The Golden Compass - a very short review

Bloodless bear fights? Lord Asriel unambiguously good? Godless villains? The ideas and the busy plot of Northern Lights were always going to be hard to condense into a movie. But the trouble with the Golden Compass is that tries to take on the additional challenge of being a kids movie suitable for US box office success. You can't think too much. You can't offend the Christians. You mustn't traumatise the kids. In the end the additional burdens are too much.

Heck, it was still a fantasy movie based on a magic book. I enjoyed it - I could hardly not have. But I was hoping for a whole heap more.

Bank Run!

At LRB John Lancaster has a very good run down of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the Northern Rock debacle and the trouble with derivatives. The prognosis? no one knows yet. Things may be ok; they may also end up very messy.

How messy? Will Hutton advises us that at least one central banker intends to spend his Christmas holiday reading The Great Crash.



Central Bankers haven't just been reading either: plans are already being enacted to - hopefully - stave off a credit crunch and cascading collapses. The scary thing is that there is no guarantee that they will work.

At a slightly more abstract level, the thought of governments riding to the rescue has Matt of TVHE worrying about moral hazard: if state institutions keep bailing out investors when they get it wrong, won't this simply encourage more risky behaviour in the future?

Personally, I'm worried about a different moral issue: fairness. When things go right financial institutions profit handsomely. When they go wrong tax payers foot the bill. Profit is privatised, risk is socialised. It's a great example of markets and the state colluding to keep the wealthy wealthy.

And yet, if central banks don't intervene the ensuing collapse will hurt the poor more then the prosperous, the innocent as much as the guilty. All those people who had their life savings in Northern Rock did nothing wrong. Do we really want to punish them?

The dilemma is a real but it also has a potential solution: regulate financial markets much more aggressively in the first place. If you we did this, then we might find ourselves juggling unpleasant options on the edge of cliffs slightly less often.

Liberation?

Liberation offers a different sort of socialist take on NZ politics.

For example, Bryce Edwards, it's author, argues against the electoral finance bill and against the state funding of political parties. He musters a lot of evidence - some of it intriguing but, to be honest, his key arguments don't make much sense to me.

Edwards is opposed to state funding of political parties, in part, because - in his opinion - it divorces parties from their grass routes membership leaving us with a professionalised political class. As evidence for this he notes that active party membership for many New Zealand political parties has declined in recent years. The trouble with this argument is that he doesn't - as far as I can see (and I haven't read everything he has written) - provide much evidence other than hearsay that one has lead to the other. There is certainly not enough evidence to convince me that the decline in political party membership is not just a reflection in the general decline in traditional associational life occurring in developed nations. And if this is the case, then state funding has filled an important vacuum - which otherwise might have been filled by business money.

Edwards also argues that money doesn't buy elections, citing amongst other examples the case of ACT who have spent a lot only to see this not reflected in electoral results. This is enough to convince me that money certainly isn't the sole factor in determining outcomes. But it's not enough to convince me that it isn't a factor. What we really need to know is how ACT would have done in those same years with funding levels similar to the Greens - rather less well I suspect.

Edwards also points out that plenty of business money goes to Labour as well. This is a good point to make. But - to me at least - this just strengthens the for regulation on private donations. If both parties are reliant on business donations is this cause for complacency?

There is some other interesting stuff in there but, overall, Edwards just doesn't convince me that we need regulations and the like to ensure a transparent democratic process.

Precisely

Tax cuts? No Right Turn says it all.

Can't Think of a Name for this Post

Under my very brief definition of idealists, Tim, offers a not quite so brief but very interesting series of points on idealism among politicians:

The discussion was in a slightly different context to you: we were thinking not about what defines an idealist, but about how a politician who was also an idealist would act. The motivation was Australian politics, and whether Rudd's perfect 'positioning' in order to win the election would be dumped after winning power. 'Positioning' purely in order to maximise your vote (which seemed like Rudd's strategy) seemed to us to be almost the precise opposite of idealism, and we were curious as to whether Rudd would in fact dump those carefully positioned policies in favour of more ideal-driven (or maybe ideological) ones.

