Film: 147 toddlers infected in Uzbek HIV outbreak

MOSCOW – An AIDS outbreak at two children’s hospitals in Uzbekistan has killed at least 14 children and left 133 infected with HIV, according to a documentary posted on a respected Central Asian news Web site on Monday psychology degree online.

The editor of Ferghana.ru said the 2007 outbreak was first reported in an official documentary produced by Uzbek prosecutors for government television.

But, he said, the video never aired because authorities had second thoughts about broadcasting it, fearing that it would provoke a public outcry and unfavorable international publicity.

The documentary posted on Ferghana.ru reported that 12 doctors and nurses at two hospitals in the eastern city of Namangan were convicted of treating the children with contaminated medical equipment.

According to the narrator, the health workers were sentenced to prison terms of from five years to eight years and eight months.

Uzbek officials, including prosecutors, did not return repeated phone calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.

The AP could not verify the authenticity of the documentary, which would be the first official confirmation of the long-rumored outbreak, but a former Uzbek television producer said it appeared authentic.

Daniil Kislov, editor of Ferghana.ru, said his site obtained the video from an Uzbek health official after authorities canceled plans to broadcast it.

Government officials keep a tight grip on the media in Uzbekistan, where President Islam Karimov has ruled for more than 20 years.

Several outbreaks of hospital-transmitted HIV have been reported among children in Central Asia in recent years. Doctors in the region have sometimes prescribed transfusions for routine illnesses.

Similar incidents in Kazakhstan in 2006 and Kyrgyzstan in 2007 left dozens of children infected.

The Uzbek documentary shows a series of men and women, identified as health workers, confessing and saying they deserved harsh sentences. All the interviewees spoke into a microphone with the logo of Uzbek state television.

“I am 1,00 Hot News: MEA TV airing Kan Ya Makan Music Video by Ridha Ibrahim

[Via http://roniyon.wordpress.com]

Germany as an economic role model (2)

Germany, as I noted in an earlier post, shows that it is possible for a nation to maintain a high material standard of living while still competing successfully in the global arena.

Germany is the world’s second-largest exporting nation, behind China, and for many years was number one, and it has the world’s third-largest trade surplus, behind China and Japan. Be it noted that there are about 60 million Germans and more than 1 billion Chinese.  At the same time German workers get six-week vacations, generous old age pensions and guaranteed health insurance.

Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer, has an excellent article about this in the March 2010 issue of Harper’s magazine.  He attributes Germany’s superior economic performance to its system of worker participation in corporate governance which, ironically, was imposed on Germany by the victorious allies after World War Two.

Workers have equal representation on the boards of directors of large corporations with shareholders, although the shareholders have the deciding vote in case of a tie.  The important thing from the workers’ perspective is that they know what’s going on.  They know the financial situation of the corporation, and they know its plans.  If a company is considering moving a manufacturing operation to Asia or eastern Europe, the union can make a counter-proposal to make it economically feasible to stay in Germany.

I don’t think that is the whole story, but I do think it is a great advantage to Germany to avoid the kind of class warfare we have in the United States.  Workers can suggest improvements in efficiency without fearing they will jeopardize their own jobs.

In the 1950s, Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers, reportedly urged General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to make a line of fuel-efficient cars; the companies reportedly reacted with outrage at this infringement of management prerogatives, and told Reuther to restrict himself for bargaining for pay and benefits.  (I don’t have a historical reference for this, but I find it believable.)

Even if you don’t think worker participation is the cause of Germany’s economic success, the facts show that it hasn’t prevented that success.

You may say that this is all very well for Germany, but its institutions can’t possibly be transplanted to the United States.  But the United States has a long history of adopting good ideas from Germany.  The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. armed forces are modeled on the Prussian General Staff.  U.S. corporate research laboratories and research universities were inspired by Germany models.  The U.S. interstate highway system is modeled on the German autobahn.  The secret of success is to take other people’s good ideas and improve upon them.

Geoghegan’s article is not available on-line, so you would have to buy a copy or read it in a public library.

[Via http://philebersole.wordpress.com]

Radical Compassion

I’m sitting in front of my TV, like so many of you, watching the post-HCR vote speechifying, grinning like a fool and tearing up here and there.

James Clyburn just said that Nancy Pelosi got it done through tenacity and compassion. I’ll have more to say about this later, but I think that this combination – which I’ll call radical compassion – is what we need to move forward, and not just in the healthcare arena.

(And speaking of hope: My miniature iris is up, too.)

[Via http://kittywampus.wordpress.com]

Morality and Leadership; Pelosi is bad for America

At it’s most basic level, government is a willing agreement entered into by a group of people to give up some individual liberty for the preservation of the group in general. Cicero called it a “partnership in justice.”

For example, I have consented to be governed by the laws of my city, state and nation, even though that means I can’t do everything I may want to do whenever I want to. I may not agree with every law, but by not rebelling, it proves my tacit consent.

Naturally, then, in government leaders will emerge. We need to pick sheriffs, judges, mayors, presidents, legislators, etc. But does it really matter what kind of people they are? I think it does.

We have recently heard of all kinds of votes being “bought” in order to pass the healthcare bill. A Utah Congressman’s brother is getting appointed to a judgeship in exchange for the Congressman’s vote for Obamacare. The Hill newspaper reports on some of the goodies, including $300 million in extra funding for Sen. Landrieu’s home state of Louisiana, and millions in extra Medicaid dollars for Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson. The public doesn’t want the bill to pass, so the Dems have to make these hidden deals in order to get it passed. Outside of Obamacare, the New Jersey government has been caught in corrupt contract scandals, awarding contracts and taking a cut of the money. Many state and national politicians are caught in sexual scandals. Our government leaders have been convicted of embezzlement, lying, and tax-fraud; implicated in the disappearance of interns, campaign fraud, and abuse of intelligence to rationalize war; and unconscionable waste of taxpayers money – basically robbing us, the citizens. It’s more like reading about pirates plundering a nation than its leaders preserving it!

Polybius, a Greek from around 200BC, watched the downfall of his native Greece and the emergence of Rome as the dominating power of the era. He wrote many books on Rome’s emergence and its history. He compares Rome to other contemporary nation-states like Greece, Carthage, etc. He says in The Histories, volume III that

“But the quality in which he Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of their religious convictions. The consequence is that among the Greeks, (where belief in religion was deemed foolish) apart from other things, members of the government, if they are entrusted with no more than a talent, (a piece of money) though they have 10 copyists and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, cannot keep their faith; whereas among the Romans those who as magistrates and legates are dealing with large sums of money maintain correct conduct just because they have pledged their faith by oath. Whereas elsewhere it is a rare thing to find a man who keeps his hands off public money, and whose record is clean in this respect, among the Romans one rarely comes across a man who has been detected in such conduct.”

Whether the moral code you adhere to comes from organized religion or not, Polybius makes clear that moral people — people who believe in and live in accordance to the natural principles of right vs. wrong; honesty is good, dishonesty is bad; fidelity and integrity are good; etc. — these are the people that make the best public servants and leaders in government.

A generation later, the Roman Cicero said that leaders that follow these moral codes are the only ones fit to govern.

