more inclined to reflect and weigh options prior to making policy decisions than was his predecessor. It is disappointing, therefore, that on this crucial issue his decision seems to have been based on the kind of unexamined "gut instincts" Bush has become notorious for (and, according to his memoirs, quite proud of).

Eric Holder

2010-11-24T13:36:00.001-08:00

GQ this month offers a revealing and ultimately quite sad profile of Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, by Wil S. Hylton: "Hope. Change. Reality." Holder comes across as a single-issue principled person: the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division matters a lot to him, and one gets the impression he would be unwilling to compromise on civil rights principles; everything else, however, and especially national security, is apparently subject to political considerations.

Hylton points out, for example, that Holder has decided (or agreed) 1) not to prosecute those responsible for torture he earlier characterized as "inherently un-American", 2) to absolve those who authorized that torture (despite an official finding of professional misconduct), 3) not to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court, 4) to ban a number of key Guantanamo journalists from attending Omar Khadr's trial at Guantanamo, and 5) to justify the administration's right to assassinate a U.S. citizen — all for political, not legal, reasons.

A true test of the rule of law is whether authorities uphold it even when it is inconvenient, or its implications undesirable. On that count, both Holder and his boss — who, it bears recalling, taught courses on constitutional law at the University of Chicago — have been measured and found wanting.

Hating the EU?

2010-11-23T08:58:00.000-08:00

Interesting defense of the EU by David Bosco at Foreign Policy's website. In "Is it OK to hope the EU fails?" he characterizes anti-EU attitudes as "a real undercurrent in conservative foreign-policy thought, and maybe American political thought on a grumpy day." {Perhaps Douthat was just channeling this undercurrent in his column yesterday (see my previous post).}

The complaints against the EU expressed by John Hinderaker (to whom Bosco is responding) are: it undermines national democracies, it is more left-wing than its citizens would prefer, and most euro-zone citizens don't want the euro. Since the first two points are highly debatable, and the third is empirically false, a response is hardly necessary, but Bosco's general defense of European integration — and public support for it — is straightforward and well-taken.

How to lie with fake arguments

2010-11-22T19:32:00.000-08:00

In his latest NYT column, Ross Douthat weighs in on Ireland's problems, suggesting that Ireland's rapid rise and even more rapid crash, culminating in Sunday's acceptance of a European Union bailout, can be ascribed to three contributing factors: free-market capitalism, secularism, and European integration.

Free-market capitalism, Douthat argues, means that "debt and ruin always shadow prosperity and growth." Secularism breeds "decadence as well as liberation." One might think that debt, decadence and ruin represent a sufficient characterization of Ireland's current troubles. But no, "utopians of European integration... should learn the hardest lessons from the Irish story."

What are those lessons? First, "that the E.U. was expanded too hastily." Really? Which expansion are we talking about here? Certainly not Ireland's, a member since 1973. But what recent members have been so badly affected by Ireland's crisis that they would have been better off not joining? Douthat doesn't say.

The second lesson is that "a single currency couldn't accommodate such a wide diversity of nations." This is a plausible claim, and has been made by many others. (Actually, Douthat mis-specifies it: it is not the diversity of nations, but the diversity of economies that matters.) Still, I fail to see how this is a lesson that follows from Ireland's economic crisis. One might argue that crisis recovery in Ireland has been hampered by the absence of devaluation as a policy option. But the constraints imposed by eurozone membership did not cause the crisis; it is pretty clear, and Douthat acknowledges, that a massive construction boom was a key culprit instead.

It appears Douthat doesn't like the EU. That's fine, but it would help if his arguments against the organization were a little less contrived and disingenuous.

A solemn commitment to what, exactly?

2010-11-22T19:11:00.000-08:00

The G20 summit in Seoul, which ended 10 days ago, featured the requisite closing communiqué, in which participant nations pledged, among others, "to continue our coordinated efforts and act together to generate strong, sustainable and balanced growth." In language simultaneously aspirational, anodyne, and arcane, the 22-page document managed to duck most of the key issues, pushing difficult decisions into the future.

On development, as William Easterly notes, the "summit set the lowest possible expectations on development, and then heroically failed to meet them." The official declaration does promise the G20 "will take concrete actions to increase our financial and technical support, including fulfilling the Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitments by advanced countries," but remains silent, of course, on what precisely those concrete actions might entail.

A more cynical but also more honest (and amusing) communiqué was offered by Derek DeCloet in Toronto's Globe and Mail. If only official communiqués could be written a little more along these lines!

Who loves ya, baby?

2010-11-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

Charlemagne's notebook, the Economist blog on Europe, presents some interesting results from a recent Gallup poll of voters in different European nations. The charts reproduced in the blog are a little small, but they convey the basic findings well enough.

First, the data confirm that Europeans' approval of U.S. leadership jumped dramatically upon the election of Barack Obama, especially in Western Europe; the pattern is more attenuated in Eastern Europe.

Second, and more interestingly, it turns out that in almost all EU member states — the exceptions are the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany — people over 55 are less likely to approve of U.S. leadership than are those between 15 and 30. This is surprising, as one might expect that older Europeans would view the U.S. more positively, since they "are more likely to remember America’s role in defeating Nazism in the second world war, its generosity in establishing the Marshall Plan and its role in confronting the Soviet Union during the cold war."

The Gallup finding thus raises 2 questions:
1) If the above explanation is true (positive memories among those who are older), why is it that the Dutch, the Danes, and the Germans remember these things much more strongly than their neighbours?
2) Assuming that the explanation is at least partially true, what positive things associated with the United States drive younger people, on average, to be even more supportive, given that they do not have any personal memory of these things (with the possible exception of the end of the Cold War)?

Charlemagne suggests that those 55 and over may disproportionately belong to the "radical generation of 1968," which might counteract positive impressions built on Marshall Plan aid or Cold War alliances. This seems somewhat ad hoc. Moreover, I seriously doubt that the generation of 1968 was less radical in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany, which ought to be the case if 1968 radicalism is the primary driver of the observed old vs. young differences.

Given the contiguity and overall similarity of these 3 countries, I suspect that a single shared factor accounts for the Denmark-Germany-Netherlands pattern. What that factor might be, however, I don't know.

One further intriguing poll result reported by Charlemagne: Americans are far more likely to answer affirmatively the following question: "Do you have a cause in your life that you believe in so strongly that you would leave yoru friends and family or go to jail for?"

Ploughing in history and culture

2010-11-20T19:10:00.000-08:00

Another intriguing post by William Easterly and Laura Freschi, this one on their own Aid Watch blog: "The plough and the veil." They discuss a new paper by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn on "The Origins of Gender Roles."

The paper's abstract explains: "societies with a tradition of plough agriculture tend to have the belief that the natural place for women is inside the home and the natural place for men is outside the home. Looking across countries, subnational districts, ethnic groups and individuals, we identify a link between historic plough-use and a number of outcomes today, including female labor force participation, female participation in politics, female ownership of firms, the sex ratio and self-expressed attitudes about the role of women in society."

This idea goes back to Ester Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development (first published in 1970; republished in 2007 with an extensive introduction reflecting on Boserup's career). Easterly and Freschi point out these cultural biases do, of course, change over time; wars, in particular, can give rise to dramatic changes.

Although the overall finding is striking, the pattern Alesina et al. identify includes a fair amount of individual variation. For example, among Nordic countries, historic plough use is not found in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland, whereas it is found in Denmark. Yet female labour force participation in Denmark is very high, and comparable to that in the other Nordics. Nor is it my impression that attitudes about the role of women in society are different in Denmark.

It would be interesting to examine whether perhaps Denmark was more of an outlier (among Nordics) prior to World War II, in which case the shock of war may account for the change to a more Nordic pattern in Denmark. I suspect, however, that this is a case where shared culture trumps non-shared agricultural history.

Whither Ireland?

2010-11-19T13:59:00.000-08:00

Much news in recent days about Ireland's crisis and the ongoing slow-motion run on the Irish financial system. In the NYT, Man Booker Prize winner John Banville eloquently sighs about Ireland's having become "The Debtor of the Western World." The paper also has a brief "debate" on "The Costs of Rescuing Ireland," in which Jeff Frieden highlights the striking statistic that British and German banks lent Irish borrowers the equivalent of "$100,000 for every man, woman and child in Ireland." Frieden very reasonably argues that, accordingly, those banks, and perhaps their regulatory agencies need to take some blame for severity of the current crisis.

European Union member states (both eurozone members and the United Kingdom) are less reluctant about bailing out Ireland than they were about Greece, for the very good reason that Ireland's government finances were, until the crisis, transparent and under control. The obvious downside of a bailout is that Ireland will have to accept certain conditions and will not be able to fully control its own actions. This appears to be why the Irish government has — at considerable cost — tried to hold off on asking for any international assistance.

In contrast, the EU (and especially the eurozone members) have almost been pushing Ireland to accept a bailout, due to fears of a financial crisis domino effect, with Portugal, Spain, or even Italy feared to be next. Given the scale and severity of the crisis, it now appears likely that some kind of bailout agreement will be reached. It would be nice if some of the "taking blame" on the part of creditors that Frieden calls for meant that the conditions associated with the bailout will be comparatively generous.

Be that as it may, Banville's lament makes clear that plenty of blame lies with the Irish themselves. Indeed, the folly that lead to the crisis is engagingly recounted in Fintan O'Toole's Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. (It was reviewed in the New York Review of Books earlier this month; full article gated. O'Toole's writing about Ireland is always interesting; his The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities is also quite good.) One clear strength of Ireland so far is that its willingness to face up to the crisis and to take painful political and economic steps to address it have been far more sane than some of the folly that continues to be on display in that regard on the continent and in the United States.

Crowdsourcing and aid

2010-11-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

Ushahidi ("testimony" in Swahili) is a website that maps reports about particular events submitted online or by cellphone. It was first developed in 2008 to map violent incidents in Kenya after disputed elections. Since then it's been used to monitor a wide variety of issues: elections in Togo and Mozambique, but also bicycling risks in Los Angeles and the cleanup of "Snowmageddon" in Washington, DC last year.

Looking through these various examples illustrates both the promise and the challenges of this approach. The two election applications got too few hits to be particularly useful, whereas plenty of people contributed information to the LA and DC set-ups. To work well, Ushahidi requires a well-connected (by internet or mobile phone) target population, with the will and desire to provide useful information, and a receiving organization that can filter the incoming information to weed out false or misleading inputs.

This suggests that, while Ushahidi can play an invaluable role in bringing together information providers and information recipients more cheaply and efficiently, the key challenge to making Ushahidi work is not the platform itself, but rather the people on either end. And that, of course, is not new. Still, Ushahidi has been hailed as portending a revolution in the management of humanitarian and development assistance by several observers.

For example, the intriguing new book Macrowikinomics, by Tapscott and Williams, opens with a story about Ushahidi's value in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. The authors argue that "the wiki world revolutionizes the work of humanitarians, journalists, and soldiers who provide aid and assistance in some of the most unforgiving circumstances available." (quotation from an online source; I have not yet seen the book.) It is, however, perhaps better to say that it "could revolutionize the work," if only people can be found who are willing to dedicate large amounts of time to it. And there's the rub.

Tom Slee has a thoughtful and much longer blog post on the issue here, with some valuable quotations from a range of experts in IT and development. His conclusion: "the closer you look at examples of Internet-based collaboration, the more they look like a new medium for realizing old (and often admirable) commitments. There is no paradigmatic shift separating Oxfam and Ushahidi."