As far as I know, political science contrasts idealists with 'realists', but I'm not sure I ever understood that label properly. It seemed to us that the guy at the other end of the spectrum - the purely vote-maximising politician - could instead be labelled a 'cynic', and that the two types of politicians inhabiting either end of the spectrum were defined as follows:

I’ll just butt-in here to note that a better term than cynic is probably demagogue.

An 'idealist' politician begins their choice about what policy stance to take with an existing set of ideals, or moral rules. The idealist's policy stance is then determined by their interpretation of which policies they think best satisfy those ideals, given the nature of the world (the facts, the science, the ways people respond to incentives, etc etc).

A 'cynic' politician begins their choice about what policy stance to take with the sole 'ideal' of maximising their own chance of re-election / their own consolidation of power / their own benefit. The cynic's choice of policy is determined by their interpretation of what the majority of voters (or the 'median voter') will vote for or accept.

So both types 'derive' a policy stance, but from fundamentally different goals: ideals vs self-interest. Anyone else on the spectrum can be characterised by the relative weight given to 'broad ideals' (the sole goal of an idealist) versus 'the self interested ideal' (the sole goal of a cynic).

My friend pointed out that (as a stylised fact) the policy stance which wins elections is that which attracts the vote of the 'median voter'. Consequently, by a natural selection process, idealists will be weeded out unless the policies they derive happen to sit close to the median. The remaining politicians will differ only in their interpretation of where the median voter lies (and thus what the 'self-interest maximising' policy stance is).

However, you would only subscribe to this argument if you believed that politicians (idealists and cynics) were able to have NO effect on what the voting population, and thus the median voter, wants. Idealists might survive if they could convince the median voter to support a policy stance which is close to that which is 'derived' by the idealist from his set of ideals. We both agreed that there is plenty of evidence of politicians (unfortunately mostly of the cynic type) influencing the median / swinging voter.

If that all sounds a bit obvious and boring, it's because we think in spectra, graphs, and optimisation problems, which are all useful for making trivial stuff look complex.

I am afraid I must strenuously disagree: this is neither obvious nor boring.

Indeed it set me thinking. And reminded me of two things that I’ve wanted to blog for a while.

First, “you would only subscribe to this argument if you believed that politicians (idealists and cynics) were able to have NO effect on what the voting population, and thus the median voter, wants.”The sad thing is that too often it seems that centre left politicians do lack precisely this confidence. As a despairing Dick Morris once wrote of Bill Clinton: "He misses something elementary about leadership . . . You [Clinton] don't always have to tack to the polls. Our extraordinary eloquence and capacity to mould opinion can change how polls read and where the wind blows."

I’d be lying if I said that, while I respect the limits political realities place on short-term progressive change, I don’t feel the exact same way about the Labour party at present. Just occasionally (the teenage Sri Lankan asylum seeker being a good example; seabed and foreshore being another) it would be nice if they actually took a stand rather than withering in front of perceived public opinion.

Second, on the subject of positioning on the political spectrum, Tim’s point reminds me of a formulation that I came up with for trying to evaluate differing degrees of radicalism on the left.

I figured that you could plot any one person’s apparent position on the centre => left spectrum by adding the following vectors.

1. Their vision of utopia – what a just world would look like under ideal conditions.
2. Their vision of a humanly possible utopia – something that might be achievable in the long run taking into account the many fallibilities of humanity.
3. Their vision of what can plausibly be achieved in the short term.
4. What they view their role in achieving this.

I’m not sure that point 1 matters so much other than in the broadest sense. But 2,3 and 4 are critical.

Let’s use Rudd to illustrate this.