Another generation or two later, approximately 160AD, Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome. In his Meditations he lauds a moral character that works for the public interest in a manner that befits a ruler.

My point is that the morality question has very little to do with the Religious Right of the current political landscape. Oh sure they get their boxers in a bunch about it nowadays, just in time for the next one to fall from within their own ranks due to yet another “indiscretion.” We don’t need to look to these punters for direction, or assume when they fall that the belief in a moral code is incorrect. We have the writings and lessons of history before us. Some Roman guys from a long time ago set-up a mixed government system with an Executive Branch, a Senate, a legislative (popular assembly) body, and judges. Sound familiar? They were the world’s super power for centuries, and their system worked for over 500 years. America, by paltry comparison, is just above the 200+ years mark.

So it’s not like we haven’t been pointed the way.

James Burgh, involved in the creation of this great nation, wrote in 1774 that,

“When we elect persons to represent us we must not be supposed to depart from the smallest right which we have deposited with them. We make a lodgment, not a gift; we entrust, but part with nothing. We have, therefore, a right to know what they are saying and doing. And should they contradict our sense, or swerve from our interests, we have a right to remonstrate, inform, and direct them. By which means, we become the regulators of our own conduct, and the institutors of our own laws, and nothing material can be done but by our authority and consent.”

Compare this with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and her behavior around the healthcare bill. Not only does the American public not know what is in this bill, she is deliberately trying to keep it this way as it says on her own website. The hidden deals, millions of dollars for buying votes, and strong-arm tactics is exactly the opposite of how the representative system is supposed to work!

Pelosi and politicians like her are bad for America. Watch CNN say so HERE.

We need a way to get career politicians back into the real world – like thru term limits for Congress. And we need to be as vocal and vigilant as ever against her and politicians like her. The right to govern ourselves is a real and unalienable right that we have. When our elected representatives abuse it and take power unto themselves like Pelosi is doing – hiding the contents of a bill from the public and doing back room deals to get it put into law – we need to use our natural rights and get her and her cronies out of our government. She and politicians like her are working toward the decline of America. The history is before us.

[Via http://blog.ericmerten.com]

ALVIN S. SIMPLETON SAYS TEXAS BOARD OF EDUCATION WRONG

Man, they do everything big in Texas, and they sure don’t use common sense in what they do.

No, I’m not talkin bout them thinkin bout seceding from the USA.

Worse. The Texas State Board of Education has taken it upon itself to write the textbooks on economics and history according to a conservative interpretation of US history and capitalism.

This wouldn’t be so bad ifn it weren’t for the fact that Texas is the second largest buyer of textbooks, which means the book publishers will abide by the wishes of the conservative members the State Board.

If the folks in Texas want their kids to read such distortion of economics and history, fine, but why should the rest of our kids have to accept such garbage?

Example of revisionist history: Thomas Jefferson is not considered one of the Founding Fathers.

You can read the story in the Washington Monthly (http://ww.washingtonmonthly.com/), dated March 13, 2010.

Jonathan Zimmerman, while not agreeing with the Texas State Board of Education, suggests in the Los Angels Times dated March 17, suggests students maybe should be given several points of view, which would show how we Americans often disagree about how our nation was formed. Then the students could on their own “sort out the differences.”

Now, that ain’t a bad idea. But it ain’t gonna fly cause both liberals and conservatives at the extreme edges just don’t want but one point of view on anything and that point of view must be theirs.

[Via http://lawillis.wordpress.com]

Health Care Roulette

 

 

A friend and occasional Power Line contributor writes:

 

If [Obamacare] passes, the Dems will own every doctor complaint out there. Moreover, the complaints will multiply, and not just because care will deteriorate as demand increases and supply decreases. They are going to multiply because the care-seeking population is about to become the Baby Boomers — i.e., the most indulged, demanding and complaining generation in a hundred years, or maybe ever. The Dems are (apparently) fixing to take over medicine at exactly the time The Giant Complaining Horde shows up at the door.

Of course, the irony, as ever with these egalitarian programs, is that people with money will still come out ahead. One reason I found out about [my] liver cancer in time to do something about it was that, knowing I had a potential problem, I paid $4,000 out of my own pocket for an exotic annual physical exam beyond what insurance would reimburse.

What is actually going to happen is that there will spring up a quasi-underground medical practice for people who can pay their own bills and do not rely on Medicare or (what will become dwindling) private insurance. Indeed, this has already started to happen with boutique clinics like the one I used. If I were a shrewd businessman, I would figure out some way to franchise it, or something, and make a fortune.

The basic thing the Dems detest is inequality born of the fact that people who think about what they’re doing tend to come out ahead of people who don’t. Oh well.

And in other news, did I tell you that my doctor never returns my calls?

[Via http://cliftonchadwick.wordpress.com]

Poverty in Africa, Ctd.

I recently mentioned a new paper by Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy about poverty in Africa, and how the situation is much better than we tend to believe. Martin Ravallion – probably the world’s most prominent poverty expert – has now reacted. He agrees that African poverty has been decreasing over the last 15 years, but he is cautious:

We must first be clear about what we mean when we say “poverty is falling”. What many people mean is falling numbers of poor. However, Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy refer solely to the poverty rate—the percentage of people who are poor. (There is no mention of this important distinction in their paper.)… Here we agree: aggregate poverty rates have fallen in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since the mid-1990s. Shahoua Chen and I came to exactly the same conclusion in our research, for the World Bank’s global poverty monitoring effort, although our methods differ considerably and (no surprise) I prefer our methods. However, Chen and I also point out that the decline in the aggregate poverty rate has not been sufficient to reduce the number of poor, given population growth…

As we warn explicitly in our paper, this is not yet sufficient survey data to be confident about the (promising) downward trend for Africa’s aggregate poverty rate that Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy have announced with such confidence.

Hopefully we will see a confirmation of the emerging downward trend for Africa in the years ahead, as more (genuine) data emerge. (source, source, source)

Again proof that poverty statistics may be tasty sausages but you wouldn’t want to see them made. And that’s not just the case for third world statistics. Even U.S. poverty statistics are a mess.

[Via http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com]

Boss Hog -- Rolling Stone on Smithfield

In the tradition of gonzo journalism developed by the legendary Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Tietz holds his nose and plows right into the shitstorm of a story that is Smithfield, the biggest hog producer the world has ever known. Thanks to Gaille for the tip! Now here’s an excerpt from Jeff’s story:

Dead pigs -- just part of the "collateral damage". Rolling Stone photo

“Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do — even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield’s business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat….’

Read the whole story on Rolling Stone.

[Via http://thebovine.wordpress.com]

Mighty Morphin' Power Narratives

It’s interesting to witness the interplay between culture and politics which is, fundamentally, the interplay between narrative and power. Narratives that attract power tend to gain priority, which can lead to more power. Narratives that don’t attract power tend to lose priority and then lose whatever power they might have had. Successful narratives tend to attract more minds to propagate themselves to, adding power. Unsuccessful narratives tend to attract fewer minds and even lose adherents.

Successful narratives, even more insidiously, heavily punish those that don’t subscribe to them. Humans are narrative propagating machines; human adaptability can basically be reduced to the adoption of successful narratives and the rejection of unsuccessful narratives. The pressure to force everyone in a group to adhere to whatever narrative is currently successful is immense. Standing alone is an emotionally violent experience.