India's microfinance crisis

2010-11-18T06:20:00.000-08:00

Microcredit institutions are popping up everywhere around the world, and have achieved some great results as well as some great press. Now a fascinating article in the New York Times by Lydia Polgreen and Vikas Bajaj illustrates some of the downsides of microcredit. "India microcredit faces collapse from defaults" reports that "almost all borrowers in one of India’s largest states [Andhra Pradesh] have stopped repaying their loans, egged on by politicians who accuse the industry of earning outsize profits on the backs of the poor."

Supporters of microcredit operations often don't realize that most microcredit loans carry interest rates that by Western standards seem quite high. One Indian bank representative notes in the NYT article that "his company had reduced its interest rate by six percentage points, to 24 percent, in the past several years as volume had brought down expenses." The article suggests that such a rate is actually quite low, compared to rates charged by microfinance companies in other countries.

(In fact, Kiva, the excellent microcredit organization that accepts micro-donations from donors everywhere and channels them through existing microfinance organizations in the developing world, has faced some complaints in the past because many donors, who see their contribution as a form of charity, are under the impression that loans are either interest-free or very low-interest.)

Comparatively high interest rates are probably unavoidable, in that microcredit loans almost inevitably involve more overhead per dollar lent than do large loans. It is also worth noting that India's inflation rate is fairly high (currently around 10%, but as high as 16% earlier this year), so the real interest rate is much lower. Nevertheless, the accumulating interest can cause trouble for borrowers, as the NYT article illustrates.

Given how successful microfinance has been, it is hardly surprising that less scrupulous financial institutions have entered the field. Nor is it surprising that some borrowers borrow irresponsibly, if given the chance to do so. The real danger, highlighted in the NYT article, is that the resulting problems will undermine the entire microfinance industry.

Aid as an instrument of repression

2010-11-17T11:43:00.000-08:00

A new blog post by William Easterly and Laura Freschi at the New York Review of Books calls attention to a recent Human Rights Watch report on the Ethiopian government's use of aid as an instrument of repression. The blog post does a nice job of tying together some of the concerns raised by Peter Gill's book Famine and Foreigners (see earlier post here) and by Easterly's NYR article on foreign aid for dictators (see earlier post here).

As Easterly and Freschi note, the HRW report convincingly establishes that (officials in) Ethiopia's government, headed by Meles Zenawi, frequently uses aid as a political weapon against dissent. Given that Ethiopia's foreign aid receipts are higher than those of almost all other developing countries, this is a serious problem. Moreover, a key challenge in addressing it is that the standard tactic — bypassing the government and delivering aid at the village level — is unavailable, since the ruling political party controls village-level authorities as well.

Still, the HRW report focuses on government-run programs. So one alternative would be to funnel aid through local non-governmental organizations. It is not possible to tell from the HRW report how feasible this is, but a look at the AidData database suggests that it would be difficult: a lot of aid would need to be re-oriented.

Searching the database for aid projects in Ethiopia in the past few years, and then sorting by declining project size shows — not surprisingly — that all of the largest projects take place in conjunction with the official authorities:

HRW focuses on two programs that each appear among the top 10 largest projects: the Protection of Basic Services program ($180mn from the World Bank's IDA in 2007, $150mn from the EU in 2007, and $140mn from the African Development Fund in 2008), and the Productive Safety Nets Program ($145mn from the World Bank's IDA). The other top projects, including road transport, food security, and industrial developments, all involve government authorities as well.

The prominence of the World Bank in this list underscores Easterly and Freschi's criticism of the World Bank's "hollow" resolution to channel aid past the national government in order to prevent "political capture". They are right to conclude that the current situation is unacceptable.

As one might expect, some donor agencies take issue with HRW's findings. The multilateral Development Assistance Group Ethiopia, which includes most of the largest donors to Ethiopia, issued a rebuttal, claiming that they have not found "evidence of systematic or widespread distortion." Note how carefully this is phrased: the implication is that there was quite a bit of "distortion," only it was not extensive enough to qualify as systematic or widespread. Perhaps so, but that is still pretty problematic.

DAG Ethiopia suggests that "a greater focus on... transparency and independent monitoring" can solve the problem. Easterly and Freschi seem inclined to be skeptical. Given the lack of donor reaction to similar past reports or to the fraudulent election in May 2010, I think they are probably right.

Gold standard update

2010-11-16T06:43:00.000-08:00

Quick update on the gold standard issue (see earlier post here). A few days ago, the New York Times featured an op-ed by James Grant, a fairly prominent financial pundit, supporting the reintroduction of the gold standard. In "How to Make the Dollar Sound Again," Grant claims that "In its utility, economy and elegance, there has never been a monetary system like [the classical gold standard."

What is funny about this claim is that Grant seems to think that monetary systems are to be judged for how they treat money ("[money] went where it was treated well"), rather than how they treat the people who use that money. And the key problem with the gold standard is that it is not so great for the average citizen.

The gold standard forces the money supply to expand at the same rate as the gold supply in a country, which is a rate determined both by the total world supply of gold and by the demand for gold in other countries (either for their own gold standard, or for other uses such as jewelry).
Meanwhile, economic production expands at a rate that is largely independent of the changing gold supply.

This means, almost inevitably, that there will be periods of deflation. Now deflation is not a big problem for the owners of capital (i.e. the wealthy, such as James Grant), but it is rather unpleasant for those who have any form of debt (i.e. most Americans). Indeed, the deflation induced by adherence to a gold standard was the single most salient political issue in the 1896 U.S. presidential elections, and produced what has been called "the most famous speech in American political history": William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" Speech (link includes audio recording of Bryan reading the speech).

Grant disingenuously cobbles together some random anecdotes and factoids to suggest that a reintroduction of the gold standard would be a good idea today. I do not know why the NYT deigned to publish his piece, but I think the concluding paragraph of Bryan's speech is a fitting rejoinder:

"If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

Netherlands gender gap

2010-11-16T05:28:00.000-08:00

Interesting article in Slate by Jessica Olien: "Going Dutch", which describes how "Women in the Netherlands work less, have lesser titles and a big gender pay gap, and they love it." Much of it rings true, and I particularly like the emphasis on the fact that a gender gap need not be evidence of discrimination (which is not to say that it is not; simply that discrimination cannot be assumed, as it too often is).

One amusing part of the article is a reference to the United Nations' take on the Dutch situation:
"In the spring, the United Nations, suspicious that there was something keeping women from full-time jobs, launched an inquiry to see whether the Netherlands was in compliance with the women's rights treaty."

This sentence is funny for two reasons. First, the notion that Dutch women are insufficiently organized and influential politically to undertake such an inquiry themselves, should they deem it necessary, strikes me as laughable; the UN's funds are limited enough — this is not where it should spend them. But second, Olien completely misrepresents how the UN process works.

Countries that have ratified the UN's Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), must submit progress reports once very four years to a UN Committee that monitors compliance. (This process is very similar to the one that brought the UN review of the human rights policies of the United States earlier this month, as described in a post 10 days ago). Past progress reports are available at the UN's CEDAW website (through 2007) and at the website of the UN's Human Rights office (from 2008 forward).

As a party to CEDAW, the Netherlands submitted such a report (its fifth since joining CEDAWin 1991) in February 2010. Reviewed along with the Netherlands were seven other countries, including Egypt, Panama, and Uzbekistan. The Committee's "Concluding Observations" can be found at the UN's excellent documents website, under identifier CEDAW/C/NLD/CO/5. Most of these observations are standard boilerplate, apart from some justified (and, to me, entertaining) criticism of the political party SGP. The discussion of employment and economic empowerment comes in paragraphs 36-39, with the concerns that Olien refers appearing at the end of paragraph 36: "the Committee expresses concern that the Government of the Netherlands overestimates the degree to which part-time employment is the result of women's choice." They offer no evidence for this alleged overestimation, however.

Somehow, all of this does not strike me as adding up to the UN launching an inquiry, as Olien claims it did. [By the way, the Dutch government offers some additional information in a May 2010 memo to the United Nations, noting, among others, that "in 2007 only 45 per cent of the female population aged 15 to 64 earned enough to support themselves, compared to 70 per
cent of the male population" (p. 8). Olien erroneously reports a figure of 25 percent.]

Perhaps the most interesting question raised by Olien's article (and by the Booth & van Ours paper that Olien cites) is the following: Is a gender gap that is largely a result of choice, as seems to be the case in the Netherlands, nevertheless a problem? In other words, should the Dutch government work to convince Dutch women that they should want both more full-time work and a less gendered household set-up? Yes, definitely, according to the UN Committee. But why? The Committee gives no real reason that I can see.

Torture recap

2010-11-16T04:37:00.000-08:00

Last week Slate published a useful, albeit depressing, article by Dahlia Lithwick, reviewing "The baby steps that have taken the United Sates from decrying torture to celebrating it." Prompted by the publication of former president George W. Bush's partially plagiarized "memoirs", in which Bush happily admits to approving water-boarding, among other forms of "enhanced interrogation, Lithwick's "Interrogation Nation" offers a comprehensively linked account of changing American reactions to the knowledge that the government has engaged in torture.

Prior to 9/11, of course, the United States strongly opposed torture, supporting the prosecution of Americans and foreigners alike who committed or ordered torture. Since 2004, the world has known that the U.S. government authorized torture, and U.S. soldiers engaged in it, but the Bush government was sufficiently ashamed to attempt to redefine torture out of existence, and then to deny that the U.S. engaged in torture. And now, it is not only common knowledge, but Bush feels (apparently correctly) that he can boast about it in print and on television. Impunity wins the day, sadly.

How to lie with fake research

2010-11-15T14:11:00.000-08:00

As Kevin Sieff reported in the Washington Post last month, it appears that a new Virginia history textbook aimed at fourth graders, Our Virginia: Past and Present, makes the claim that "Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson." Needless to say, this news comes as a surprise to most Civil War historians.

In the follow-up to the initial story, it has become clear that no historians reviewed the textbook before it was distributed. According to Sieff, the problem was first discovered by William & Mary's own Carol Sheriff, a professor history. The textbook's author, meanwhile, has admitted to relying primarily on the internet in doing her "research." Apparently, she has much to learn about the reliability of internet sources .

The Virginia Gazette has an informative interview with prof. Sheriff, discussing the error of the textbook claim. Next, for reasons that are not entirely clear, George Mason professor of economics Walter Williams decided to wade into the fray, and in the process demonstrated why one should be wary not only of internet sources, but also of the "evidence" put forward by people with an axe to grind.

In a syndicated column titled "Virginia's Black Confederates," Williams first cannily reduces the textbook claim to "blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy," which is of course not controversial at all. The controversy is over the "thousands" and over those two Stonewall Jackson battalions.

Be that as it may, Williams next claims to examine accepted scholarship on this "controversial" fact. Here is Williams's "accepted scholarship":

In April 1861, a Petersburg, Va., newspaper proposed "three cheers for the patriotic free Negroes of Lynchburg" after 70 blacks offered "to act in whatever capacity may be assigned to them" in defense of Virginia. Ex-slave Frederick Douglass observed, "There are at the present moment, many colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down ... and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government."
Charles H. Wesley, a distinguished black historian who lived from 1891 to 1987, wrote "The Employment of Negroes as Soldiers in the Confederate Army," in the Journal of Negro History (1919). He says, "Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies (1,600) of free men of color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia."

Wesley cites Horace Greeley's "American Conflict" (1866) saying, "For more than two years, Negroes had been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy. They had been embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the armies of the Union."
Wesley goes on to say, "An observer in Charleston at the outbreak of the war noted the preparation for war, and called particular attention to the thousand Negroes who, so far from inclining to insurrections, were grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of shooting the Yankees."

This discussion appears to be drawing on 4 sources, representing "accepted scholarship": Frederick Douglass, the Petersburg, VA newspaper, the Wesley article, and Horace Greeley. As we shall see, however, the last 3 "sources" really turn out to be just a single source: Charles Wesley's "The Employment of Negroes as Soldiers in the Confederate Army," published in the Journal of Negro History in 1919. Let's take each piece of "evidence", briefly, in turn.