Under 2, I suspect that his vision of a humanly possible utopia is some kind of social democratic state, with the market and the state interacting to ensure that we live in an environmentally sustainable world where people are free to choose how to live their lives within reason while also being afforded thorough social insurance.

Under 3, I imagine that, in the short run – given factors such as the right wing tilt of much of Australian media, the ability of economic elites to resist radical reforms and Labor’s need for wealthy donors – Rudd’s vision probably starts to move considerably to the centre.

Under 4, because he has chosen to be a politician (rather than a lobbyist or an academic say) he moves further to the centre still – eager to reduce the number of points which the opposition can target him on.

I think that the fact that Rudd has, in the safest earliest days of his term in power, taken some vaguely bold liberal steps not all of which did he broadcast in advance of his election, shows the gap between 3 and 4.

Tim’s post also makes me think that I need to add a point 5 to my list: How genuine the person in question is. Some people do cynically crave power as an ends of its own rather than as a means to a more noble ends. How genuine a person really is also going to affect the stance they take.

Finally, I ought to note that there will be feedback between the points if level 3 causes you to say something long enough you may end up believing it at level 2 as well.

Ok – that was all a bit much for Sunday afternoon really.

For some light relief we have a Howard v Rudd rap battle. (Hat Tip: The Standard)

Keynes Says...

...of Hayek's Prices and Production:

It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.

Sigh, smart people have all the best insults.

Hearts of Darkness (2)

Matt Taibbi writes:

In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O'Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O'Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron's moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan's community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was … an anti-smoking campaign.

It gets much, much worse. Read the whole thing.

Having read it, it's very hard to disagree with Taibbi on the following point:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government.

Talk About Co-Dependency

Meanwhile, in the darkest depths of the ocean:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil. It's a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish—seemingly all fangs and gape—with a "fishing rod" affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea—until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a male black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate's blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.

George Bush = Very, Very Bad Man (Issue number - oh I've stopped counting)

Anthony Lewis:

As governor of Texas he [Bush] indicated that judicial niceties were not at the top of his concerns. A study by the Chicago Tribune, published in June 2000, showed that he had refused clemency in all 131 death cases that had reached him. (Alberto Gonzales was legal counsel to Governor Bush and provided memoranda on clemency petitions.) Bush explained that the defendants had had "full access to a fair trial." In a third of those cases the lawyer who represented the defendant at trial or on appeal had been or was later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned.

It Became Known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy

David Farrar in 2005:

Michael Crighton’s novel - State of Fear. This was a huge disappointment. He uses the novel to attack the credibility of the extreme environmental movement. Now I have no problems with that - they need to be attacked. But he overdid it by turning the novel into a lecture on the myths of global warming etc. For people like me who are already sceptics, it was way way overdone. Every second conversation of the characters was one person stating a well known ‘fact’ and then the hero demolishing it. Would have been okay once or twice, but in the end it destroyed the flow of the novel.

David Farrar in 2007:

National has just done a press release highlighting the hypocrisy of David Parker preaching overseas about the need to end global deforestation, when their own policies in NZ have led to deforestation...Deforestation contributes to global warming, so goes totally against the rhetoric of carbon neutrality.

[Emphasis Mine]

Now, I'm not the cynical type so I'm just sure that Dave's change in opinion on global warming must be more than opportunistic tacking with the wind shifts of the National Party. But seeing as I can't find any clear mea culpa's on Kiwiblog I'm left guessing as to what it might have been that sparked his epiphany. The latest IPCC report perhaps????

[missing text]

Neither Washington nor Tehran

Good commentary by Peter Tatchel.

The Iron Law of the Bagpipes...

...states that: the closer you get to the damn things the worse they will sound. From the other side of a drizzle-shrouded glen, bagpipes can, I imagine, sound something akin to beautiful (hmmm - you might want to make that two glens just to be safe). On the other hand, when they are being broadcast from close range (say the street outside your office) it is not possible for them to sound anything but like some form of war crime involving a chainsaw and a cat. Dear god, please make that busker stop...