Author Michael Lewis became famous for the book Liar’s Poker. Liar’s Poker was originally an expose on the dysfunctional culture on Wall Street during Lewis’s time as a bond salesman at Salmon Brothers. Following the typical logic of narrative and power, Liar’s Poker instead attracted people to Wall Street. An unspoken context of Liar’s Poker implied that not only could mindless testosterone fueled jocks make their way on Wall Street without any particular skills but that they could make lots of money. Liar’s Poker became a recruiting tool and even an encouragement for the kind of Wall Street idiocy he had deplored.

As something of an act of penance, Lewis has written a new book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. In it, he profiles four groups of investors who shorted the Housing Bubble and profited immensely from it. In an interview, Lewis commented that one commonality of these “shorts” was how socially disconnected they were. One of Lewis’s protagonists, hedge fund manager Michael Burry, was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome during his shorting. Those who suffer from Asperger’s tend to have less social connectivity to others that is true of the average member of the population. Burry, for example, never socially connected with Wall Street circles, instead spending all of his time obsessively reading SEC prospectuses for mortgage-backed securities. This meant that the predominant collection of current Wall Street narratives like “there has never been a decade over decade decline in housing prices in American history” didn’t infect him. Indeed, it seems that the more isolated his position was, the happier he was. This didn’t mean he was completely free of being bombarded by the narrative. Burry’s investors, infected with the dominant narratives, constantly criticized him for his shorting of the Housing Bubble. He was vindicated at the end, making “$100 million for himself and $725 million for his investors”.

Yet he is singular for how unique he was. Most investors went happily off the cliff, carried away by a narrative that brought them huge wealth in the short-term but disaster in the long-term. My view has always been that, in the aggregate, culture lags behind events just as biology tends to lag behind events. But sometimes the day of reckoning comes quickly, even for the most successful of narratives. Priority and with it power can disappear very quickly.

Narrative crawls but history jumps.

[Via http://committeeofpublicsafety.wordpress.com]

Adam Smith - Monopolies - Oregon - Montana Territory and the Land Run of 1889

Adam Smith – Monopolies  Oregon – Montana Territory and the Land Run of 1889 Adam Smith From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Adam Smith (baptised 16 June 1723 – 17 July 1790 [OS: 5 June 1723 – 17 July 1790]) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economics. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics. Smith studied moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and Oxford University. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his later life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith returned home and spent the next ten years writing The Wealth of Nations, publishing it in 1776. He died in 1790.  Monopolies The term Robber baron was popularized by U.S. political and economic commentator Matthew Josephson during The Great Depression in a 1934 book.[1] He attributed its first use to an 1880 anti-monopoly pamphlet in which Kansas farmers applied the term to railroad magnates. The informal term captains of industry may sometimes be used to avoid the negative connotations of “robber baron”.

Five Points (or The Five Points) was a notorious slum centered on the intersection of Mulberry, Anthony (now Worth St.), Cross (now Mosco), Orange (now Baxter), and Little Water Street (no longer exists) on Manhattan island, New York City, New York, in the United States. Today, the Five Points would be located about halfway between Chinatown and the Financial District. The name Five Points derived from the five corners at this intersection.

The neighborhood features in the book The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, published in 1928. In the 1970s, the book inspired director Martin Scorsese to make a film set in The Points, which he accomplished with 2002’s Gangs of New York. In The Sting, mob boss Doyle Lonnergan (Robert Shaw) is known to come from Five Points; as part of the plan to gain Lonnergan’s confidence, Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) claims to be from the same neighborhood.

Robber Barons Bill the Butcher  Gangs of New York – Trailer    Northwest Territory On July 13, 1787, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. The act created the Northwest Territory. It also established a form of government and specified how the various parts of the Northwest Territory could become states. The Northwest Ordinance required the creation of at least three but not more than five states from the Northwest Territory. The first state to be formed from the Northwest Territory was Ohio, the seventeenth state of the United States of America. While the United States government had now established how the Northwest Territory would be governed, Native Americans living in the area refused to agree to American control of the region. From the Northwest Territory’s creation in 1787 until well after Ohio statehood in 1803, bloodshed between white settlers and the Indians continued in the American Northwest Oregon Territory  The Territory of Oregon was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from August 14, 1848, until February 14, 1859, when the southwestern portion of the territory was admitted to the Union as the State of Oregon. Originally claimed by several nations, the region was divided between the U.S. and Great Britain in 1846. When established, the territory encompassed an area that included the current states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, as well as parts of Wyoming and Montana. The capital of the territory was first Oregon City, then Salem, followed briefly by Corvallis, and lastly as Salem, the seat of government for the State of Oregon. Montana Territory The Territory of Montana was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from May 28, 1864, until November 8, 1889, when it was admitted to the Union as the State of Montana. Land run

Land run (sometimes “land rush” ) usually refers to a historical event in which previously-restricted land of the United States was opened for homesteading on a first arrival basis. Some newly opened lands were sold first-come, sold by bid, or won by lottery, or by means other than a run. The settlers, no matter how they acquired occupancy, purchased the land from the United States Land Office. For former Indian lands, the Land Office distributed the funds to the various tribal entities according to previously negotiated terms. The Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 was the most prominent of the land runs, although there were several others enumerated below.

There were seven land runs in Oklahoma:

1. Land Run of 1889 took place at high noon on April 22, 1889 and involved the settlement of the Unassigned Lands (most of modern day Canadian, Cleveland, Kingfisher, Logan, Oklahoma, and Payne counties).
2. September 22, 1891: Land run to settle Iowa, Sac and Fox, Potawatomi, and Shawnee lands.
3. September 23, 1891: Land run to settle Tecumseh, the pre-designated location of the county seat of County B, later renamed as Pottawatomie County.
4. September 28, 1891: Land run to settle Chandler, the pre-designated location of the county seat of County A, later renamed as Lincoln County.
5. April 19, 1892: Land run to settle the Cheyenne and Arapaho lands.
6. September 16, 1893: Cherokee Strip Land Run. The Run of the Cherokee Strip opened nearly 7,000,000 acres (28,000 km²) to settlement on September 16, 1893. The land was purchased from the Cherokees for $7,000,000. It was largest land run in United States history.
7. May 23, 1895: Land run to settle the Kickapoo lands.
8. In honor of Oklahoma’s Centennial, an Oklahoma Centennial Land Run Monument is currently being built by Oklahoma artist Paul Moore in his Norman, Oklahoma studio. As elements of the 47 piece monument are finished, they are to be installed in lower Bricktown, Oklahoma City. When completed, the monument will be approximately 365 feet (111 m) long, making it one of the largest bronze sculptures in the world.