The statement by Douglass was made in the service of calling upon the Union to draft African American soldiers. It is from "Fighting Rebels with Only One Hand", published in September 1861. The goal of the piece was not to establish evidence, but rather to convince a recalcitrant Union to broaden its recruitment. Moreover, Williams' quote is disingenuous. Douglass' statement does not begin "there are at the present moment...", but rather "It is now pretty well established, that there are at the present moment..." which gives a better sense of the indirect and second-hand nature of Douglass' claim.

Next, the apparently primary source material: the Petersburg, VA newspaper. In fact, it seems unlikely that Williams saw the paper himself. His information appears to be drawn from Wesley, who in turn draws from Greeley, so Williams' information is tertiary at best. Greeley mentions the article immediately after describing the Confederate Congress passing a bill limiting the ability of individual towns to pass laws drafting local free blacks. Here's Greeley's description: "The Lynchburg Republican (Va). had, so early as April, chronicled the volunteered enrollment of 70 of the free negroes of that place, to fight in defense of their State." (Greeley, vol. 2, p. 522).

First, note that these men were volunteered, which is very much different from volunteering. Second, neither Greeley nor Wesley says these volunteered men said they would "act in whatever capacity may be assigned to them." It is possible Williams draws this from the original source, but I highly doubt it. In fact, Wesley describes a desperation act passed in March 1865 by the Confederate Congress drafting slaves "to perform military service in whatever capacity he [the President] may direct" (p. 251), and it appears likely this is where Williams got his language.

On to the next claim. Williams says that Wesley writes: "Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies (1,600) of free men of color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia." This is a manufactured quotation. In fact, Wesley writes only that a paper in Lynchburg, VA (i.e. the "source" already mentioned by Williams) commented "on the enlistment of 70 free Negroes to fight for the defense of the State." Here too, note that Wesley, in contrast to Williams, does not argue that these men enlisted on their own; he notes simply that the enlistment took place, voluntary or not.

The second sentence is also made up by Williams, although his creative rewrite does not diverge much from Wesley's description (p.245). However, Wesley claims to be drawing this information from Greeley, even though Greeley offers no such information. In fact, Wesley appears to have derived his data from Christian Fleetwood's "The Negro as Soldier" (1895) which states: "the 'Charleston Mercury' records the passing through Augusta of sixteen well-drilled companies and one Negro company from Nashville, Tenn." Note that there is nothing here about these 16 companies being colored. So Wesley's footnote is wrong and his interpretation of Fleetwood's sentence is wrong; on top of this Williams manufactures a quotation out of Wesley's somewhat longer description. Not exactly quality "research" on anyone's part.

On, then, to Greeley as a source, as cited by Wesley, as cited by Williams (who shows no evidence of having bothered to look up Greeley's work himself, even though it is readily available online). The first quotation ("For more than two years, Negroes had been extensively employed...") is correct, but does not of course imply that the "employment" was at all voluntary. The second quotation correctly quotes Wesley, who incorrectly quotes Greeley. Moreover, Greeley here is reporting about an item in the The Evening Post of New York, sent by a Washington correspondent, who heard from "A gentleman from Charleston," who did not call particular attention to (instead, he just mentioned) "the thousand negroes," who in any case were busy building batteries, not being trained as soldiers.

In sum, Williams' definition of "accepted scholarship" appears to be "an article from 1919 that I happened to find online and which I will creatively quote from without doing any further investigation". The irony of all this is that it is not actually controversial that there were some black Confederate soldiers, which appears to be the thing Williams is so desperate to "prove." Moreover, given the reams of research on the Civil War that have been produced since 1919, it is odd that he is not apparently aware of any. One hopes that his teaching of economics (his academic home department) does not present "accepted scholarship" from 1919 as cutting edge!

Sorry for the long rant. Lesson for the day: the internet puts many research resources at your fingertips. Use them wisely and use them well: don't trust just any information you find, and do double-check the sources used by those whose information appears reliable. There is a depressing amount of intellectually dishonest "information", even from sources that may appear reliable (Williams is "John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics" at George Mason University). Other information is simply wrong due to sloppy research (as in Wesley's interpretation of Fleetwood's report).

Second, lesson, for my students only: I will check some of your sources, and even your sources' sources. And if I find errors, whether deliberate (dishonesty) or sloppy (laziness), I will get grumpy. Doing good research is important; learning to do it well will stand you in good stead throughout your careers.

Democracy: letter vs. spirit

2010-11-11T05:04:00.000-08:00

In the study of democratization, one common issue is the tendency among government leaders to try to manipulate the system to their advantage by pretending to follow the letter of the law while quite blatantly violating the spirit. Most recently, the Burmese government held "multiparty elections", which nobody expected to be even remotely fair. Still, as the New York Times pointed out beforehand, "The appearance of electoral legitimacy and civilian institutions may make it easier for Myanmar’s neighbors to embrace what has been a pariah." One might hope this would not work, but in the NYT's post-election report, Seth Mydans notes that "China praised the election" and Burma's neighbours also welcomed it. The U.S. and many European nations, in contrast, have condemned the election for the sham that it obviously was.

Sadly, the same desire to ignore the spirit of democracy is now on display in Alaska, where Joe Miller is fighting Lisa Murkowski's write-in bid. As William Yardley reports on the NYT's "The Caucus" blog, lawyers working on behalf of the Republican Senate candidate were challenging any write-in vote that was even slightly mis-spelled. Indeed, they were initially challenging even people who had written "Murkowski, Lisa" rather than "Lisa Murkowski".

The Republican Party lawyers base their appeals on Alaska's election statutes, which state (in paragraph 11) that "A vote for a write-in candidate... shall be counted if the oval is filled in for that candidate and if the name, as it appears on the write-in declaration of candidacy, of the candidate or the last name of the candidate is written in the space provided."

(In fact, paragraphs 9-11 all deal with write-in candidates, and each of them is written quite poorly. One would think that some clarity would be helpful in voting laws. In any case, it is worth noting that the last clause of paragraph 11 does not state that a correctly spelled first name must accompany the last name, nor does it contain the "as it appears in the write-in declaration" of the preceding clause. Paragraph 10 does not contain that clause either, for that matter.)

I am sure more quibbling by lawyers is to follow, but the deeper question is this: does Joe Miller really want to win the Senate position based on the "appearance of electoral legitimacy" that might be achieved by systematically challenging every write-in vote that does not spell Lisa Murkowski's first and last name correctly, and in that order? Would that not suggest that he, and the Republican Party hacks who are doing the challenging for him, do not, in fact believe in the spirit of democracy (or, perhaps, believe in it only for non-allied foreign countries)?

To live and die in Detroit

2010-11-10T06:46:00.000-08:00

The current Mother Jones cover story — What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones? —is a sad account of the myriad ways in which Detroit is falling apart (has fallen apart?) not just physically, but also in terms of its public sector: judiciary, education system, police, fire department, etc.

Of course money alone will not fix these problems, nor will simply hiring more public employees. Still, stories like this cast a disturbing light on the current debate about allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the richest x% of the U.S. population. Why is empathy in such short supply?

Google causes war?

2010-11-09T07:32:00.000-08:00

As Mark Monmonier* points out in his charming How to Lie with Maps, maps have often been used by governments to further their political goals in the international arena. Now, however, it seems governments no longer need to rely on their own maps to support dodgy political claims.

Last month, Nicaraguan troops "invaded" Costa Rica, blaming the "error" on a mistake in Google maps, which misplaced a section of the border by about 1.5 miles. Of course, this is highly unlikely to cause an actual war (note how the newspaper article is filed under "Notas Secundarias" :-). Still, Google is embarrassed, especially since it appears Microsoft's Bing mapped the border correctly. Google offers some defense of its error here, blaming the U.S. Department of State.

More detail about the 19th-century border dispute that lies at the source of the "misunderstanding" is offered by Stefan Geens on Ogle Earth. As Geens points out, Nicaragua's government was already trying to assert its claim to the small area under dispute when it appears to have noticed that, fortuitously, Google maps awarded them the area. This was deemed sufficient justification to go ahead and occupy it.

It is unclear whether the Nicaraguans actually believed that the appeal to Google maps would convince anyone of the legality of their actions. Nevertheless, these events make clear not only how important maps are, but also how much governments have to come rely on private organizations who have no legal responsibility under national or international law to supply correct information. It's surprising that hackers haven't jumped on this earlier — imagine the uproar if Google maps suddenly started showing Texas as an independent country, for example :-)

* Mark Monmonier is speaking at William & Mary at 4pm this Friday, Nov. 12. His talk's title will be “Fear and Loathing in Geopolitics: Cartographies of Pretension and Persuasion.” He may well have more to say on this same issue.

Bretton Woods III?

2010-11-08T11:31:00.000-08:00

In the lead-up to the G-20 meeting, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, posted an op-ed in the Financial Times this weekend in which he called for stronger international monetary cooperation, of a kind that was attempted in the 1970s and 1980s (most famously in the Plaza Accords). It is perhaps not surprising that his example of how the U.S. ought to promote such cooperation is the second Reagan administration, when policy was led by James Baker, for whom Zoellick worked at the time.

What is quite puzzling, however, as others have noted, is that Zoellick calls for "employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values" i.e. some form of modified gold standard. Brad DeLong, calling Zoellick a candidate for the "Stupidest Man Alive Crown" points out that he is quite mistaken about the current role of gold (Zoellick argues that in some vague way it already serves as a currency).

Equally odd, however, is Zoellick description of the current "monetary system". He calls the current situation "Bretton Woods II", and says that it was "launched in 1971." Somehow, I doubt most people would consider the unilateral, last-resort policy option of suspending the dollar's gold convertibility by Richard Nixon equivalent to the "launch" of an "international monetary system".

Not only that, it is not a puzzle why the original Bretton Woods system, which really was a system, fell apart: the successful operation of a monetary system requires a monetary base whose supply increases apace with economic growth, and in which people have confidence. Gold by itself cannot meet those conditions. The Bretton Woods combination of gold plus dollars did so only temporarily. I don't see how anyone could expect more success for a combination of gold plus multiple currencies (which would have to maintain fixed parities relative to one another and to gold, if gold is to have any function in the system other than the speculative hedge function it has today).

The final oddity about Zoellick's op-ed is that Martin Wolf, in his blog at the very same newspaper, the Financial Times, had given a quite thorough run-down of the issues that make a return to the gold standard today utterly infeasible. Even if Zoellick does not read the FT's blogs himself, you'd think that someone either on his staff or at the FT would have warned him that not only was he being foolish, but Wolf had pre-emptively pointed out just how foolish.

Elections and recognition

2010-11-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

Burma (Myanmar) held its first elections in 20 years this weekend. Reuters reports that the vote was "marred by fraud charges and apathy" — not surprising given that the military has carefully ensured that it will win, and that last time around, in 1990, they simply ignored the election results. These famously gave a clear victory to the opposition National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Also not surprising is Suu Kyi's appeal to boycott the current election. Still, it will be interesting to see what the election results are. Even fraudulent election results tell a story, after all.

Meanwhile, Myanmar's brutal and illegitimate regime still enjoys unanimous international recognition, of course. In contrast, Somaliland, which is not officially recognized by any nation, held elections this past summer that were considered relatively fair, in which the opposition leader won, and which resulted in a peaceful transition in July. The international community continues to hope that some day Somalia will once again become a unified and peaceful nation. But in the meantime Somaliland has been de facto independent for nearly 20 years. At some point one has to wonder what purpose is served by refusing to officially recognize such a state. Numerous countries provide development assistance to the Somaliland government, but so far there is little evidence that they are considering recognizing it.