What's the Matter With Markets

Via Mike Huben's ever useful Critiques of Libertarianism Website I stumbled across this post by Mark Thorma which does a great job of explaining the limitations of markets - particularly unregulated ones.

In order for markets to work their magic, there can be no externalities, no public goods, no false market signals, no moral hazard, no principle agent problems, and, importantly, property rights must be well-defined (and I probably missed a few). In general, the incentives that the market provides must be consistent with perfect competition, or nearly so in practical applications. When the incentives present in the marketplace are inconsistent with a competitive outcome, there is no reason to expect the private sector to be efficient.

...

There is nothing special about markets that guarantees that managers or owners of companies will have an incentive to use public funds in a way that maximizes the public rather than their own personal interests. It is only when market incentives direct choices to coincide with the public interest that the two sets of interests are aligned.

...

There is nothing inherent in markets that guarantees a desirable outcome. A market can be a monopoly, a market can be perfectly competitive, a market can be lots of things. Markets with bad incentives produce bad outcomes, markets with good incentives do better.

I believe in markets as much as anyone. But the expression free markets is often misinterpreted to mean that unregulated markets are all that is required for markets to work their wonders and achieve efficient outcomes. But unregulated is not enough, there are many, many other conditions that must be present. Deregulation or privatization may even move the outcome further from the ideal competitive benchmark rather than closer to it, it depends upon the characteristics of the market in question.

It's a good summary - read the whole thing - but I also think it misses the number one argument against laissez faire. This is simply that markets do not guarantee provision. Under a pure market based system the only guarantee of obtaining a certain good is to have the resources to purchase it. This is fine with hamburgers (in New Zealand at present), for example, because (a) they are generally affordable and (b) it's not the end of the world if you can't purchase them. This is not the case with health care on the other hand - treatment is costly and absence of treatment can be, well, deadly. Nor is it the case, in many developing countries (and even New Zealand in a recession), with regards to basic nutritional requirements. Under markets alone - there's no guarantee you can afford to eat and, if you can't, you're dead.

If this strikes you as a bad thing then you are going to want to live under a system governed by more than markets alone.

Capitalism, Society, Democracy

Tony Judt:

The market requires norms, habits, and "sentiments" external to itself to hold it together, to ensure the very political stability that capitalism needs in order to thrive. But it also tends to corrode those same practices and sentiments. This much has long been clear.^[10] The benign "invisible hand"—the unregulated free market—may have been a favorable inaugural condition for commercial societies. But it cannot reproduce the noncommercial institutions and relations—of cohesion, trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality, authority—that it inherited and which the pursuit of individual economic self-interest tends to undermine rather than reinforce.^[11] For similar reasons, the relationship between capitalism and democracy (or capitalism and political freedom) should not be taken for granted: see China, Russia, and perhaps even Singapore today. Efficiency, growth, and profit may not always be a precondition or even a consequence of democracy so much as a substitute for it.

If modern democracies are to survive the shock of Reich's "supercapitalism," they need to be bound by something more than the pursuit of private economic advantage, particularly when the latter accrues to ever fewer beneficiaries: the idea of a society held together by pecuniary interests alone is, in Mill's words, "essentially repulsive." A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose. "The greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose in the lives of men and women."^[12]

The Scorecard on Development: 25 Years of Diminished Progress

A while ago I wrote of Johann Norgberg's pro-globalisation ululating:
______________________________________________________________

[Norberg writes:]

...During the last 30 years, chronic hunger and the extent of child labour in the developing countries have been cut in half. In the last half century, life expectancy has gone up from 46 to 64 years and infant mortality has been reduced from 18 to 8 per cent. These indicators are much better in the developing world today than they were in the richest countries a hundred years ago.