THE RUSH TO OKLAHOMA

Oklahoma! Oklahoma! – Trailer

This isn’t Commie propaganda, it’s what your teacher’s taught you in school so turn off the babbling idiots like Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity and O’Reilly long enough to remember what you were taught in school?? Jeez!! You wanna put the Robber Baron’s back in the Drivers seat when you no longer have the West to settle and start over when the proverbial shit hits the fan under pure unbridled, unregulated capitalism that maybe was only ever really in effect from the 1890’s ( and forget about TR and Wilson to boot?) till the crash of 1929, maybe the public schools were really bad back when you were in school too, nah, you know better, turn off FOX, it’s that easy?? U know Glen, these crazy papists come over here and want a hand out and turn our cities into war zones with their vices and odd religions, and don’t even get me started about those crazy Mormons that believe in Vishnu or something weird like that? Somebody ought to look into their UnAmerican views in Congress? In the late 19th century, Democrats would call the Republicans “Know Nothings” in order to secure the votes of Catholics. Since the early 20th century, the term has been a provocative slur, suggesting that the opponent is both nativist and ignorant. Bob Jones Reposts Mormon, Catholic ‘Cult’ Reference Doctor PaisleyPaisley’s use of the title’Dr’ derived initially from a 1954 qualification from the outlawed American Pioneer Theological Seminary in Rockville, Illinois. Later this was somewhat legitimised by an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree awarded by Bob Jones University

West Side Story – America  West Side Story-Tonight West Side Story (1961)

[Via http://dummidumbwit.wordpress.com]

Looking to America's First Financier

In a time of ever more alarming reports on the financial condition of our country, Alexander Hamilton, who did more than any other to establish America’s financial system, is a useful figure to return to. I recently read a 1931 biography of Hamilton entitled Alexander Hamilton: First American Business Man. (1) The author, an economic historian at Cornell University named Thomas Irving Warshow, focused on what he regarded as essential about his subject: Hamilton’s role in the development of the business and financial systems of the United States.

In the existing biographies of Hamilton, there is but little emphasis on this portion of Hamilton’s activities, yet it was as financier and business man that our first Secretary of the Treasury proved his immortality. For as a man, he was not noble; as a politician, he was not an eminent success; as a statesman, apart from financial measures, he was not superior. But as a business man, not in all his period was any man to match him, nor in all the years of American history can any figure dwarf him in this, his natural field. (p. ix-x)

There is something dubious about Warshow’s characterization of Hamilton as a “businessman” rather than a statesman, but his narrative does have the virtue of keeping the focus on certain highlights of his career. It is impossible not to be riveted by Hamilton’s life story. The magnitude of his role in shaping our basic political and economic institutions is difficult to exaggerate. For all those Americans who have been taught to see the Founders as “immigrants,” Hamilton’s story serves as a corrective. Born out of wedlock in the British West Indies, he was derided as a “foreigner” by enemies like Jefferson. But this misses the larger point: our founding fathers were not immigrants to this nation; they created it. Hamilton rightly is ranked among the most important among them.

When Hamilton traveled to New York in 1772 to pursue an education, he had while still a teenager already served as general manager of the largest trading operation in the West Indies. He helped to win the Revolutionary War as Washington’s military secretary from 1777 to 1781. With his essays in the Federalist Papers and active campaigning, he secured the adoption of the Constitution. As Secretary of the Treasury he engineered the federal assumption of the states’ debts from the Revolutionary War and established the first United States Bank. He planned and organized the first large business corporation in America, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (S.U.M.). He was a strong proponent of strengthening manufacture through protective tariffs, a policy argued for by Patrick Buchanan and at the Economic Nationalist site. He was an instrumental proponent of the “Federalist” philosophy whose conflict with “Jeffersonian Democracy” was basic to early American politics and continues to resonate today. Were it not for the public exposure of an amorous indiscretion and his capacity for making enemies, he might have been President. Instead, he squandered his life before he had reached 50 in a needless duel with Aaron Burr.

In his zeal to grow the economy, Hamilton was too tolerant of speculation and profiteering, and a number of scandals surrounded his tenure as Secretary. Yet he did not grow rich and does not seem to have ever used his political power for personal gain. He built up a financial system that provided the indispensable precondition for industrialization: sufficient access to credit. Warshow expresses “liberal” (in the 1931 sense of the word) reservations about Hamilton’s legacy, while seeing his contribution to American industrialization as beyond questioning:

In this entire plan Hamilton accepted the principle of exploitation. With the larger social effects of his program – the consequences to the working classes, congestion of population, the entire labor problem – he did not concern himself. Political fallacy though it was, it was not in harmony with his temperament or his principles [to so concern himself]. Material splendor and power were his vision and his plan. With the singleness of purpose so necessary to the successful large man of business he blazed the path to our present-day material prosperity. Without Hamilton we might be a happier people, but not the great commercial nation. Woodrow Wilson has said of America’s first business leader: “A very great man, but not a great American.” Deficient in liberalism, indeed; but then, what great debt does industrialism owe to the leaders of liberalism? (p. 179)

Russell Kirk, while describing Hamilton’s conservative vision of a virtuous, if privileged, aristocratic class running the helm of society, makes trenchant criticisms of his industrialist and nationalist views that are somewhat germane to Warshow’s.

[H]e ignored the probability that the industrialized nation he projected might conjure up not only conservative industrialists, but also radical factory-hands – the latter infinitely more numerous, and more inimical to Hamilton’s old-fashioned idea of class and order than all the agrarians out of Jefferson’s Virginia.” (2) Kirk feels that the trends towards industrialization and centralized government would have proceeded without Hamilton’s almost fanatic encouragement, and quite possibly in a healthier manner that could have prevented the rupture of the Civil War.

Nevertheless, from the present-day perspective, Hamilton’s thinking holds plenty of value to conservatives. Many of his intuitively held positions could be tools of salvation if adopted by our present-day business and political leaders. Hamilton held that the integrity of a nation rested on its credit, and his achievement was to make United States into a nation that could be relied on to pay off its debts. His establishment of the national credit appears to have been largely squandered by the current custodians of his legacy, but it is never too late to return to common sense on these matters. We are the inheritors of Hamilton’s practicality as well as of Jefferson’s idealism, and in the end we will get done what needs to get done.

Notes

(1) Robert Irving Warshow, Alexander Hamilton: America’s First Business Man, Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1931.

(2) Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind From Burke to Eliot (Seventh Revised Edition), Chicago: Regnery Books, 1986.

[Via http://heritageamerican.wordpress.com]

What drives us to Succeed (what makes good Doctors good?))

A thought occurred to me today. We pay doctors an awful lot. And then of course we demand that they pay high medical practice insurance, and their educational costs are pretty darn high, too. Why do we pay doctors so much?

Well, the services that doctors give us improve our lives and even allow us to continue living when we might otherwise die. Life is pretty valuable to most of us– and it might be useful to examine the age in which we live, and what things teach us that life is so valuable. Perhaps it might even be useful to study violence as seen through the lens of the extreme value of life. Not only does violence seem more abhorrent to most of us– it is also perhaps more potent as a form of expression and as an influence upon us in our world of relative peace (not to discount the current conflicts in the world). Sorry– bit of a tangent there.

So the value of life is part of why we pay doctors so much. Perhaps we pay doctors a lot because their services are scarce as well. So we currently have 1)value of life, 2) scarcity of medical services, and here’s another one I’ll introduce, but as a question– Does paying doctors more actually improve their service?

Or, supposition 3) the improved service that higher pay can buy, not in the form of better technology or the like, but in improved performance for higher pay.

