Fareed Zakaria: Are America's Best Days Behind Us? - "We have an Electoral College that no one understands and a Senate that doesn't work, with rules and traditions that allow a single Senator to obstruct democracy without even explaining why. We have a crazy-quilt patchwork of towns, municipalities and states with overlapping authority, bureaucracies and resulting waste. We have a political system geared toward ceaseless fundraising and pandering to the interests of the present with no ability to plan, invest or build for the future. And if one mentions any of this, why, one is being unpatriotic, because we have the perfect system of government, handed down to us by demigods who walked the earth in the late 18th century and who serve as models for us today and forever. America's founders would have been profoundly annoyed by this kind of unreflective ancestor worship." [
for/
against]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 17, 2011 -
93 comments
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the Aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he's trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to establish foreign-run "charter cities" within their borders. Romer's idea is unconventional, even neo-colonial—the best analogy is Britain's historic lease of Hong Kong. And against all odds, he just might make it happen. (via
cc)
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Jun 10, 2010 -
92 comments
The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital [
pdf] - "For now, we think that progress is likely to be most rapid if we follow the example of the neoclassical model and
treat institutions the way the neoclassical model treated technology... Further out on the horizon, one may hope for a successful conclusion to the ongoing hunt for
a simple model [
1] of
institutional evolution. Combining that with the unified approach to growth outlined here would surely constitute
the economics equivalent of a grand unified theory..." [
2,
viz.
previously] This
might, as it were, be a subset of
collective cognition (or, possibly,
autism [
3]).
posted by kliuless
on Jul 14, 2009 -
9 comments