In a generation, the average income in developing countries has doubled. As the United Nations Development Programme has observed, in the last 50 years global poverty has declined more than in the 500 years before that.

The trouble with these numbers is that, with the arguable exception of of the figure of hunger and child labour (based over the past thirty years), he is talking about data from a period of time (past 50 years, half century, generation) that includes not only the current 'era of globalisation' (which started in the mid 1980s) but also the post WW2 years, which were characterised by the Bretton Woods exchange system, considerably less trade integration than prior to the great depression or at present, and state led development policies. And it was these post WW2 years which in many developing countries saw the most rapid improvements in wellbeing.

Norberg's welcome to argue the case for more rapid global integration but it would be nice if he didn't muster as evidence statistics that are due in part, at least, to progress made in a period of time when a completely different approach to development and trade was being followed.

_________________________________________________________________

This paper by Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker and David Rosnick is a good illustration of exactly what is wrong with Norberg's argument:

Over the past 25 years, a number of economic reforms have taken place in low and middle-income countries. These reforms, as a group, have been given various labels: ‘liberalization’, ‘globalization’ or ‘free-market’2 are among the most common descriptions. Among the reforms widely implemented have been the reduction of restrictions on international trade and capital fl ows, large-scale privatizations of state-owned enterprises, tighter fiscal and monetary policies (higher interest rates), labour market reforms, and increasing accumulation of foreign reserve holdings. Many of these reforms have been implemented with the active support of multilateral lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as well as the G-7 governments, and have often been required in order for countries to have access to credit from these and other sources. But regardless of origin, labels or political perspectives, there is a general consensus that the majority of developing countries have benefi ted economically from the reforms, even if they have sometimes been accompanied by increasing inequality or other unintended consequences (De Rato, 2005).

This paper looks at the available data on economic growth and various social indicators—including health outcomes and education—and fi nds that, contrary to popular belief, the past 25 years have seen sharply slower rates of economic growth and reduced progress on social indicators for the vast majority of low and middle-income countries.

Oh No...

This is not good. Not good at all.

All I can do is hope that the armoured polar bears make up for it...

Saturday Afternoon Darth Vader Funnies 2

Daniel Davies:

From D-squared Digest:

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else: It is a strange fact about organisations that although we can put men on the moon and grow human ears on the backs of mice, there is no force on earth that can stop people from double-booking rooms. One of the most unrealistic things about Star Wars is that Darth Vader never swept into a conference room ready to do something dramatic and evil, only to find a bunch of IT people with sandwiches having their monthly planning meeting...

Saturday Afternoon Darth Vader Funnies

Episode 1, Paul Krugman:

Back when Hillary Clinton described Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, a number of people pointed out that this was an unfair comparison. For example, Darth Vader once served in the military.

Here’s another reason the comparison is invalid: the contractors Darth Vader hired to build the Death Star actually got the job done.

A

State Department project manager banished from Iraq by the U.S. ambassador and under scrutiny by the Justice Department continues to oversee the construction of the much-delayed new American embassy in Baghdad from nearby Kuwait, State Department officials disclosed Thursday.

James L. Golden, a contract employee, is still managing the $740 million project, said Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, the department’s top management official.

“Mr. Golden is still . . . our project manager, and still is working with the contractor, at their base in Kuwait,” Kennedy said.

One State Department official with detailed knowledge of the unopened embassy expressed outrage that his superiors haven’t replaced Golden.

Clinton V Obama V Edwards

Ah yes, the Democratic primaries. In terms of policy, Edwards is my preferred candidate. Between Clinton and Obama, I'm not so sure. Obama is way, way, way better on foreign policy but his domestic policy positions - at least with regards to health care and social security - are not to great.

However, I have to confess, with the Republican candidate likely to be a religious fundamentalist or Rudy 'no really, I am more crazy than Bush on foreign policy' Giuliani, policy isn't the only thing influencing my choice. I want a Democrat who can win. Sure they won't be great once they get in, but at least they won't be actively coaxing our planet towards Armageddon.