In some jobs, higher performance means better pay, but in other jobs this is seen as ineffective.  Ex: Business consultants are paid more if they have more prestige, experience or success under their belt. However, the consensus isn’t the same about High School teachers– some still think this would be useful or a true principle, but others (I think most people) disagree.

The basic reasoning may have something to do with how ’sure’ results seem to be for each of these professions or situations.

So, does it really work? Or should we rate doctors in other ways? How do we get better service from doctors?

[Via http://elkym.wordpress.com]

Green Jobs Debate

The Economist is hosting a green jobs debate between former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones and Andrew Morriss, one of the authors of “The Green Jobs Myth”. The pre-debate vote of reader support for the statement “This house believes that creating green jobs is a sensible aspiration for governments” was close to 50-50, so this one could go either way.

When green jobs are created by the public sector they are at best a coincidental byproduct of other worthy goals. Making green jobs an explicit policy goal means having two contradictory objectives: maximizing efficiency, that is output per dollar, and maximizing jobs, that is maximizing workers per output. If you consider that jobs cost dollars, these goals are almost exactly opposite. The only way they don’t work against each other is the extent to which you can costlessly exchange capital for labor, a rare if non-existent condition. Remember, maximizing workers per output is the same as minimizing output per worker.

The easiest defense of green jobs is to contrast it with doing nothing, The most difficult defense is to contrast it with a gas tax or cap-and-trade. This is where Jones is at his weakest:

Furthermore, governments will need to go beyond a simple cap-and-trade system for global warming pollution. Renewable energy standards and codes for energy efficiency will help build markets. Green banks and new financing tools will use public underwriting to help unleash private capital. And public investments in infrastructure will create a platform for innovative businesses to thrive and hire more workers.

Notice that when contrasted with cap-and-trade, the actions that he argues the government needs to take are completely unrelated to the kind of policies promoted by green jobs fans. For instance, weatherization would not fall under any of these categories, nor would direct subsidies to particular companies or technologies. Unless that’s what he means by “green banks… will use public underwriting” is that “the government will subsidize things”, in which case he hasn’t really made an argument so much as an assertion. Once the cost of pollution is priced into polluting, there is no more externality. What is the remaining justification for government action? He has dodged a very critical question here.

Jones is most successful in arguing that since government intervention in energy markets is inevitable and desirable, they need to explicitly prioritize green technologies, and cannot simply let the market handle it. This is a good argument for why the government should consider the environmental impact of it’s regulatory actions.

As to whether or not green jobs policies are protectionism, he argues that “In this context, policy is not a restraint on trade. It is a driver of innovation”. However, in reality it almost certainly is. When a policy goal is to maximize American jobs, that has the effect of a “Buy American” provision. Here’s one recent example:

…when American stimulus funds subsidized a joint U.S.-China wind-power farm in West Texas, it turned out that Texas stood to get 30 permanent jobs to China’s 3,000. After Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) protested, the Chinese agreed to build a wind-turbine factory in Texas.

Clearly, prioritizing American jobs is highly correlated to prioritizing American investments, which is protectionism.

[Via http://modeledbehavior.com]

Ignorance Is Bliss

Ignorance seems to be bliss in America… The American people don’t want to care about things that are happening in this world. The more important the issue, the less people truly care to understand.

In my economics class, we were shown a picture of a statue of Mao Zedong with his right arm raised and we were asked to identify him. A girl raised her hand and said, “It’s Hitler!” Everyone agreed with her and were upset to find out that it wasn’t him. First off, under the statue there was a sign that had Chinese characters, so I find it hard to believe it was Hitler. And besides, if they knew world history they would know that during WWII, China was was an Ally and was helping us fight against the Axis powers…

Another example from today was in my class following economics. Two girls walked into the room proclaiming that they would catch a cold because the room was cold. I couldn’t believe that they were serious. Cold temperature doesn’t make you sick; all it does is weaken your immune system, allowing you to get sick easier. You don’t get sick from temperature…

I’m not sure if that last example fits with this or if it just shows how stupid people really can be. Nonetheless, ignorant people piss me off and just completely annoy me to no end…

Here’s a video to show how stupid Americans can be; they don’t even understand that they’re being made fun of.

[Via http://chelseastonger.wordpress.com]

Walmart discriminates against little Caucasian girls

…or something.

Guys, Ballerina Teresa was on clearance. If she was “devalued”, it was because Louisiana Negro consumers didn’t pony up the $6 to do their bit for Mattel’s and Walmart’s bottom line….so who actually did the devaluing here? I don’t know if the issue is that Louisiana Negroes don’t like Barbies, or don’t like black Barbies, or can’t relate to ballerinas …and it really doesn’t matter; the product has to go. Would you be happier if Walmart had raised the price to $50? No, because that would have been discriminatory. So it’s not discriminatory if Ballerina Barbie is still $6? It’s not a good thing that poor girls can now buy a doll for 50% off? Come on, I thought we lived in the post-racial age. Millions of Americans didn’t vote for America’s first Black Red President so they could hear race-pimping psychologists whine about trauma to kids’ self-image. Then they claim that Negros buy more Caucasian dolls than vice-versa…hmmm, maybe that’s where the self-image problem is??  Do we need doll apartheid? Mandatory gene tests to make sure you have sufficient African genetics to own a Teresa (or of course Eurogenes for Barbie)?

The racial insensitivity didn’t happen when they dropped the price; it happened when they ordered too many Ballerina Teresas. I’m sure they won’t make that mistake again. Get over it!

[Via http://jeffreyquick.wordpress.com]

Beteille on Raj

Here is Beteille on the economist K N Raj:

I cannot assess Raj’s contribution to economic science, nor is this the place or the time to do so. But he certainly was an inspiration to many both within and outside his own discipline. P.N. Dhar, who was both his friend and his rival, was bemused by the admiration Raj was able to attract. Shortly after he joined Indira Gandhi’s office as her adviser, he prepared a note for her with great care and some satisfaction. When he went to see her about the note, the first question she asked him was, “What does Dr Raj think of this?” It mattered to many people what Raj thought of them and their work. It certainly mattered to me.

In 1968, I was awarded a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship for two years. I chose as my subject the study of agrarian social structure, at that time a somewhat unusual choice for a sociologist. My choice was influenced to a large extent by my association with Raj. I was determined to show him that sociologists had something to say about class and not just about caste, but that they had their own approach to its study. My colleagues in the department of sociology were a little puzzled by my choice of subject, and some even thought that Raj was turning me into a Marxist.

Take a look!

[Via http://mogadalai.wordpress.com]

Sinking In Debt ?

As  opened my mail today I noticed a letter from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce. I opened it and found a two paragraph letter informing me that next week I would be receiving a form from the 2010 census and that it was very important that I fill out the form and return it promptly.  Beyond that the letter said nothing that any half-wit would not already know.  The longer I looked at that letter the angrier I became.  Our Nation has a 1.4 billion dollar deficit projected. Everyone acknowledges that the debt is unsustainable and that our currency is becoming worthless as a result.  All manner of lip service is given to ways to cut waste in govt. spending.  The President talks about how we can cut waste in Medicare spending.  Who are we kidding?  If it wasn’t obvious to someone in govt. that this letter, that was sent out to every home in the U.S.,   was unnecessary and a huge waste of the taxpayer’s money then we don’t have a chance of ever getting this thing under control.  This letter was unnecessary, but even if it had been necessary it could have been sent next week with the census form. Who knows how many millions of Dollars in savings this would have amounted to?  I called my Congress person’s office to register my unhappiness about the waste of my taxes on this boondoggle. I hope everyone who receives one of these letters will do the same.

