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
A Glimpse of the World All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built, ports deepened,
commercial contracts signed -- all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose
appetite for commodities seems
insatiable. Do China's grand designs promise the transformation, at last, of a star-crossed continent? Or merely its exploitation?
The author travels deep into the heart of Africa, searching for answers.
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 26, 2010 -
20 comments
One Night in Afghanistan THE PRESIDENT: at a time when too many American institutions have let us down, when too many institutions have put short-term gain in front of a commitment to duty and a commitment to what's right... all of you want to build -- and that is something essential about America. [Al Qaeda and the violent extremists have] got no respect for human life. You see dignity in every human being. That's part of what we value as Americans. They want to drive races and regions and religions apart. You want to
bring people together and see the world move forward together.
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 4, 2010 -
36 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
Innovation, Ideas and the Global Standard of Living by Charles Kenny: "
The Success of Development acts like a sword through many of the Gordian knots plaguing the development community, especially those surrounding the rate of economic growth in many developing countries. Put that question to one side, says Kenny, and suddenly a lot of much more interesting questions, about issues like education and healthcare and clean water and human rights, come into a lot more focus. And if you use those metrics,
rather than GDP growth, to judge the success or failure of developing countries, then things look rather more optimistic than you might think." (
pdf)
Glenn Hubbard's review, cf.
Technological Creativity and Economic Progress [more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Jun 25, 2009 -
2 comments
Prelude to Federation - Like a neocolonial
SEZ (or
TAZ)
Paul Romer,
not to be confused with
David,
posits "less developed countries contract with capitalist nations to set up Hong Kong's for them... that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe import administrative control); rethink citizenship (support residency, but maybe import voice in political affairs); and rethink scale (instead of focusing on nations, focus on cities—on city states like Hong Kong and Singapore)." cf.
neocameralism [
1,
2,
3]
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on May 21, 2009 -
16 comments
In defense of
suburbs: "Revolutionary Road," based on Richard Yates's 1961 novel of the same name, is the latest entry in a long stream of art that portrays the American suburbs as the physical correlative to spiritual and mental death.
posted by kliuless
on Dec 29, 2008 -
172 comments
Women's rights: What's in it for men? - "Women in rich countries largely enjoy gender equality while those in poor countries suffer substantial discrimination. This column proposes an explanation for the relationship between economic development and female empowerment that emphasises changes in the incentives males face rather than shifts in moral sentiment. Technological change that raises demand for human capital may give men a stake in women's rights."
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Jun 29, 2008 -
29 comments
Clean water is a right: "The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published its annual
report on human development. It denounces the world's complacent disregard for such unglamorous subjects as standpipes, latrines and the 1.8m children who die each year from diarrhoea because the authorities cannot keep their drinking water separate from their faeces.
The study is both coldly analytical and angry..."
posted by kliuless
on Nov 24, 2006 -
18 comments