I suspect that's what most Democrat voters want too. Which explains, perhaps, why they are currently looking most likely to select Hilary 'safe pair of hands' Clinton.

The crazy thing about this is that is - if polling is to be believed - she is actually much less likely to win:

While Clinton maintains her lead in national polling among Democrats, in direct matchups against Republican presidential candidates, she consistently runs behind both Barack Obama and John Edwards. In the recent national Zogby Poll (Nov. 26, 2007), every major Republican presidential candidate beats Clinton: McCain beats her 42 percent to 38 percent; Giuliani beats her 43 percent to 40 percent; Romney beats her 43 percent to 40 percent; Huckabee beats her 44 percent to 39 percent; and Thompson beats her 44 percent to 40 percent, despite the fact Thompson barely appears to be awake most of the time.

By contrast, Obama beats every major Republican candidate: He beats McCain 45 percent to 38 percent; Guiliani 46 percent to 41 percent; Romney 46 percent to 40 percent; Huckabee 46 percent to 40 percent; and, Thompson 47 percent to 40 percent. In other words, Obama consistently runs 8 to 11 percent stronger than Clinton when matched against Republicans. To state the obvious: The Democratic presidential candidate will have to run against a Republican.

Clinton's inherent weakness as a candidate shows up in other ways. In direct matchups for congressional seats, Democrats currently are running 10 percent to 15 percent ahead of Republicans, depending on the poll, while Clinton runs 3 percent to 7 percent behind -- a net deficit ranging from 13 to 22 percent. No candidate in presidential polling history ever has run so far behind his or her party.

To look at Clinton's candidacy another way, Clinton runs well behind generic polling for the presidency: In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted Nov. 1-5, 2007, voters were asked, "Putting aside for a moment the question of who each party's nominee might be, what is your preference for the outcome of the 2008 presidential election -- that a Democrat be elected president or that a Republican be elected president?" By 50 percent to 35 percent, voters chose "Democrat" -- a 15-point edge. Thus, Clinton is running 10 to 15 percent, or more, behind the generic Democratic candidate. This is not a promising metric nor the numbers of a strong candidate.

...

To be fair, it should be noted that not all polls find Clinton on the short end of polling disparities, and some have found her polling at parity, or sometimes even slightly ahead, of Republicans (generally, within the margin of polling error). But this should not obscure the main point: By every measure, Clinton's support runs well behind congressional Democrats, well behind generic Democrats and, generally, behind her Democratic presidential rivals in matchups with Republicans.

Message to Democrats: last election you chose safe, electable, foreign policy conservative John Kerry over a man who had a bit - and had a chance of eliciting a bit - of fire. Kerry was crap. He lost. Are you sure you want to repeat the same mistake?

From Liberation to Occupation. From Deceit to Death

Read this. Read this. Read this.

The picture they [the reviewed books] present is not always bleak. They describe many affecting scenes in which soldiers try to do good, administering first aid, handing out food, arranging for garbage to be picked up. For the most part, the GIs come across as well-meaning Americans who have been set down in an alien environment with inappropriate training, minimal cultural preparation, and no language skills. Surrounded by people who for the most part wish them ill and living with the daily fear of being blown up, they frequently take out their frustrations on the local population. It's in these firsthand accounts that one can find the most searing descriptions of the toll the war has taken on both US troops and the Iraqi people.

Wanna know how to create an Iraq worse than that governed by Saddam? Here's how: Launch a 'liberation' while not giving a shit about the people you are liberating. Plan poorly. Send in troops - fallible human beings who you have trained to kill dispassionately. Ask them to deal with all the complexities of occupation. Fail to support them...

A Bookmark

A critique of William Easterly's White Man's Burden.

(I've referred to it before but if you're interested, Amartya Sen's review is good too).

P.S Matt and Tim - I owe you both posts/replies. I'll write these over the weekend, I hope).