[Via http://seniordiscount.wordpress.com]

Idiot in US Senate

Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb. suggested that U.S. should consider banning Japanese cars until Japanese government guarantees that their cars have no defects.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2010-03-02-toyota-hearing-japanese-cars_N.htm

One small problem though: all the cars being recalled were assembled in the U. S.

Mr. Jahanns should also seek banning the sale of GM, Ford and Chrysler cars in the U.S. and other countries unless the US government promises  that there will be no recalls from these companies.

Same thing for Benz, BMW, Volvo and Hyundai too.

Yeah, let’s get the trade war started!

[Via http://hslu.wordpress.com]

Global Shipping Routes

Via Paul Kedrosky, a look at the most important global shipping routes and ports.  No surprise that there are only two U.S. ports, and they are both petroleum centers.  Click image for larger version.

Pablo Kaluza et al., “The complex network of global cargo ship movements,” (January 13, 2010)

MP

[Via http://blog.accordionpartners.com]

Cleansing China's environmental soul

The world’s biggest polluter seeks to cleanse their soul and win a brand new image as an environmental champ.

After the failure of the Copenhagen Summit – which ended in a sort of deal-no-deal agreement many blamed mainly on the Beijing government for its opposition not only to a legally binding agreement but to any agreement at all – China may start its first city-wide carbon cap-and-trade system by June in what may be seen as a trick to win global confidence back.

Site of the new diplomatic strategy is the northeast port city of Tianjin whose government is planning to impose a mandatory limit on energy used to heat buildings in the first half of this year. Property managers able to reduce energy use to below the limit will earn credits they can then sell.

China has pledged to reduce its carbon-dioxide output per unit of gross domestic product by 40 percent to 45 percent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels. Premier Wen Jiabao in January called pollution in the nation “grim” and said the government will strictly limit emissions from coal-powered generators, cement and steel producers.

The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the top advisory body to the nation’s parliament, this week proposed additional measures to cut carbon emissions. Premier Wen addressed the opening session today of the parliament’s annual meeting in Beijing and deliver what amounts to China’s State of the Union speech.

The Tianjin program, China’s first market-based carbon trading plan, was established by Arreon and the Tianjin Climate Exchange. The exchange is a venture between a unit of China National Petroleum Corp., the country’s largest oil and gas company, the Tianjin Property Rights Exchange and the Chicago Climate Exchange, according to its Web site.

“On the one hand, Tianjin needs to develop very quickly,” said Mu Lingling, deputy general manager of the Tianjin Climate Exchange. “On the other hand, it has to provide environmental protection.” The emissions trading program can help the nation achieve both targets, Mu said.

Beijing and Shanghai are also working on carbon trading programs and are in a “horse race” with Tianjin to develop emissions trading systems for the nation, Shi said.

Tianjin, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) southeast of the Chinese capital, recorded its pilot trades in carbon emissions allowances last month in a trial program covering heating suppliers serving more than 2 million square meters (21.5 million square feet) of residential buildings.

The Tianjin program was designed along the principles of cap and trade methodology, the government’s five-year economic plans and third-party auditing of emissions, said Dan Barry, deputy director of global carbon at Gazprom’s marketing and trading unit in London, which agreed to buy some allowances in the pilot phase.

[Via http://reportingtheworldover.wordpress.com]

Liberaltarian Bargains, Part II

I won’t let the rejection of the last liberaltarian bargain I proposed deter me. There are others out there. For example, you have Matt Yglesias’ enthusiastic support for getting rid of “tax expenditures”. These are the millions of little tax cuts that turn us all into special interest groups, which according to Andrew Leonard of the Fiscal Times add up to $1 trillion a year and are growing at several times the inflation rate.

You know these tax cuts, they are the political bread and butter of stump speeches and debates. They allow politicians to say things like:

“I voted for a tax break for working mothers who want to back to school and learn the skills for tomorrow’s green jobs!”

“I voted for a tax break for sustainable health insurance for the children of veterans that would have provided health care and green manufacturing jobs for a million working class South Carolina children, and my opponent voted against it!”

“Senator Dickle and I passed a bipartisan small business investment tax credit that helped entrepreneurs create manufacturing jobs for middle class families; just like Dan Bindle from Dumpsville Alabama who used that tax credit to reopen his grandfathers tugboat factory and put 2,000 sustainable-small-business-working-mother-veteran-entrepreneurs back to work!”

They’ve got the buzz words of “tax credit” and “tax cut”, with all of the benefit of being highly targeted to achieve maximum political value. It’s this high political value that makes me skeptical we’ll ever get rid of them in any significant and permanent way. Remember, if they are designed for maximum political upside as a “tax cut”,  they will have maximum political downside as a “tax raise”. Pity the politician who votes to “raise taxes” on working mothers who are going back to school to… you get the point.

[Via http://modeledbehavior.com]

Europe 2020: Commission proposes new economic strategy in Europe.

The European Commission has launched the Europe 2020 Strategy to go out of the crisis and prepare EU economy for the next decade.

The Commission identifies three key drivers for growth, to be implemented through concrete actions at EU and national levels: smart growth (fostering knowledge, innovation, education and digital society), sustainable growth (making our production more resource efficient while boosting our competitiveness) and inclusive growth (raising participation in the labour market, the acquisition of skills and the fight against poverty). This battle for growth and jobs requires ownership at top political level and mobilisation from all actors across Europe. Five targets are set which define where the EU should be by 2020 and against which progress can be tracked.

President Barroso said, “Europe 2020 is about what we need to do today and tomorrow to get the EU economy back on track. The crisis has exposed fundamental issues and unsustainable trends that we can not ignore any longer. Europe has a growth deficit which is putting our future at risk. We must decisively tackle our weaknesses and exploit our many strengths. We need to build a new economic model based on knowledge, low-carbon economy and high employment levels. This battle requires mobilisation of all actors across Europe.”

First of all, Europe must learn the lessons from the global economic and financial crisis. Our economies are intrinsically linked. No Member State can address global challenges effectively by acting in isolation. We are stronger when we work together, and a successful exit therefore depends on close economic policy coordination. Failure to do so could result in a “lost decade” of relative decline, permanently damaged growth and structurally high levels of unemployment.

The Europe 2020 Strategy therefore sets out a vision for Europe’s social market economy over the next decade, and rests on three interlocking and mutually reinforcing priority areas: Smart growth, developing an economy based on knowledge and innovation; Sustainable growth, promoting a low-carbon, resource-efficient and competitive economy; and Inclusive growth, fostering a high-employment economy delivering social and territorial cohesion.