Modern piracy on the free seas

2010-11-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

Reuters reports that Somali pirates killed a hostage who had refused to disembark from a yacht they had hijacked. The relative impunity with which piracy continues to thrive in Somalia is quite striking. The New York Review of Books had a good article by Jeffrey Gettleman a few weeks ago reviewing two recent books about Somalia and piracy: "The Pirates Are Winning!"

Gettleman recounted a visit to Somalia last Spring in which it became clear that a local pirate leader had no need to hide his occupation — in fact, he was a celebrity. As Gettleman noted, "There's no doubt that in Somalia, crime pays — it's about the only industry that does." It is even possible to invest in piracy ventures, just as in Europe several centuries ago, where successful pirates were often underwritten by early 'venture capitalists' who preferred to stay on land.

Gettleman also points out that this form of marine lawlessness may be particularly visible, but that for years before the pirates took to their coastal seas, foreign trawlers had been using "dirty fishing tactics, like dynamiting reefs or employing giant, waterborne vacuums... decimating not just that year's catch but future generations as well." At times these ships used to shoot at local fishermen. Today, some ships dump toxic waste in the local seas, safe in the knowledge that no Somali government will track them down and punish them.

All of this points to the difficulty of establishing the rule of law on the open seas, an issue that also goes back centuries. Grotius famously wrote De Mare Liberum, while on the payroll of the Dutch East India Company, to argue that no authority could deny anyone the right to freely use the seas. The current interpretation of "mare liberum" is that any nation can assert jurisdiction over issues of piracy, under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction.

So far, no national government appears to be sufficiently concerned to do much about Somali piracy (or about other widespread forms of law-breaking such as illegal fishing techniques or dumping waste). One clue as to the reason why is that Gettleman estimates that pirates have taken in "at least $100 million" in the past few years. That is less than some annual incomes on Wall Street!

Reviewing human rights in the United States

2010-11-05T16:00:00.001-07:00

For the first time ever, the human rights record of the United States has been reviewed by the United Nations' Human Rights Council. This took place as part of the new "Universal Periodic Review" instituted by the UN General Assembly in 2006, which reviews all UN member states once every 4 years.

As the Washington Post reports, the delegations of several other states camped out overnight to be first in line to criticize U.S. policies. Among these were representatives of Cuba, Iran, and North Korea. The hearing today was based on a report submitted by the Obama administration back in August.

As one might expect, a good deal of the criticism focused on detention policies and torture allegations in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. As one might expect, too, much of the criticism was also rather self-serving and disingenuous. As Germany's envoy, Konrad Scharinger archly noted (quoted in the Washington Post article): "We have noted with interest that some of states which are on the first places of today's speakers list had spared no effort to be the first to speak on the U.S. We would hope that those states will show the same level of commitment when it comes to improving their human rights record at home."

Inevitable politicking aside, the UN's universal review is a valuable initiative, in that it forces all states, including Cuba, Iran, and North Korea, to give an official account of their policies. And however much they will deny, dissemble, and distort their own policies, they will nevertheless produce a public document to which they can be held accountable. As Daniel Thomas shows in the wonderful The Helsinki Effect, such small beginnings may pay unexpectedly large dividends down the line for oppressed groups in such countries.

Governance and foreign aid allocation

2010-11-04T14:34:00.001-07:00

In the current New York Review of Books, William Easterly discusses the continuing reluctance among aid donors to reduce aid to autocratic governments, even though all donors, at a minimum, pay lip service to the notion that good governance in general, and democracy in particular, are key to long-term, sustainable development: "Foreign Aid for Scoundrels."

The article offers a nice overview of the considerable sums that even the worst autocrats continue to receive, and of what Easterly nicely calls the "Gerund Defense": the argument that autocrats are "democratizing" and hence deserve continued aid.

It's a good article overall, and well worth reading. Still, it won't come as a surprise to those who've read Easterly's other work that he is a little too facile in his criticism of donor aid agencies. Specifically, he overlooks two key points:

1. Most aid does not flow to developing country governments in the form of a blank check. Easterly is, of course, correct in noting that aid often "increases the slush funds available to the government." After all, money is fungible. But this conclusion applies only if aid is given to pay for things the government would otherwise have spent its own money on. Aid that is given to strengthen political opposition parties, for example, quite clearly does not increase the slush funds available to the government.

2. Easterly writes as though he believes that countries governed by autocrats should not receive any aid. But really that is only a defensible argument if one thinks either that a) countries have the government they deserve, so it is all right to punish people for the autocrat they have ended up with, or b) it is utterly impossible to do any good for development, and for people at the grass-roots level in countries that are governed by bad autocrats.

Consider, for example, Zaire under Mobutu. Clearly, Mobutu did not care a whit about his own people. As a result, he was not going to spend any money on, say, mosquito nets. We know, however that widely distributing mosquito nets can dramatically reduce the incidence of malaria, which is surely a good thing both in an immediate human rights sense and in terms of the longer-term development of the country.

It is quite plausible that Mobutu would have been perfectly willing to allow an NGO to come in and distribute mosquito nets to all of his citizens. Almost certainly, he would have found a way to extract money from the NGO, so the mosquito nets would have been needlessly expensive to distribute, and Mobutu would have enriched himself further. Nevertheless, I would support a national donor agency's decision to fund such an NGO. Easterly not only implies that he would not, but also that such an aid project would be a bad, paternalistic idea.

Technocrats and development

2010-11-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

A little bit lost in The New Republic's election coverage is some new grumpiness from David Rieff: "The Gates Foundation's Delusional Techno-Messianism." Rieff's basic complaint appears to be that many aid organizations either see or portray development as a technocratic challenge: find the right tool, and poverty and underdevelopment will be history.

Certainly development was often seen as a technocratic challenge during the early decades of development assistance. Indeed, much early development assistance came in the form of so-called technical assistance: sending experts from rich countries to show the poor countries how it is done. This, not surprisingly, turned out to be futile or even counterproductive.

I don't know of many (if any) development agencies that take a similar approach today. Certainly Rieff offers no evidence that the Gates Foundation does. My impression is that the Gates foundation focuses on empirically assessing, on a small scale, which strategies work and which do not, and then trying to scale up those that work. This is technocratic, yes, but it does not pretend that such limited, context-specific strategies will 'solve' the problem of development.

Gates strikes me as the epitome of someone who is both optimistic and clear-eyed, which are the very qualities Rieff claims to admire (see my Oct. 23 post). In fact, Rieff's only piece of evidence about Gates in the piece actually has nothing to do with what the Gates Foundation does or promises to do, but rather with how Gates, in 2009 (why publish a complaint about it now?), described the Green Revolution.

Gates noted that it “averted famine, saved hundreds of millions of lives, and fueled widespread economic development.” As Rieff correctly counters, many of the techniques promoted by the Green Revolution turned out to be unsustainable and to do long-term ecological and economic damage. But hindsight is 20/20. More importantly, if we are to avoid such problems and yet not become utter luddites, the best approach seems to be exactly what the Gates Foundation is doing: experiment on a limited scale with a particular initiative before putting it in wider circulation.

Moreover, Rieff is unfair to Gates in that the latter, in the same speech from which Rieff draws the above quotation, also "warned that as scientists, governments, and others strive to repeat the successes of the original Green Revolution, they should be careful not to repeat its mistakes, such as the overuse of fertilizer and irrigation." So Rieff, in criticizing Gates' statement, is essentially just parroting what Gates himself said immediately after.

The other aspect of Rieff's central complaint is that many aid organizations portray development as a simple, solvable problem in search of the right instrument (or money), as this helps them raise much-needed funds from people who might otherwise be less generous. Here Rieff is correct, but surely there is no worse agency to pick on than the Gates Foundation, which does not need to advertise what it is doing to raise money — indeed, that is one of its great strengths.

It's election day, so vote (if you are legally allowed to do so :-)!

2010-11-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

On election day, some notes on what political science has contributed to our understanding of election outcomes (turnout, votes, etc.). The New York Times magazine this past weekend included an interesting article called "Nudge the Vote" covering insights derived from political science research into elections over the past decade. As the article notes, experimental studies have shed considerable insight into tactics political campaigns can use to increase turnout. Moreover, those insights are increasingly specific: for example, multiple-voter households are targeted in different ways from single-voter households. In recent years, political consultants are drawing more and more on such findings, as well as conducting experiments of their own.

Also of interest: an op-ed in the New York Times last week, by political scientists Barry Burden and Kenneth Mayer, pointing out that early voting may, somewhat counter-intuitively, reduce turnout, because it reduces the hype around election day. On the other hand, voting-day registration — whether this be for early voting or on election day — unambiguously increases turnout. Given how little verification takes place to give people their voting registration (see my post last week about the DMV routinely suggesting that I, a non-citizen, register to vote), it is surprising how few states allow same-day registration.

Finally, the Berkeley Electronic Press' Forum currently has an entire issue dedicated to the connection between political science and practical politics. Among many interesting contributions, Hans Noel offers a handy overview of "Ten Things Political Scientists Know That You Don't"

Preventing another Greece

2010-11-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

At the end of last week, the EU decided to embark on another treaty change. The organization hopes to create a "permanent crisis mechanism" to avoid recurrences of last summer's crisis in Greece. The Economist's Charlemagne blog has a good overview of the diplomacy required to get all the EU countries on board with this idea.

The idea is that profligate countries will be subject to more automatic and harsher sanctions; it will be a new and improved version of the much-maligned stability and growth pact. That agreement foundered in part because key EU member states (including Germany and France, who are now pushing this new mechanism) violated it more or less with impunity.

Given that France's Sarkozy insisted that the sanctions associated with the new mechanism not be fully automatic, there are good reasons to think that it, too, will function only so long as no major EU states run afoul of it. Also of interest: the head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet is not at all a fan of the new idea.

History, genocide, memory

2010-10-31T16:01:00.000-07:00

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has a fine review by Anne Applebaum of two books that treat the mass-scale murders that took place under the despotic leaderships of Hitler and Stalin: The Worst of the Madness.

Timothy Snyder has written Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, a discussion of the fate of the region between Germany and Russia which suffered the worst and most systematic killing to take place not only during World War II, but also during the years before and after under Stalin's control. Norman Naimark's Stalin's Genocides focuses more narrowly on Stalin's various genocidal campaigns.

As Applebaum points out, the key contribution of each work is to shine a new light on evidence that is already generally known. In Snyder's case, the emphasis is on the fact that, to those living in the 'bloodlands', World War II does not stand out as a unique historical episode as much as it does in Western Europe. Instead, these years were simply the continuation of, or a preface to (or sometimes both) many years of similar domination by a brutally murderous foreign oppressor.

Not only does this have implications for how we should think about what happened in those regions during World War II, but it also forces us to acknowledge that overthrowing Hitler, and ending World War II, did not do much to improve the situation of those in parts of Eastern Europe and that, moreover, Western leaders almost certainly were aware of this.

Naimark's book is particularly valuable for addressing head-on an issue that has frustrated those who study genocide: that the legal (UN) definition of genocide excludes genocidal policies that target political, economic, or social groups. This was done in part at Stalin's insistence, and it has meant that Stalin's campaign against the kulaks is often not listed among the major genocides of the twentieth century.

In fact, a similar problem applies to the murderous Khmer Rouge regime (see previous post), which killed about a fifth of its own population. It undeniably committed genocide against ethnic and religious minorities in Cambodia, but the vast majority of the regime's victims were fellow Khmer, singled out for political or socio-economic reasons (for example, anyone who wore glasses was suspect for being almost certainly literate). Here, too, one finds occasional debates in the literature as to whether or not this ought to count as a genocide.