Subsidies: saving lives in Malawi (no thanks to the World Bank)

From the New York Times:

LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors.

...

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

...

The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.

“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, the government reported.

“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”

“The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers wanted,” he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi’s 2007 bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year’s increase in corn production.

The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy “has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught.”

Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi’s southern and central regions said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi’s staff of life.

In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose husband died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two ox-cart-loads of corn this year from her small plot instead of half a cart.

Last year, roughly half the country’s farming families received coupons that entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer, enough to nourish an acre of land, for around $15 — about a third the market price. The government also gave them coupons for enough seed to plant less than half an acre.

Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That season, an already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough fertilizer and seed to plant a meager quarter acre of land had been reduced again. Regional flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn prices surged. And under the government then in power, the country’s entire grain reserve was sold as a result of mismanagement and corruption.

Mrs. Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His strength ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was one of many who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local Agriculture Ministry official. He recalled mothers and children begging for food at his door.

“I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and every one,” he said. “It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed.”

But Mr. Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the subsidies, which he said had more than doubled corn production in his jurisdiction since 2005.

“It’s quite marvelous!” he exclaimed.

...

Emphasis above is mine.

Speaking of Coyotes

On the subject of Wile E. Coyote, Paul Krugman must surely win the award for best economics metaphor for this effort at explaining why and when crashes occur:

So, according to the story, one of these days there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment for the dollar: the moment when the cartoon character, who has run off a cliff, looks down and realizes that he’s standing on thin air – and plunges. In this case, investors suddenly realize that Stein’s Law applies — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” – and they realize they need to get out of dollars, causing the currency to plunge.

My very own, very succinct...

...definition of an idealist:

Someone who believes that processes that appeal to a sense of justice (or possibly morality) will also lead to better outcomes in a consequentialist sense.

Arrrrharrrrhooouuueeeeeee.............

Some years ago I traveled to Greenland. Whilst there I ate a seal. I can't say I enjoyed it. Nor, I imagine, did the seal. But I did write a story about it. And, last year, that story won a contest. The prize: being sent on commission to write a story for AA Directions travel magazine.

The moment I heard this I started thinking big. Perhaps I could write about a road trip to the Wairarapa. Or the nascent restaurant culture in Waikanae. The magazine, however, was thinking bigger still. "Please," they asked, "go and investigate the Nelson Backpacking Scene".

No doubt they thought that any man who had been to Greenland would be a backpacker par excellence. This was true - once. Now it isn't. My backpack and I fell out a few years ago and haven't spoken since. But, the occasion - my first ever commission - was big. Bigger than the past. Bigger than our differences. So we negotiated a temporary reconciliation and accepted the commission.

That was when I saw the itinerary. A trip to Farewell spit. Kayaking in the Abel Tasman. The World of Wearable arts museum. Sky Diving. Sky Diving.

Which was a bit much. Even for my backpack.

Still it was my first commission. I couldn't say no. All I could do was hope the weather did that on the day.

It didn't. And so, in late October, I found myself spiraling up into the sky in a Cessna with a dangerously open door. 13,000ft up into the sky. Heading for a date with gravity.

Gravity which, when it came, did so with a rush. And a roar.

And fragmented thoughts, flying past me like small confused clouds.

Fuck.


I am

actually

falling.


Fuck.


Is there

an afterlife.


Will the seal be waiting for me there?


The answer to that last question was silence. Silence as clear as the air at altitude.

Silence because the parachute opened.

And all of a sudden dear reader I found myself suspended in a place that shouldn't be. But is. And is rather beautiful thank you very much.

Not so beautiful, mind you, that I'll be racing up there again any time soon. But not bad.

Funnily enough, the only sleepless night eventuating from the whole affair was the night after the jump, where recalling the truly disturbing feeling of pitching forward out of the plane and into nothing kept my heart and head racing late into the night.