Progress towards these objectives will be measured against five representative headline EU-level targets, which Member States will be asked to translate into national targets reflecting starting points:

• 75 % of the population aged 20-64 should be employed.
• 3% of the EU’s GDP should be invested in R&D.
• The “20/20/20″ climate/energy targets should be met.
• The share of early school leavers should be under 10% and at least 40% of the younger generation should have a degree or diploma.
• 20 million less people should be at risk of poverty.

In order to meet the targets, the Commission proposes a Europe 2020 agenda consisting of a series of flagship initiatives. Implementing these initiatives is a shared priority, and action will be required at all levels: EU-level organisations, Member States, local and regional authorities.

• Innovation union – re-focussing R&D and innovation policy on major challenges, while closing the gap between science and market to turn inventions into products. As an example, the Community Patent could save companies 289€ million each year.
• Youth on the move – enhancing the quality and international attractiveness of Europe’s higher education system by promoting student and young professional mobility. As a concrete action, vacancies in all Member States should be more accessible through out Europe and professional qualifications and experience properly recognised.
• A digital agenda for Europe – delivering sustainable economic and social benefits from a Digital Single Market based on ultra fast internet. All Europeans should have access to high speed internet by 2013.
• Resource-efficient Europe – supporting the shift towards a resource efficient and low-carbon economy. Europe should stick to its 2020 targets in terms of energy production, efficiency and consumption. This would result in €60 billion less in oil and gas imports by 2020.
• An industrial policy for green growth – helping the EU’s industrial base to be competitive in the post-crisis world, promoting entrepreneurship and developing new skills. This would create millions of new jobs ;
• An agenda for new skills and jobs – creating the conditions for modernising labour markets, with a view to raising employment levels and ensuring the sustainability of our social models, while baby-boomers retire ; and
• European platform against poverty – ensuring economic, social and territorial cohesion by helping the poor and socially excluded and enabling them to play an active part in society.

The ambition of Europe 2020 means that leadership and accountability must be taken to a new level. The Commission invites Heads of State and Government to take ownership for this new Strategy and endorse it at the Spring European Council. The role of the European Parliament will also be enhanced.

The governance methods will be reinforced to ensure that commitments are translated into effective action on the ground. The Commission will monitor progress. Reporting and evaluation under both Europe 2020 and the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) will be carried out simultaneously (while remaining distinct instruments) to improve coherence. This will allow both strategies to pursue similar reform objectives while remaining as separate instruments.

[Via http://reportingtheworldover.wordpress.com]

The Conventional Wisdom, or Lack Thereof

“The conventional wisdom” is a phrase that has somewhat ironically taken a turn for the more sincere and genuine, especially given that John Kenneth Galbraith intended for the term to signify the ideas most commonly accepted or acceptable without regard for their truth (and most often, that are accepted in spite of their lacking validity).  Of course, all things being equal, the more support a proposition has in terms of empirical observation, the more likely it is to be correct.  However, our conventional wisdom is often based on common accounts of certain events rather than from direct and empirical observation; our shared source itself may have been subject to some degree of bias or impermanence.  The concept of “mesofacts” demonstrates that it need not have even been an error so much as a lack of continuous inquiry that may result in a disastrously incorrect conventional wisdom.

Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school!

A more significant problem is that people’s political values and positions are rarely derivations of empirical observations, and in this sense, very few things are equal.  Indeed, when it comes to politics, I would re-assert Galbraith’s original thesis, which was that “the conventional wisdom” contains pervasive errors, and the conventional wisdom is potentially dangerous.  For example, conventional wisdom would posit that a country should strive for the highest quality of health care possible.  After all, what’s more important than one’s health, the conventional thinker would ask.  The problem is that the practical implications of such policies are never considered by the conventional thinker who often hold values that are not subject to comparison:

That decrementally cost-effective innovations are so rarely described in the health-care literature suggests that medicine is distinct from most other markets, in which cost-decreasing, quality-reducing products are continuously being introduced—think IKEA, Walmart and the Tata car. Several reasons may explain this “medical exceptionalism.” First, there is fundamentally a lack of incentives both for physicians to control costs, especially under a fee-for-service regime, and for patients to demand less expensive treatment when insurance shields them from the direct costs of care. Second, medical “bargains” frequently come with health risks, and trading health for money strikes some as vulgar, regardless of ratio. The inherent ethical unease that decrementally cost-effective innovations can elicit poses a serious public relations and marketing challenge.

Moreover, the conventional thinker need not consider the process required of adapting his or her political preferences to reality in a representative democracy.  They just have to whine and insist that someone else do it for them.  The problem is that usually, the representatives do the same thing, and the buck gets passed from voter to politician to industry, without any intervening oversight to ensure that the policy goals are actually achieved.  Eliot Spitzer apparently makes that point simply and directly enough for the conventional thinker in his latest book.  To paraphrase, in a cut-and-paste fashion, for the sake of the conventional thinker:

Rule 1. Only government can ensure integrity, transparency, and fair dealing: To protect the market, government had to come in and say something very simple: tell the truth to your customer…There are certain core values—values that we as a society embrace—that the marketplace simply will not address.

Rule 2. In the face of externalities, government must intervene to change the way the market behaves: When companies get too big they underperform because they cannot be managed. Too-big-to-fail is too-big-not-to-fail.

Rule 3. The government needs to intervene on behalf of core values: Regulators don’t need additional power, they just need to use their existing power appropriately. And this will not happen unless different people are in charge…Corporations run the economy and they should. But if we don’t run our corporations properly, then we will not get ourselves out of this pit…Taxpayers have been getting the short end of the stick in everything we’ve been doing. The Treasury Department is not negotiating for us.

It’s just too bad that the conventional thinker is also probably more likely to be distracted by Spitzer’s marital infidelities than his policies if he were to ever consider running for public office again, almost by definition: those are the ideas more easily and universally accepted.  Sigh.

[Via http://newprint.wordpress.com]

Greece must make more cuts, not clear how much: EU

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Greece must tighten its belt further to reach this year's deficit-cutting target, but it is not yet clear by how much, the European Commission said.

Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn on Monday discussed with Greek authorities the need for deficit-cutting measures on top of those already taken by Athens.

No bailout plans were discussed, but "both parties understand … there is a need for additional measures and these should be presented as soon as possible… in order to make sure that the target of 4 percent is reached," Commission spokesman Amadeu Altafaj said Tuesday.

Greece has committed to cutting its budget deficit to 8.7 percent of gross domestic product this year from 12.7 percent in 2009 and to bring the deficit to below the European Union ceiling of 3 percent in 2012.

Altafaj said he "cannot quantify" how far short of the 4 percent target the measures already announced have left Greece.

The size of the gap was still under discussion between Greek and EU experts and "at this point we are waiting for the new measures to be presented."

The ambitious austerity program hopes to calm debt markets that have been demanding increasingly high premiums for lending money to Greece amid concerns that Athens might at some point not be able to service its debt, which stands at more than 120 percent of GDP payday loan no faxing.

Market concerns persuaded euro zone countries to issue a statement on February 11 declaring that, if the need arose, they would move to safeguard the financial stability of the 16-country euro zone.

But they gave no details of a potential rescue plan and instead put more pressure on Athens to deliver on its austerity plan.