On the other hand, it should be noted that Applebaum exaggerates the nomenclature issue a little. Most genocide researchers do use more inclusive definitions of genocide, while those that do not will often include similar crimes ('politicide' or 'democide') in their studies, given the obvious similarities in motivation and perpetration.

Challenges of post-conflict justice

2010-10-31T13:51:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, the first sentence was handed down the hybrid national/international court in Cambodia that is attempting to try the leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime three decades after the fact.

The leader of S-21, the detention/torture center in Phnom Penh where at least 12,000 (but more likely closer to 20,000) people were killed was sentenced to 35 years in prison (of which he has already served about 11). However, Kaing Guek Eav (Duch) is now appealing his sentence, arguing that he was not sufficiently high-ranking in the Pol Pot regime to fall within the purview of the Court's mandate.

In the blog section of the New York Review of Books, Stephanie Giry offers a thoughtful analysis of Duch's comportment during his trial — during which he mostly acted remorseful — and of his more recalcitrant actions since.

Her discussion makes clear that the Cambodia Court faces additional challenges above and beyond the already not inconsiderable difficulties inherent in pursuing post-conflict justice elsewhere. First, many potential witnesses have died in the three decades since the Khmer Rouge's were finally overthrown. Second, the court does not have a sufficient budget to do serious investigations, and has been forced to rely on the imperfect efforts of non-governmental organizations. Third, the current regime of Cambodia has been ambivalent at best about the Court's activities.

It is to be hoped that, whatever the final outcome in Duch's case, his testimony will help the Court pursue convictions in the key trials of four top-level Khmer Rouge leaders, which are to begin in 2011.

Child soldiers and military aid

2010-10-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

Worrisome news from Washington: the New York Times reports that four developing countries that conscript child soldiers were given a waiver by the Obama administration to allow them to continue to receive military aid from the United States, overriding the provisions of the 2008 Child Soldiers Prevention Act.

The administration states that the waiver is in the national interest, the argument apparently being that these countries are important allies in the struggle against terrorism. However, this argument assumes that they would no longer be allies in that struggle if denied military aid, which implies that the administration sees them as mercenaries. Somehow the idea of allowing mercenaries to recruit and train child soldiers does not strike me as a great long-term strategy to reduce terrorism.

Apart from that, the child soldier problem is associated with a wide range of serious human rights violations. Allowing the systematic use of child soldiers to go unpunished does not reflect well upon the Obama administration.

Educating immigrants

2010-10-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

As I noted yesterday, the US immigration authorities take a dim view of those who vote without being citizens; it displays poor moral character. It is less obvious what their take is on undocumented immigrants who avail themselves of other forms of political expression.

The New York Times Magazine had a fascinating story last weekend about undocumented college students: Coming Out Illegal, describing their efforts to engage in political action without being expelled from the country. Fortunately, and to the immense credit of the immigration authorities, the Times notes that "the Department of Homeland Security has so far spared undocumented youth who have been arrested during Dream Act protests."

The story centers around the Dream Act, a legislative proposal dating back to 2001 (and most recently reintroduced last month by Senators Durbin, Lugar and Leahy), which would allow immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children, have been in the country for years (at least 5), and have graduated from high school in the U.S. or obtained a GED, to obtain conditional permanent residency (a green card).

According to the Migration Policy Institute (as cited by the Times), these conditions may apply to as many as 825,000 people. Those people would need to either serve in the uniformed services or attend college in order for the permanent residency to become truly permanent. Those who oppose the Dream Act argue that it is a form of amnesty, and may create additional incentives to those considering entering the United States illegally.

Even taking into account economic conditions and the political sensitivity of immigration issues, however, it is hard to see much of a downside to the act: it is not as though there is currently a giant surplus of people willing to serve in the armed forces, and the U.S. unemployment rate among people with a bachelor's degree is less than half that among those with no college. As for attracting additional immigrants, the current version of the act requires that candidates have been present in the U.S. for at least 5 years prior to its enactment. Moreover, virtually nobody who today claims that the 1986 Immigration Reform Act (which applied to far more people) was a bad idea or failed to work as intended argues that it attracted large additional numbers of immigrants. It seems rather doubtful, then, that the much narrower Dream Act would do so.

Perils of petty bureaucracy

2010-10-27T12:08:00.000-07:00

Lord Acton told us that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Anyone who has dealt with government bureaucracies soon learns that this insight can be elaborated upon: circumscribing power (one way to minimize corruption) tends to make those who wield it petty, and also short-sighted.

Exhibit A: the DMV

The state of Virginia requires two identity documents to get a drivers' license. There is a separate requirement for documentation to offer proof of legal presence, so these documents only need to establish identity. (An official school transcript suffices as second document, if coupled with a primary document that has full legal name and date of birth). Nevertheless, an unexpired foreign passport is not valid as proof of identity, unless it contains an unexpired or expired long-term visa (student, working, permanent resident, etc.). In other words: a document that is accepted worldwide, including by the U.S. federal government, as proof of identity, is not valid as proof of identity for the state of Virginia. See the accepted document list here. Petty power-wielding? Check.

Circumscribed power also leads to the wielding of that power without understanding. For example, I was told by a DMV agent that I should have held on to the last I-94 form I had in my passport prior to receiving a green card, because that form would suffice to make my passport acceptable as proof of identity. Never mind that you are legally supposed to surrender the I-94 form when you leave the country, and that the immigration service strongly frowns on people who fail to do so: the DMV suggests you violate immigration service rules so that you may meet their own arbitrary requirements.

Worse still — and rather more significant in the grand scheme of things — every single time in the past decade or so that I have visited a DMV office to obtain a driver's license — in several different states — I have been asked whether I would like to register to vote. And this is after I have shown them my foreign passport. So every single time I have to inform the DMV person in question that it is in fact against the law to register to vote as a non-citizen.

But what about people who do not know the law? If you believe in democracy and in the importance of elections, and are asked by an official government authority (which the DMV is, after all), which knows you are a foreigner, whether you would like to register to vote, wouldn't it make sense for you to say yes? As the New York Times reported in a sad article two weeks ago, the immigration service does not think so. In fact, it seems that voting in an election, as a foreigner, constitutes evidence of bad moral character.

The immigration service does have a point, of course: when registering to vote, you have to certify that you are a U.S. citizen. On the other hand, common sense also tells us that many people do not read the fine print on all the official forms they sign. It would help a lot, therefore, if we could at least rely on official government representatives to be aware of the law. It's not as though this would require a lot of additional training.

Two good links

2010-10-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

Just 2 quick links:

1. James Fallows wrote an excellent post on the value of NPR (National Public Radio) and on the differences between NPR, on the one hand, and organizations like Fox, on the other.

2. Since we know that the state of the economy is a key factor determining vote choice, this map of unemployment by U.S. county since Jan. 2007 does not bode well for incumbents next week.

Serbia, Mladic, and the EU

2010-10-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

The European Union on Monday decided to move forward with Serbia's application for membership. The sole hold-out on this issue had been the Netherlands, which insisted that Serbia must first deliver the two most famous remaining fugitives from the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s: Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic.

It is generally assumed, and the Serbian government does not deny, that Mladic is in hiding within Serbia, and Hadzic probably is as well. Both fugitives are wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Mladic in particular for his participation in the genocide in Srebrenica, and Hadzic for the ethnic cleansing of Croats from the Krajina Serb republic in Croatia.

The Netherlands has a particular interest in Mladic, because Dutch UN soldiers were stationed at Srebrenica when Mladic's troops overran the enclave in 1995. The problem with insisting on Serbia's delivery of Mladic and Hadzic before even considering Serbia's membership application is twofold. First, in recent years Serbia seems to have been genuinely trying to apprehend Mladic in particular. (As the New York Times pointed out earlier this week, Serbia had earlier been less than cooperative on this issue, but this has changed more recently.) Second, there is another pending issue on which the EU would like Serbia's cooperation: the status of Kosovo.

The EU is insisting that Mladic and Hadzic will still need to be delivered to the Hague before any substantive accession negotiations take place, but some of the political leaders quoted in the New York Times article no longer seem to consider this a key prerequisite. It will be interesting to see whether the Netherlands will attempt to veto further progress, if the Commission offers a positive opinion on the membership application before the fugitives having been apprehended.

Meanwhile, the ICTY is busy with the prosecution of several other indictees, including, most notably, Radovan Karadzic, who was finally apprehended in Serbia in 2008. At the time, most people thought a Mladic arrest would soon follow, but so far that has not happened. The ongoing ICTY trial hearings can be followed live on the internet at www.icty.org

Private citizens and foreign aid

2010-10-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

The cover article of this past Sunday's New York Times magazine was Nicholas Kristof's "The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution." It's an excellent article, featuring inspiring accounts of individuals who have taken into their own hands the challenge of trying to improve the fortunes of the world's most vulnerable people.

Continuing the theme of being clear-eyed yet optimistic (see Saturday's post), Kristof points out that altruism and determination are not enough:

"it’s complicated. Scharpf is engaged in a noble experiment — but entrepreneurs fail sometimes. And anybody wrestling with poverty at home or abroad learns that good intentions and hard work aren’t enough. Helping people is hard."

Moreover, the kind of development initiative that can be spearheaded by a single individual rarely has an impact that is measurable on a global scale, as Kristof concedes. This may explain why major development agencies have tended to ignore such efforts.

There are two responses to this, one of which Kristof offers (and abundantly illustrates in the article): the local impact can be tremendous. The other response is that international development agencies may be looking at a bigger picture, but they still fund individual projects. And it is not clear that those are any more likely to have an impact on a global scale than the efforts discussed by Kristof.

Moreover, individual aid projects funded by the major development agencies are often not any larger than the private initiatives Kristof discusses. This can easily be verified by looking through the projects listed at AidData, which over the past few years has put together an unrivaled database of official development assistance at the project level (disclosure: AidData receives institutional support from the College of William & Mary, as well as from Brigham Young University and Development Gateway)

Since private initiatives may have an enormous local impact, it stands to reason that many individual efforts might, put together, exceed the global impact of larger, official development initiatives. Kristof thus argues that "The challenge is to cultivate an ideology of altruism, to spread a culture of social engagement — and then to figure out what people can do at a practical level," referring to Peter Singer, who last year published The Life You Can Save, a book that has precisely this goal.

Another conclusion one can draw from Kristof's article, however, is that official development agencies should start thinking about better ways to harness and build on these types of initiatives, which start as one-person efforts but frequently morph into non-governmental organizations of a type that the official agencies are quite used to working with.

Optimism & realism in foreign aid, redux

2010-10-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

Rieff's criticism of Bono and Bob Geldof (see yesterday's post) reminded me that earlier this year, Jagdish Bhagwati offered an interesting, brief overview of some of the historical motivations for foreign aid -- or, more precisely, development assistance -- including altruism, moral obligation, enlightened self-interest, and geopolitics. As someone who has been prominent in the fields of international and development economics for decades, Bhagwati has a valuable insider's perspective on the failure of so much aid to help promote growth and development.

His comments came in the context of a review, published in Foreign Affairs, of Dambisa Moyo's trenchant aid critique Dead Aid. Like Rieff, Bhagwati is critical of the influence of popular entertainers in the debate on economic development. His conclusion displays his exasperation with public aid debates quite nicely:

"Moyo is right to raise her voice, and she should be heard if African nations and other poor countries are to move in the right direction. In part, that depends on whether the international development agenda is set by Hollywood actresses and globetrotting troubadours or by policymakers and academics with half a century of hard-earned experience and scholarship."

Optimism and realism in development assistance

2010-10-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

The New Republic has a fairly grumpy review by David Rieff of a new book on Ethiopia by Peter Gill: Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia since Live Aid. (The full review is available only to subscribers, including through LexisNexis and similar subscription services).

