by Andy Sumner | Feb 20, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development, Middle East and North Africa
Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain. Who’s next? Yemen or Libya or… Sudan, or Angola?
The race is on for a small set of numbers to predict major upheavals. Violence begins at $7000 per person (PPP) tweets Hans Rosling noting the flare up of pro-democracy protests seem to start at that level of income in Tunisia and last year in Thailand (Egypt is a bit under US$6000 per capita). The Economist has gone for a more sophisticated ‘Shoe Throwers Index’ adding more data. Whilst the NY times special has gone much further with a full range of data for the middle east and north Africa.
What do the countries have in common? Actually seems to boil down to 5 things…
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by Jules Evans | Feb 19, 2011 | Economics and development, Influence and networks
According to the FT, the “most talked-about non-fiction book of the year” is the economist Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, more of a long essay really, which you can only get in e-book format. It’s worth reading, particularly for what it says about the politics of well-being.
Cowen suggests that we in the West are in the midst of a great economic stagnation, because all the “low-hanging fruit” of technological innovation, which drove the economic boom of the last two centuries, have already been picked. Life in 1800 was, for the average westerner, markedly different to life in 1960. Scientific advances in transport, energy, hygiene and medicine, housing, education and government made the material conditions of life significantly better for someone born in 1950 than for someone born in 1800. But the pace of technological advance slowed significantly in the last few decades, Cowen says, so that “life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953…The wonders portrayed in The Jetsons have not come to pass. You don’t have a jet pack.”
Tyler Cowen? Tyler Durden more like! Kind of reminds me of that other Tyler, snarling: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
Just to consider T’other Tyler’s main point – how does Cowen know how high or low the ‘fruit’ of future technological advances are? The whole point about future inventions is we don’t see the fruit at all until they fall on some genius’s head, like Newton’s apple. We can’t tell how low or high the remaining fruit is.
And Cowen doesn’t provide enough evidence that innovation has slowed. I’m not a scientist, but in the last 30 years others have decoded the human genome, come up with a totally new hypothesis about how organisms interact to preserve life on Earth, started to analyse the climate and realized we’re in danger of destroying it, begun to map the universe, made advances in analysing dark matter with the Hadron collider, invented brain scanning and made major advances in neuroscience, brought new empirical rigour to the study of wellbeing, and, um, invented the personal computer, the Internet, the kindle, the smart phone, the smart home, the smart car and all the other gadgetry of the Digital Age. To me, the present is like the Jetsons.
Despite the fact that government spending on education, health and welfare continues to rise, Cowen argues that performance in these areas is not necessarily rising and may, in fact, be getting slowly worse. This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault, says Cowen. The low-hanging fruit have been picked, and we’re now in an ‘ideas slow-down’. We must simply get used to annual GDP growth of 1% a year, rather than 3% – unlike the emerging markets, who can attain 6-8% growth simply by copying and disseminating ideas invented in the past by western scientists, like the car.
The Credit Crunch was really part of a broader phenomenon of over-optimism, Cowen argues. This over-optimism wasn’t just confined to investment bankers. We all thought everything would simply carry on getting better, median income would continue to grow and GDP would continue to rise – so we all bet on future growth through personal, corporate and government borrowing. But this was a mistake, based on a failure to recognize what Daniel Pink describes as “a period of truly staggering underachievement in business, technology and social progress”.
A lot of the social unrest and personal suffering of our times comes, Cowen argues, from a frustration that material progress is not continuing at its past rate, and that governments are struggling to meet spending commitments made in times of faster economic growth. He writes: “Low-hanging fruit means there are lots of material goodies to hand out, and lots of fairly easy ways to make people happier, namely by giving them more stuff. That’s not the case now, as we are struggling fiscally to make good on previous promises to Medicare and Social Security recipients, as well as bondholders.”
That’s why the politics of stagnation can be pretty acrimonious. On the Right, it can lead to the voodoo economics of tax cuts supposedly leading to greater economic growth, which Cowen thinks is one of the great delusions of our age. On the Left, it can lead to demands for greater redistribution through programmes like Medicare. But Cowen warns: “Like unfunded tax cuts, the remedy cannot be applied forever. Taxpayers in the top 5% of income already pay for more than 43% of the US government, and taxpayers in the top 1% pay for more than 27%; at some point, taking more resources from the wealthy yields diminishing returns.”
At its worst, the politics of stagnation becomes a “dysfunctional politics”, as the public coffers grow emptier, populist politicians and special interest groups attack each other, and an indignant populace used to higher government spending takes to the streets. Cowen worries about the “honest middle” of politics becoming drowned out by angry, irrational and shrill political voices (ie Glenn Beck).