Monday's discussions with Rehn "were about efforts to correct the fiscal situation in Greece. We did not enter (or) elaborate on scenarios of bailouts and things like that," Altafaj said.

The Commission was pleased to see the Greek government was determined to do what was necessary to reach the 4 percent target, he added.

(Reporting by Jan Strupczewski, editing by Dale Hudson)

Greece must make more cuts, not clear how much: EU

Hot News: Off the Charts: Banks Out of the Woods? Maybe Not

[Via http://djonbri.wordpress.com]

McDonnell saves $80,000 on transition

Sure, the number is far too small to be anything but a symbol, but symbols matter, and this one shows an Administration that is very serious about our predicament (Richmond Times-Dispatch via Weekly Standard):

The grungy office space, used supplies and limited freshening of the official gubernatorial quarters paid off.

Gov. Bob McDonnell’s transition team has saved at least double its $40,000 goal during the switch from campaigning to governing.

Early estimates indicate McDonnell conserved about $80,000 of a $353,600 transition budget.

That’s a savings of over 20%, by the way.  Attorney General Cuccinelli save $40,000 himself, as did Lieutenant-Governor Bolling (although that was largely due to the fact that the would-be transition office wound down quickly due to his re-election).

Here’s how important the symbolism can be: when yours truly began the transition from Jersey-born Yankee to, um, regional refugee (yeah, that works), it was just after Doug Wilder had taken office.  I heard complaints about Wilder’s transition and inauguration spending for months afterward, even as he heroically stared down his own party on spending and refused to raise taxes.

By contrast, McDonnell has shown voters he’s serious about cutting spending, including his own when necessary.  That will go a long way to winnning support for getting us through this budget cycles without a tax increase.

Cross-posted to RWL

[Via http://virginiavirtucon.wordpress.com]

Why expiration dates probably aren't good for business

Noah asks a provocative question: What if business came with expiration dates?

Nobody wins forever. It just doesn’t happen.

What we see in reality are millions of corpses of businesses and ideas that have made their impact (or not) and then petered out into oblivion without leaving much more than a memory. Some of them get bought and swallowed by a bigger company, others have their ideas copied and commodotized and many just don’t have the business or financial chops to make it all work for more than a few years.

So what if instead of worrying about all that you just decided at the beginning you were going to end it all six years in?

I love questions like this, and Noah is great at asking them.  He suggests that such an arrangement may solve the problems that arise when management sacrifices the long-term interests of the company for the short-term, making decisions that optimize their current job security but may create problems for the firm down the road:

Company management doesn’t know how long the company will last, so they optimize for the now (they also don’t know how long their jobs will last, but I’ll get to that in a minute). It may be overly hopeful, but as long as one choose a reasonable time-frame (5-10 years) I wonder if you couldn’t lift the decision-making out of the immediate.

It is an interesting idea, but I think that what Noah is mostly interested in here is a shift in how employment is structured (i.e. knowing up front when one’s job will terminate), rather than how businesses as a whole are set up.   (If the business will shutter its doors in 10 years what precisely are the long-term interests of the firm?)  Additionally, he focuses more on the employment issue towards the end of the post.  In either case, I think that on the whole the uncertainty that exists in terms of business and employment termination is superior to expiration dates.  Here’s why: If businesses were set up at the outset with a planned time frame at the end of which the business would wind down it would likely play havoc with their ability to compete in the marketplace. Additionally, the beneficial economic conditions that obtain through competition would be warped. Why? Because businesses would not have to operate in the shadow of the future.

The shadow of the future is a concept that comes from game theory and relates to how actors’ incentives and behaviors change depending on whether they are playing a game that ends after only one round or if it will go on indefinitely.  In a single-round prisoner’s dilemma, each actor knows that they will not have to interact with the other after they make their decision to either stay quite or rat their partner out.  Since they’ll never interact again, their preferred choice will be to rat the other out in the hopes that they receive a mild sentence or get to go free.  In an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, the same choices will obtain unless the players are unaware of when the game will end.  The fancy term for this is backwards induction, but basically the idea is that if players know when the game will end it will create the same incentives as if the game was only one round.  However, if the game is repeated indefinitely, if players must operate within the shadow of the future, then cooperative behavior is more likely to evolve.

Businesses

In a market, we do not want businesses cooperating too closely.  Partnerships, licensing deals, sure.  But we abhor collusion.  Why?  Because it distorts the very market dynamics that are supposed to give rise to all the benefits of a market economy.  Open competition by individual businesses will lead to better products for lower prices.  Collusion amongst businesses or the formation of monopolies works against this.  And while collusion is to be feared, so to should any development that threatens the existence of competitive pressures on businesses.  If dominant businesses in a market are known ahead of time to be set to expire after, say 6 years other businesses that have not set an expiration date will feel little pressure to improve their product or service.  Why?  Because they realize that in a few years consumers will not have the superior products or services to turn to.  This being the case, the businesses that will survive the expiration of the dominant businesses will have no incentive to bring their performance up to the level of the best businesses.  When businesses are unsure as to the viability of their competitors they must assume continued competition and therefore better manage their firms in order to compete and survive.  Artificial expiration, particular that which is decided up front, would likely decimate the competition mechanism.

Employees

But what about employees?  Would management and other employees make better decisions, decisions geared towards the long-term interests of a firm, if they knew ahead of time when their tenure would come to an end?  This argument has been floating around for some time, particularly with regards to GM’s in professional sports.  While GM’s are given long-term contracts, they can be fired at any time.  Towards the end of their contracts the amount of money due to them decreases and therefore the amount of money the team would have to eat if they fired the GM also decreases.  This can create perverse incentives to create short-term success at the expense of long-term competitiveness.  Think of a baseball team where a GM is on the hot seat.  If they don’t produce a playoff team the following year they will likely be fired.  One option is to empty the farm system in order to trade for older, proven players.  By bringing in proven talent, the GM increases the chances that the team will perform better in the short-term, securing their job and possibly another contract.  But by emptying the farm system the GM risks crippling the team in the long-term.  They will have less low-cost talent to deploy while having taken on large, guaranteed contracts which will reduce the team’s ability to build competitive teams in the future.

So what if management doesn’t have the uncertainly of a new contract hanging over their head?  Would they then shift to making decisions that are in the long-term interests of their companies (this assumes the firm has no expiration date)?  I am not so sure.  Since no new contract is possible, employees in this scenario would likely be motivated by reputation.  Their legacy becomes more important than short-term financial incentives.  But the problem with the long-term is that, well, it’s long-term.  It could be 15-20 years or more down the road.  The farther away we get from decisions the harder it becomes to connect future results with previous policies.  Whether or not the long-term fortunes of the company will be associated with the legacy of a former employee becomes less of a clear-cut issue.  So while expiration dates for management may not increase incentives for selfish short-term behavior, it may not decrease them either.  Incentivizing long-term decision-making requires creating the shadow of the future for employees, even after they’ve left the firm.  Stock options that are valued and redeemed years after management has left is one potential (but not unproblematic) mechanism.

All of this is not to say that the answer to Noah’s question is that it’s a bad idea.  However, I think that, on balance, there must be a prominent role for the shadow of the future in order to prevent the market from being distorted.

[Via http://billpetti.com]