Rieff, author of the critique of humanitarian aid A Bed for the Night, is often grumpy about humanitarians and humanitarianism — usually with reason — but his grumpiness here is oddly inconsistent and somewhat unfair.

He opens the review by praising the late James P. Grant, former executive director if UNICEF for being "as unyieldingly optimistic about human possibility as he was clear-eyed about the extent of human suffering among the bottom half of the world's population." This seems a fair characterization of many of those who have dedicated their lives to reducing that human suffering, but for some reason some of those people appear to be insufficiently clear-eyed for Rieff.

In particular, he criticizes Bob Geldof, Bono, Tony Blair, and Jeffrey Sachs, each for some combination of wild over-optimism or refusal to consider the likelihood that aid might not help or even be counterproductive. However, he fails to make clear how one might distinguish "unyielding optimism" (good, according to Rieff) from "wild over-optimism" (very bad).

As to the insufficient clarity ("clear-eyed"ness?), Rieff is on firmer ground, at least where Geldof and Bono are concerned. But then again, both are musicians, not politicians or economists. It is not surprising that their portrayal of humanitarian issues is oversimplified, and that they are sometimes fooled or taken in by governments that are deeply flawed (as almost all Ethiopian governments have been). The real criticism ought to be leveled at those who look to Geldof or Bono for expert advice, rather than just for inspiration.

Rieff's review is nevertheless well worth reading, because he makes some important points about family planning, the political nature of famines in the modern world (drawing on Sen's seminal Poverty and Famines), and the tendency of actual Western experts and politicians (not just musicians) to support (and want to overlook the negative sides of) governments that are a) capable and b) far less likely than their predecessors to massively violate human rights. Meles, in Ethiopia is one example; Rieff also mentions Rwanda's Kagame and Uganda's Museveni.

Rather oddly, given his swipes at Sachs for being over-optimistic and insufficiently clear-eyed, Rieff closes his review by citing the man: faced with the population challenges of Ethiopia, Sachs replies that "it is absolutely unmanageable... beyond any of our [development] tools right now." To me, this suggests that, like James Grant, Jeffrey Sachs, too, is "as unyieldingly optimistic about human possibility as he [is] clear-eyed about the extent of human suffering among the bottom half of the world's population." To Rieff, it further illustrates Sachs' foolishness. Why?

In any case, Gill's book sounds like a valuable contribution to the literature on the promises and pitfalls of humanitarian intervention and development assistance, and I look forward to reading it.

The low, low financial cost of global transportation

2010-10-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

Fascinating blog post by Ethan Zuckerman: "The ley lines of globalization", in which, with the aid of Maersk's online shipping rates calculator, he discusses the cost of shipping various goods from point A to point B on the globe.

It turns out, for example, that it costs just $0.18 to ship a liter of water from Suva, Fiji, to Cambridge, MA, of which just $0.15 is for the literal "shipping" from Fiji to Philadelphia, with the remaining $0.03 consumed by truck transportation to Massachusetts. This explains why it can make financial sense to bottle water in Fiji for consumption on the other side of the world. (Whether it makes sense carbon-footprint-wise is of course a different question.)

Interestingly, Zuckerman finds that since there is much more demand for goods from China elsewhere in the world than there is for goods from elsewhere in China, it costs much less to ship something to China than the other way around.

The low cost of global shipping also helps explain why it may make financial sense for various groups to collect books, shoes, etc. in the United States for distribution in developing countries. Again, there are other considerations that may make this a bad idea (Are the donations useful and appropriate? Do they displace or undermine local production? And is paying for those transportation costs the best use of that money? What about the carbon footprint?), but if it costs little more than $0.50 to get a pair of shoes from, say, Cambridge, MA to Mozambique, that may well be worth doing.

Foreign assistance and opportunity cost

2010-10-21T06:02:00.001-07:00

Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times today discusses the importance of supporting education in Afghanistan, and notes that the Taliban rarely, if ever, attack schools that have the support of the locals and (especially) of local religious leaders.

Given the unquestioned importance of making education accessible to everyone growing up in Afghanistan, boys and girls equally, and given the Taliban's notoriously sexist predilections, the evidence Kristof provides is striking and crucial to include in policy deliberations going forward.

Meanwhile, the most important insight in Kristof's column is a different one, in my opinion. He points out that it costs about $1 million per year to send a U.S. soldier to Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea and the driving force behind one of the organizations that has been building schools even in Taliban-controlled areas, notes that all higher education in Afghanistan could be funded for $243 million/year.

Mr. Mortenson suggests, therefore, "that America hold a press conference here in Kabul and put just 243 of our 100,000 soldiers on planes home. Then the U.S. could take the savings and hand over a check to pay for Afghanistan’s universities. "

Such a symbolic step would be significant. But there is a deeper lesson here. We do not have troops in Afghanistan just because we think it is a good idea to have troops there; those troops are there to serve a specific purpose. Yet whenever the issue of sending additional troops to Afghanistan is debated, whether by policy makers or in the media, the most salient question tends to be:

• Will these X additional soldiers allow us to achieve our goals in Afghanistan (or, in a less demanding version, to come closer to achieving those goals than we have so far)?

Meanwhile, the correct question to ask is:

• If we are willing to spend an additional $X million on achieving our goals in Afghanistan, is it the best use of that money to spend it on X soldiers?

In addition, from a budget point of view, there is of course an important prior question:

• If we are willing, as a government (or a nation), to spend an additional $X million, is Afghanistan the policy issue where that money is best spent?

Policy-making is about opportunity cost: a given dollar in the budget can only be spent once. Deciding to spend it on one thing means you cannot spend it on something else. This fundamental point gets overlooked far too often in general, but especially when the discussion involves troops. To a government, a soldier is not just a soldier; he or she is also a budget expense. And a soldier in Afghanistan is a pretty large budget expense at that.

As numerous analysts have complained, it is far too easy for outsiders to ignore the human cost of the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan (and that human cost is very high, for soldiers and their families, for the U.S. as a nation, and also for the people of Afghanistan). Oddly enough, it also turns out to be too easy to ignore the financial cost of that presence.

Zen and the Art of Foreign Aid

2010-10-20T06:36:00.001-07:00

Charming article by Tina Rosenberg and David Bornstein at the New York Times: Health Care and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (both its title and the title of this post borrowed, of course, from Robert Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). The article illustrates the importance of infrastructure & transportation in development, noting how just providing health care professionals in developing countries with reliable transportation (motorcycles in this case) can dramatically multiply their effectiveness.

Also pointed out in the article (hence the title), is that infrastructure and means of transportation are no good without regular maintenance. This is an old complaint in the aid literature; most aid donors are more interested in big new projects than in maintaining older and existing initiatives. Interestingly, even in this case the motorcycles themselves and their maintenance are funded by two different aid organizations.

The article nicely illustrates two important points: 1) foreign aid really can have a major impact, for a relatively small investment; 2) the challenge in aid is not that we have no idea how to have an impact, but rather to convince aid donors to give less glamorous types of aid.

(Further relevance of this post's title and that of the NYT article: in Pirsig's book, there is a priceless moment where a motorcycle can be repaired by a shim cut from a beer can, but its owner refuses, not because it won't work, but because it is such a low-tech, unglamorous repair. Many aid donors are a little like that motorcycle owner)

P.S. Rosenberg also wrote the excellent The Haunted Land, on the very different issue of how the post-socialist societies of Central and Eastern Europe dealt with their past after the end of the Cold War.

How to lie with statistics, once again

2010-10-19T09:15:00.001-07:00

David Brooks in his column in the New York Times today:
"The vast majority of campaign spending is done by candidates and political parties. Over the past year, the Democrats, most of whom are incumbents, have been raising and spending far more than the Republicans.

And from the Center for Responsive Politics overview of raising and spending (a source that Brooks cites):
Democratic House candidates have raised $444 million, while Republican candidates have raised $473 million (rounded to the nearest million). Democratic Senate candidates have raised
$229 million, while Republican candidates have raised $238 million.

I don't know in what world $444 million is "far more" than $473 million, but apparently that's where Brooks lives.

David Brooks again:
"According to the Wesleyan Media Project, between Sept. 1 and Oct. 7, Democrats running for the House and the Senate spent $1.50 on advertising for every $1 spent by Republicans. Despite this financial advantage, Democrats have been sinking in the polls."

And from the Wesleyan Media Project's press release that is the source of this data:
"Candidates in federal races have spent roughly $130M and Democrats have a 1.5:1 advantage in that spending. However, between 9/1 and 10/7, almost $65M has been spent by interest groups in key federal and gubernatorial races. “Breaking down the air war by party reveals big advantages to Republicans in both party and interest group investment in federal races,” said Franz. “Combining party and coordinated totals, Republicans are outspending Democrats by almost 3 to 2. Among interest group spenders, Republican-leaning organizations are outspending Democrats by a margin of almost 9:1 in House and Senate contests.”

Brooks argues in the remainder of the column that outside spending doesn't matter (although the best he can offer is some anecdotes of questionable relevance), but even so his highly selective use of data from the Wesleyan Media Project strikes me as disingenuous, to say the least.

More generally, it may well be true that Democratic party candidates are doing better at raising funds in some key races than the general public believes at the moment (and Brooks cites some data that suggests this is true). But if money is as unimportant to election outcomes (or to the behaviour of those elected afterwards) as Brooks suggests, then why does he feel it necessary to distort the evidence as he does?

Update: some of the other "evidence" in Brooks' column is also highly misleading (or worse), it turns out, as Glenn Greenwald discusses at Salon.com.

Morality and religion

2010-10-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

My compatriot Frans de Waal wrote an interesting discussion of the evolutionary roots of morality in the New York Times over the weekend: Morals without God? He frames the article with a reference to Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. It's a great painting, but I'm not convinced it works all that well as a framing device. De Waal argues that the central panel of the triptych depicts humanity free from guilt and shame; I think he intends to argue that, at the same time, the humans depicted are not behaving immorally, but he does not make this explicit.

A key point of the article is that there is no evidence that religion is necessary for morality. Moreover, religion, while being key to certain specific systems of morality, also tends to introduce morals that, to external observers, appear arbitrary at best (and reprehensible at worst). It is in this sense, I think, that de Waal points to the central panel of Bosch's painting as showing behaviour that appears not to have been considered immoral by Bosch (hence the panel's occupants display no guilt or shame), although religious mores at the time probably held some of it (naked frolicking! :-) to be immoral.

The article's main contribution is to put forth a number of striking examples of apparently 'moral' behaviour among animals, and it is worth reading for those examples alone. I think de Waal is less successful in making his more philosophical point about religion and morality.

As de Waal notes, the problem is that we don't really have a good example of a society with no religious influences. So we know that it is perfectly possible for an atheist to live a very moral life. But although it seems certain that atheists can derive a set of moral values without any external input from (or reaction to) any religion, this cannot be demonstrated empirically. Moreover, de Waal suspects it cannot be proven, since this would require a stable society without religion, and he suggests that a religion would inevitably emerge in such a society almost as soon as (and maybe even before) any coherent moral code were established.

Of course, this quandary does point to a key issue with the relationship between religion & morality: depending on your beliefs, either all religions or all but one (your own) are human, not divine, creations and thus no more than an instrument to obtain some other benefits. Morality may be one of those benefits, or it may be an unintended side effect; in either case, to suggest that morality requires religion is to suggest that people will not behave morally unless fooled into doing so by religion. This is both a rather depressing view of humanity and entirely at odds with the evidence from the animal kingdom offered by de Waal.

Pitfalls of nation-building

2010-10-17T06:02:00.001-07:00

Today's column in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, "Tea in Kabul," illustrates the problems with the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Most disconcerting sentence in the piece: "A single American soldier in Helmand Province… causes enough money to leak to the Taliban to recruit another 10 fighters trying to kill that American."