And yet, all is not entirely bleak. (more…)
by Richard Gowan | Feb 17, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system
David Bosco has an interesting post over at FP riffing on a Reuters piece about Ban Ki-moon’s record at the UN. The Reuters article basically says that most diplomats think that Ban’s OK but that he’s no Kofi Annan. David takes exception:
I’m afraid that this type of invidious comparison is by now part of the accepted institutional history. Kofi Annan was charismatic; Ban is not. Annan had moral authority; Ban doesn’t. You get the idea. I don’t have a particular view on Ban, but I have always thought that Kofi Annan’s vaunted moral authority had a very weak foundation. In fact, I’ll go further–I don’t think he had the moral authority to get the job in the first place.
Why so?
Kofi Annan was the first secretary-general to rise from the ranks of the UN bureaucracy. Before he got the top job, he served as head of UN peacekeeping. As his Nobel Prize biography reports, “he was Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at a time when nearly 70,000 military and civilian personnel were deployed in UN operations around the world.”
The Nobel bio neglects to mention that while he was in that post, two of the most shocking episodes in UN history occurred: the Rwanda genocide and the massacre at Srebrenica. In both cases, UN peacekeeping forces were essentially eyewitnesses to genocide. The greatest portion of the blame, of course, goes to the Security Council member states that authorized weak peacekeeping forces incapable of defending civilians and that balked at bolstering them once the bloodletting started. But it is fair to say that Annan’s office did not cover itself in glory.
For all of Ban Ki-moon’s evident shortcomings, at least he doesn’t have that as part of his record.
You can agree or disagree with this assessment – I concur with David’s basic point that a near-ubiquitous nostalgia for Kofi clouds assessments of Ban’s work. Conversely, if are going to judge every UN leader by the horrors that took place on their watch, should we mention’s Ban’s association with humanitarian mega-crises in the DRC (2008), Sri Lanka (2009) and Darfur (ongoing)? Maybe so. But my main problem with this argument is that I’m wary of the whole moral yardstick thing anyway.
Annan’s strongest qualifications to run the UN were his instinctive sense of the organization’s capabilities and his political ability to charm the Clinton administration – which obviously failed to transfer to the Bush administration. Annan got hold of the UN at a time when it was in well-nigh terminal disarray after the Balkan and Rwandan fiascoes (which, in fairness, he took responsibility for while SG) and used his institutional and political skills to restore its relevance, as the 70K blue helmets attest.
And Ban? I have a piece coming out in Internationale Politik assessing his performance in similar institutional/political terms – but you’ll have to wait until April to read that. Suffice it to say that I think that, after four years in the job, he has still to get the real sense of what the UN can achieve that Annan had. Equally, it’s harder for Ban in 2011 than it was for Annan in 1999 or 2000: Annan worked in a straightforward context of American power. Mr. Ban navigates less well-charted waters.
by Andy Sumner | Feb 17, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, South Asia, UK
UK aid to India is in the news again following a speech on emerging powers by UK Aid’s Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell at Chatham House which was carried in a range of the UK media and in the Guardian today and trailed in the FT before the speech. The temperature is rising in some parts of the UK media such the Daily Express and Daily Mail. The later probably outraged more so because 6 months ago they were presumably briefed by aides on the axing of the India programme.
Mitchell’s take is now this – focus aid in India on the poor and poorest (side-stepping the various diplomatic elephants in the room – on the one hand aid is peanuts to India versus India is home to 450m or one in three of the world’s poor which sits uneasily with the image of an emerging world power).
Basically Mitchell’s line is ignore the contradictions and focus on the poor and poorest:
Some people – in both the UK and India – have been asking whether the time has come to end British aid to India. In my view, we are not there yet. The whole rationale for my Department is, eventually, to work ourselves out of a job. But having discussed this with the Government of India, I believe that, for the next few years, it is in both India’s interest and in Britain’s interest for us to continue our highly successful collaboration on development, not least so we can support the Government of India’s own successful programmes in the poorest priority areas.
If India doesn’t need the money why does the UK give aid to India and why does India accept?
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by Jules Evans | Feb 17, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development
Daniel Batson, the social psychologist, has recently brought out what is probably his defining work on the topic he has studied for 30 years, Altruism In Humans. I bought it after hearing Martha Nussbaum rave about it when she spoke at the RSA in December. She says on the dust jacket that it’s “simply one of the most important books in our time for anyone who wants to ponder the problems and prospects of our species”. Casting my eye around Google, I think this might actually be the first review of the book. Woohoo, first! (more…)