Over at the New York Review of Books, Christopher de Bellaigue has a longer, more in-depth article, "The War with the Taliban," that reaches a similar conclusion. Both articles point to the fact that the Taliban are hardly a purely religious movement (if they ever were): Kristof mentions that they sell themselves as offering law and order, as well as higher wages; de Bellaigue notes that they have partially morphed into a patriotic movement.

Whether this means that Afghanistan is less likely to fall apart into warring factions each with their own territory once the U.S. begins pulling out remains to be seen, of course. Even so, that would be a pretty meager accomplishment for a long and costly war.

Nature's wealth and human nature

2010-10-16T04:51:00.000-07:00

Last summer's BP oil disaster in the Mexican Gulf was a reminder that in our eagerness to get at the earth's natural resources, our reach often exceeds our grasp, resulting in massive environmental damage. Thousands of coal fires burn worldwide, sometimes for decades (the one in Centralia, PA has been going for about 50 years), and most often ignited as a result of human mining activity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, while the environmental damage often remains local, the economic benefits rarely do. The Niger delta's oil industry is notorious for causing local immiseration while producing billions in income for corrupt political leaders and foreign multinationals.

Add to the mix a weak state and the availability of cheap weapons, and you have the recipe for an indefinitely sustainable local conflict combining local immiseration and insecurity, environmental degradation, and widespread human rights violations. Coltan mining in the eastern Congo is perhaps the best-known example of this, but it is hardly the only case.

The current issue of Foreign Policy magazine covers another chronic conflict of this kind, this one in India. In "Fire in the Hole," Jason Miklian and Scott Carney describe how self-identified Maoist rebels have killed thousands of people over the past decade, and driven tens of thousands more away from their homes. The cause is depressingly familiar:

"Revenues from mineral extraction in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand topped $20 billion in 2008, and more than $1 trillion in proven reserves still sit in the ground. But this geological inheritance has been managed so disastrously that many locals -- uprooted, unemployed, and living in a toxic and dangerous environment, due to the mining operations -- have thrown in their lot with the Maoists."

The consequences are no less depressingly familiar. The Maoists "are less an organized ideological movement than a loose confederation of militias, and many of their local commanders appear to be in it for the money alone." Meanwhile, the authorities have lost control, and both sides engage in human rights violations against the local population. Comments the founder of an anti-Maoist militia: "If we kill a Maoist, then how is that a violation of human rights?"

These situations cannot be allowed to fester indefinitely. But addressing them will not be easy, and will almost certainly require more international involvement than the world community currently seems to be willing to spare.

Technology, governance, and development

2010-10-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

Useful article over at Foreign Policy by William Easterly on the importance of path dependence and of grass-roots initiatives in economic development: Reinventing the Wheel.

On path dependence, Easterly notes "that there was a remarkably strong association between countries with the most advanced technology in 1500 and countries with the highest per capita income today." This sounds pretty similar to Jared Diamond's argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel, and indeed some of the key technologies on Easterly's list are firearms, artillery, and steel.

The article is useful not so much for this claim, then, as for the implication Easterly derives from it: "the blank-slate theory is a myth." In other words, it makes little sense to try to impose grand models and theories of development on countries in a top-down fashion, without taking into account their own specific background and context.

This argument, too, is hardly new. Many people have made it over the years, (a comparatively recent example is Stiglitz in Globalization and Its Discontents). Still, the article is an interesting attempt to tie these two very broad arguments (path dependence and bottom-up development), each with their own enormous literatures, together into a single framework.

Industrial policy and government intervention

2010-10-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

In my International Political Economy class, we will be covering international competitiveness and
strategic trade policy tomorrow. This past summer, the Economist featured a very informative debate on the issue of industrial policy (government promotion of particular industries) between Josh Lerner and Dani Rodrik. Worth reading in its entirety (the link is to the overview page, but there are opening statements, rebuttals, and closing statements by both economists as well as the moderator). None of the contributions really break new ground, but they do a nice job of highlighting the promises and pitfalls of government intervention in industry.

(update, 15 Oct.)
The Economist also had a nice article later in the summer (Aug. 15th) about the renewed appeal of industrial policy in rich countries: Picking winners, saving losers.

Medical studies show...

2010-10-14T04:57:00.000-07:00

Excellent article in the November 2010 issue of the Atlantic Monthly: Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science, by David H. Freedman. The title is an obvious reference to "lies, damned lies, and statistics", a popular indictment of the way statistics can be used to deceive as easily as they can be used to inform. (Side note: I always thought it was a quotation from Disraeli, but Wikipedia informs me that this attribution is faulty; apparently Mark Twain introduced the attribution back in 1906 but without any evidence to back it up).

The Atlantic article is a profile of Dr. John Ioannidis, who has made a career of pointing out the low quality of published medical research. He has hypothesized that about 80% of non-randomized studies are later refuted, as well as 25% of studies involving randomized trials, and even up to 10% of large-scale randomized trials. The article does a fine job of discussing the myriad ways in which the structure of the field and its professional incentives make such high levels of faulty research likely: "Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right."

(Although it is not one of the main points, Freedman also notes that many published findings may be not so much wrong as spurious: if you take a large enough sample, you will inevitably find some patterns that appear meaningful even though they are not.)

A key message in the article is that the medical research community is not surprised by Ioannidis's findings, but that faulty research continues to have an impact on medical treatment and on public perceptions. One obvious conclusion from the article is that the incentive structure in medical science (the need to have interesting findings, the need to obtain funding from sources that introduce a conflict of interest into one's work) is deeply flawed and should be overhauled if possible. This is not a new argument, but Ioannidis' work gives us added ammunition for making it.

Another possible conclusion is that somehow the medical community is being disingenuous and/or deceptive, because although they are not surprised by the findings, they continue to publish faulty studies, and do flawed research. But I think this conclusion would be unfair. I don't think anyone who has thought about the pressures of publishing in science and about the scientific method (i.e. a much larger population than just medical researchers) would be particularly surprised by Ioannidis' findings.

Indeed, I would argue the situation is cause for concern at least as much because of what it tells us about the lack of understanding of the scientific method and the publication process among the media that transmit the findings and among the general public that 'consumes' them. Improved statistical literacy among reporters and the public alike would go a long way towards making Ioannidis' findings a lot less shocking. Yet one more reason to think Darrell Huff's charming classic How to Lie with Statistics ought to be required reading in high school.

Benevolent dictators?

2010-10-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

The current (Oct. 11) issue of the New Yorker has an intriguing profile of Justin Yifu Lin, the chief economist of the World Bank, who is the first Chinese citizen to hold that position (article abstract online; full text for subscribers or through services such as LexisNexis).

The profile is striking for Lin's studied evasion of the issue of political reform, and whether it might be either a) good for Chinese economic development, b) impossible to avoid in the long run, if economic development is to continue, or c) desirable in and of itself.

China's economic success has revived arguments about the possible desirability of authoritarian government for developing countries. These arguments crop up at regular intervals, whenever
an autocratically ruled country enjoys a number of years of steady growth. The notion seems to be particularly appealing to economists, whose own theoretical models sometimes posit a "benevolent dictator."

The problem, of course, is that benevolent dictators are comparatively scarce in the real world, and benevolent dictators who select the right economic advisers to listen to are even more rare. Indeed, perhaps the most valuable point made in the article is Dani Rodrik's comment at the end: "For every Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko, of the Congo."

By convenient and coincident timing, China's political shortcomings were brought into sharp relief earlier this week when the Norwegian Nobel Prize committee awarded Liu Xiaobo the Peace Prize. Some useful basic information about Liu and the Chinese government's case against him appeared in the New York Review of Books last year. The Guardian published a nice, thoughtful reaction by Timothy Garton Ash to the Nobel announcement which discusses some of the likely implications of the prize.

Getting the eurozone out of its troubles

2010-10-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

Last month, the Economist had a nice article about the challenges facing the EU's euro zone. They did a good job of reviewing Greece's problems and discussing the problems of the other countries that may follow that country into trouble (Ireland and Spain, most prominently). They also pointed out that fiscal centralization is not as promising a recipe as some commentators believe.

Their main call is for more spending by trade surplus countries. They point out that higher inflation (and quantitative easing) might be a good idea, but that this would be anathema to the European Central Bank (ECB).

Conveniently, this last point was just confirmed by a member of the ECB's Governing Council in a talk at the Yale Law School. So more spending by Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands appears to be the best hope for now.

Chronicle of a crisis forestalled?

2010-10-11T06:01:00.000-07:00

The current issue (Oct. 14) of The New Republic has a good overview of recent developments in Kyrgyzstan by James Kirchick: Dispatch from the Knife's Edge (only the first part is available online to non-subscribers; also accessible through LexisNexis and similar services).

Kyrgyzstan was the scene of riots between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in June of this year, causing hundreds of deaths and resulting in a massive stream of refugees across the border to Uzbekistan (followed some weeks later by a massive return stream, as Uzbekistan's authoritarian leader kicked his fellow ethnics out).

Kirchick offers some post-riot anecdotes that indicate a process of dehumanization of the 'enemy' is well under way among certain groups. The rhetoric has not reached the level seen in pre-genocide Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, but the situation bears careful watching.

On the positive side, Kyrgyzstan held elections yesterday and by all accounts they seem to have gone quite well, as the Guardian reports. It is to be hoped that the political reforms earlier this summer (moving from a presidential to a parliamentary system) will provide the proper incentives to local leaders to work together.

Accountability in humanitarianism?

2010-10-10T06:32:00.000-07:00

Philip Gourevitch has a brief, thought-provoking, but ultimately unsatisfying article in the Oct. 11 issue of the New Yorker, titled "Alms Dealers" (only the summary is available online; full article available to subscribers, and also through sources such as LexisNexis).

The article's subheading is "Can you provide humanitarian aid without facilitating conflicts?" In it, Gourevitch discusses a new book by Linda Polman, the Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?, which highlights the ways in which humanitarian initiatives — or even simply the possibility of attracting humanitarian interventions — may aggravate or perpetuate conflict situations and human rights crises.

As Gourevitch points out, Polman's polemic is not particularly new: it "leans heavily" on a number of important earlier books, published in the late 1990s or the first few years of this century. Gourevitch just lists the brief titles of these works; I reproduce the secondary titles as well, which underscore how similar the messages of these books are:

• Alex de Waal's Famine Crimes: Politics & the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa
• Michael Maren's The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
• Fiona Terry's Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action
• David Rieff's A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis

I have not yet read Polman's book, but Gourevitch's discussion does not make it sound as though she has any new ideas to add; on the other hand, it does appear that she offers some new stories and anecdotes from her own reporting. I look forward to reading the book for that reason.

Still, to quote Bob Dylan, "if there's an original thought out there, we could use it right now." It is not news that humanitarianism affects the calculations of participants in conflicts. Nor is it news that sometimes humanitarianism makes things worse rather than better. Nor should we be surprised, at this point, to learn of the evil human beings can inflict on one another, deliberately and with calculation.

Moreover, although it is true, as Gourevitch notes, that many humanitarians "readily deflect accountability for the negative consequences of their actions" this does not mean that the problem does not haunt many dedicated humanitarians. In fact, Terry continues to be active in humanitarian relief, and both De Waal and Maren were active in humanitarian initiatives before becoming disillusioned.

In my opinion, Terry's continuing dedication to humanitarian action, while being fully aware of the attendant difficulties, is what makes her book the most valuable of those listed here. It is easy to criticize the many ways in which humanitarianism goes awry, as Polman does; it is also easy to conclude that perhaps we are better off not getting involved, as some of the other authors (including Gourevitch) do, implicitly or explicitly. Gourevitch ends his article with an anecdote about a boy saved by humanitarian doctors in Zaire/Congo in 1996, wondering "If these humanitarians weren't here, would that boy have needed them?"

This is an excellent question, and one that must be asked, but to end with it is a bit of a cop-out; the real challenge is to think very carefully about the implications of humanitarian operations in a specific context, to weigh their costs and benefits, and then to decide how to proceed. Terry is willing to grapple with these questions, and that makes her book particularly valuable. Two years ago, she gave the Kenan distinguished lecture in ethics at Duke University, which offers a good overview of her approach. It is available on Youtube here, and is well worth watching (note: introductions take up the first 8+ minutes of the video).

Failing to deal with torture and rendition

2010-10-09T05:48:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today has a deplorable op-ed by Jack Goldsmith, former assistant attorney general under G.W. Bush, and now professor at Harvard Law, titled "Don't Try Terrorists, Lock Them Up." In discussing the challenges faced by the Obama administration in convicting Guantánamo Bay detainees, he matter-of-factly notes that some testimony was inadmissible because it would not have been available without the CIA interrogating the defendant at a secret overseas prison. The lesson, according to Goldsmith, is that the Obama administration should embrace what the Bush administration did so much of: "military detention without charge or trial."

Two basic problems here. First, this seems to imply that the Bush administration was sending people for "aggressive interrogation" (Goldsmith's term) to secret prisons run by the CIA without any intention of ever bringing them to trial before they had any evidence that such people qualified as candidates for indefinite military detention.

Second, Goldsmith suggests that the problem lies in the Obama administration's attempts to introduce the rule of law into the situation. However, his own argument makes it clear that the real problem is not that the rule of law cannot function in war, but rather that the Bush administration, with its secret prisons and "aggressive interrogation," flouted national and international laws, so that the subsequent application of the rule of law has become nearly impossible.

One might hope for some kind of mea culpa from a former high-ranking legal official in the administration that not only shot itself in the foot by these tactics, but is making things very difficult for its successor, but it appears that is too much to hope for.

For a far more interesting (and much less self-serving) article on the challenges facing the Obama administration (and more generally, the legal system) in dealing with Guantánamo, see David Cole's article in the current New York Review of Books, "What to Do about Guantánamo?"

Progress & challenges at the ICC

2010-10-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

The International Criminal Court today ordered the resumption of the trial of Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. The trial had been stayed in July when prosecutors refused to release the names of some witnesses, arguing that doing so would endanger those witnesses. It's not immediately obvious how that issue will now be resolved.

Lubanga's case illustrates two crucial challenges to the Court's success. First, trials tend to last a long time (the arrest warrant dates back to early 2006). Second, the Court's cases are likely to primarily focus on regions where law & order continues to be uncertain at best, putting at risk both those directly affected (for example as potential witnesses) and some groups that have nothing to do with the trial at all.

Illustrating this last point, the New Republic earlier this week published a sad story about the life of a child bride in Sudan. The girl in question had been getting some assistance from a local organization, SEEMA, which in turn was funded primarily by CARE International. CARE International, however, was kicked out of Sudan last year, after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's President, Al Bashir. So this girl, who has no apparent connection whatsoever to the case the ICC is pursuing in Sudan, nevertheless feels the effects.

The fault lies, of course, with the Sudanese government, not the ICC. It is not the ICC, after all, which cares so little about its own citizens that simply out of spite it will kick out organizations whose only purpose in being present in Sudan is to help those same citizens. However, it is probably too much to hope that, if and when Al Bashir is finally arrested, this pointless and spiteful violation of human rights (Sudan acceded to the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Covenant of the International Human Rights Charter in 1986) will get added to the crimes he is charged with.

Competitive devaluation vs. quantitative easing

2010-10-07T06:47:00.000-07:00

Interesting and clearly written article (with a somewhat unfortunate title) by Barry Eichengreen over at Foreign Policy's website: Financial Shock and Awe. He makes the useful point that quantitative easing (a good thing in times where deflation is a real concern) is not at all the same thing as competitive devaluation (generally a really bad idea).

Worth noting is one key reason why so many central banks are now pursuing quantitative easing: "fiscal policy, for better or worse, is off the table." Eichengreen simply mentions this, almost as an aside, and then moves on. But from a political economy point of view it is quite important, as it underscores just how important politics is as a constraint on (or inhibitor of) economic policy options that most economics textbooks would expect to see in circumstances such as those we face today.

Brooks, books and writing

2010-07-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

Interesting column today by David Brooks in the New York Times. He points out that children who have many books around at home tend to do better in school. Unfortunately, this important observation is conveyed in a very sloppy sentence: "We already knew, from research in 27 countries, that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better."

• Question 1: longer and better than what? than dolphins? than mice? than adults who go back to school?
• Question 2: exactly 500 books? That's going to spell trouble for those poor kids who grow up in academic households (like ours) with thousands of books!

You'd think that someone who is trying to emphasize the importance of the written word would exercise some basic care with his own writing. Coincidentally, there is an interesting article in the New Republic this week about why David Brooks is a pretty poor columnist overall.

I'm also not quite convinced by Brooks' argument in his column that the world of printed books is hierarchical with some kind of logical flow from bottom to top (in quality), whereas the internet is not. One can use the world of printed books intelligently or poorly, just as one can use the internet well or stupidly. The main difference is that book publishers traditionally impose an initial filter, but of course with self-publishing this difference may well be shrinking.

(Unrelated note: also fun in the New Republic today, a collection of some of the most ludicrous political program items of state Republican parties. Some of those who drafted those programs would definitely benefit from some additional book- or internet-learning!)

European anthem

2010-07-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

As part of its continuing attempts to develop a European identity, the European Union has long had an anthem. It is the "Ode to Joy" movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony. In fact, this is not just the EU anthem, but a more general European anthem, as it is also the anthem of the Council of Europe.

Unfortunately, the "Ode to Joy" movement has words; more specifically, German words: the text is Friedrich Schiller's poem "An die Freude". This is problematic, since non-German-speaking EU members would of course protest at having to sing a German-language anthem. As a result, the European anthem is actually text-less. :-)

As I was watching the FIFA World Cup semifinal between Germany and Spain yesterday, I was thinking that there are other anthems around that are quite European. Take, for example, the Dutch anthem, which will be played at Sunday's final match between the Netherlands and Spain. The first verse of this anthem contains the lines "of German blood" and "I have always honored the king of Spain". So, regardless of the outcome of the Germany-Spain match, the Dutch were already assured that their opponents would be able to sing along wholeheartedly at least a little bit with the Dutch anthem.

This oddity is of course largely a result of the fact that European royal families are often quite "European" in the sense that their lineages trace back to one or more countries other than the country they currently rule. The British royal family is mostly German; the Swedish royal family is mostly French; the current Belgian king is a direct descendant of Swedish and Danish kings, and so on. To the extent that national anthems are at least partially royal anthems, some of this international lineage is bound to shine through.

Come to think of it, perhaps that's what the EU really needs: a royal family! We could draw up a list of adult members of European royal families that are related to current or previous royal families of at least 5 (or maybe even 10) current EU member states. They could be polled as to their willingness to take the job, and then we could have a Europe-wide election to create the queen or king (or both, if the winner is married) of the EU.

The new sovereign's main job would be to officially open all those infrastructure projects throughout Europe that are funded by EU money, as well as various other public functions. (And he/she could have a rotating residence, just as Charlemagne used to have, moving from one country to the next at 3-month intervals, say.)

How to lie with statistics

2010-05-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

In graduate school, we used to call this "practicing math without a license", which is perhaps a little more generous than "how to lie with statistics" (a reference, of course, to Darrell Huff's classic book). A nice example occurs in the May 9th column by Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

Douthat draws on teen pregnancy & abortion data from the Guttmacher Institute to argue that "Conservative states may have more teen births and more divorces, but liberal states have many more abortions", which leads him to conclude that "the “red family” model" represents "an attempt, however compromised, to navigate post-sexual revolution America without relying on abortion." In order to make this argument, he points out that Connecticut has much higher abortion rates than Montana, that New York has many more abortions than does Texas, and that the rate Massachusetts easily exceeds that in Utah.

However, this is a pretty egregious form of cherry-picking. It is also true that Vermont has a much lower abortion rate than does Virginia. And New Hampshire has less than half the abortion rate than does Florida.

If one charts teen pregnancy rates against teen abortion rates, it is true that the trend line is positive (higher pregnancy rates are associated with higher abortion rates) and that the two states with the highest abortion rates are "blue" (New York and New Jersey) while the three with the lowest rates are "red" (Kentucky, South Dakota, Utah). But the trend is not nearly as strong as Douthat suggests, as the following plot shows.

Moreover, the much more striking finding that emerges is how much variation there is. Douthat wants very much to suggest that these factors must be inextricably related: that it is nearly impossible "to navigate post-sexual revolution America [successfully] without relying on abortion." But the data do not come even close to supporting this conclusion.

For example, Vermont and New Hampshire seem to do very well, thank you very much. So do Wisconsin and Minnesota. If Douthat had compared Texas to one of those states rather than to New York, his argument would fall apart. In fact, New Hampshire's pregnancy rate is about one third as high as that in Texas, and it has a lower abortion rate.

None of this is to suggest that it is not worth asking why both pregnancy rates and abortion rates show such variation across states. But Douthat's simplistic conclusion is either innocently (practicing math without a license) or disingenuously (lying with statistics) tendentious.

Cambodia, sweatshops, and the cost of a cheap T-shirt

2010-02-01T19:20:00.000-08:00

Good article in the January issue of Harper's Magazine about the human costs of sweatshop apparel manufacture in Cambodia (link is to a blurb about the article; full article available through university library's e-journals). Posing as a representative of a U.S. apparel manufacturer, Ken Silverstein does a nice job of highlighting the problematic incentive structures facing the ILO (as a monitoring organization), the individual sweatshops, and of course apparel workers.

It is worth noting that this is not an issue that affects only poor countries such as Cambodia. The challenges are not so different from those facing migrant workers (and those who employ them) in the U.S. See, for example, the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

Dealing with the past in Dresden

2010-02-01T19:05:00.000-08:00

Another excellent issue of the New Yorker (Feb. 1). It includes an interesting article on Dresden's troubled confrontations with its own history (full text available through university library's ejournals). Dresden is well-known as the victim of the best known (and likely most lethal) fire-bombing campaign by the allied forces in WWII, killing 25,000-40,000 people. By most any definition, the campaign (Feb. 13-15, 1945) qualifies as a war crime. This has made it easier for some to paint Dresden as some innocent victim, which of course it was not.

The article offers some interesting thoughts on the implications of architecture for the way a city confronts its past. Berlin certainly offers a striking contrast to Dresden, as Packer points out. However, the implications are more general. Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes similarly offers some insightful musings on how different Pacific islands remember/commemorate their connection to captain James Cook. And what does Athens, GA's own double-barreled cannon say about Athens' institutional memory of the Civil War? It is worth noting that this cannon became a tourist attraction almost as soon as the Civil War ended.

Inflation- and corruption-proof currency?

2010-02-01T18:47:00.001-08:00

I just learned that an Indian NGO, 5th Pillar, has been distributing zero rupee notes since 2007. The Economist has a brief write-up about them in the Jan. 30th issue. The front of the notes looks like a real banknote; the back has information about its inspiration. The idea is to shame corrupt officials demanding bribes into doing their jobs. Anecdotally it appears to work, the Economist suggests. Perhaps an idea for other countries rife with corruption?

Additional benefit: no amount of inflation is going to reduce the value of this banknote! Perhaps Zimbabweans could use some of their old, now worthless, banknotes the same way?