The Poor Will Inherit the Earth - By Uri Dadush and William Shaw A generation ago, developing countries only hit the economic headlines when a Latin American country defaulted or a Saudi minister announced a new oil price target. The Soviet empire still lorded over Eastern Europe; China and India remained largely closed to the world; and conflict, disease, and corrupt regimes kept sub-Saharan Africa's population mired in poverty and economic isolation. But today, developing countries are propelling the world economy. Already, four (China, India, Russia and Brazil) of the seven largest economies are developing countries. Thirty years of 10 percent annual growth has transformed China from a poor, agrarian economy to an industrial giant and the world's second-largest economy. In Juggernaut: How Emerging Markets Are Reshaping Globalization, we predict that, in the next generation, Japan and Germany will fall further behind and the United States will be the only advanced country to rank among the world's seven largest economies Feng Li/Getty Images
Coyle, D.: The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters. The world's leading economies are facing not just one but many crises. The financial meltdown may not be over, climate change threatens major global disruption, economic inequality has reached extremes not seen for a century, and government and business are widely distrusted. At the same time, many people regret the consumerism and social corrosion of modern life. What these crises have in common, Diane Coyle argues, is a reckless disregard for the future--especially in the way the economy is run. How can we achieve the financial growth we need today without sacrificing a decent future for our children, our societies, and our planet? Running the economy for tomorrow as well as today will require a wide range of policy changes. Creating a sustainable economy--having enough to be happy without cheating the future--won't be easy. Reviews: "In The Economics of Enough, Ms. "If widely read, [The Economics of Enough] could be the twenty-first century's basic action manual. More reviews Italian
140 Characters Is Enough For A Lawsuit Tweet now, be sued later? A fashion designer sued Courtney Love over tweets Love posted following a dispute between the two ("You will end up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead," the singer wrote). Demi Moore and Perez Hilton traded lawyers letters after a series of tweets in which Moore accused Perez of flouting child pornography laws in posting and commenting on a picture of her daughter and the blogger said Moore was a bad mother. The BitCoiners Strike Back Even if hypothetical where a "hacker" could create fraudulent Bitcoins, how in the world is that potentially more inflationary than our current fiat system with a "discretionary" monetary policy? It might not be more inflationary than every real or imaginable monetary policy of central banks. But it certainly has the potential to be more inflationary than the fiat money of the United States has proven to be. We have a long history of Federal Reserve notes. There is no similar history for BitCoins. What's more BitCoins exhibit far more volatility than dollars. Sunday's hacking took place on an exchange—a better analogy would be blaming grain growers for a faulty product if there were a problem at the commodity exchange. Actually, the best analogy would be a stock traded on an exchange. Why would you say it isn't a currency? It doesn't behave like a currency. Look, money is mostly useful for exchange purposes. Maybe not. Questions?
Interview with Grzegorz W. Kolodko, author of Truth, Errors, and Lies: Politics and Economics in a Volatile World The following is a Q&A between Grzegorz W. Kolodko, author ofTruth, Errors, and Lies: Politics and Economics in a Volatile Worldand William R. Brand, the book’s translator. William Brand: This is an exceptionally wide-ranging book that looks far into the past and the future, taking a global view, in the geographic and cultural sense, of economic development, where we are today and where we could be heading. Grzegorz W. I like to say that economics and the social sciences ought to be as simple as possible, but no simpler. WB: What can you contribute that others cannot? GWK.: My books and research articles have been published in 25 languages in over 40 countries. WB: This book is titled Truth, Errors, and Lies. GWK.: When you watch TV or read a newspaper and come across someone making an assertion you're sure is untrue, ask yourself: "Are they in error, or deliberately lying?" If they’re mistaken, it’s a pity, especially among professionals. If they're lying, we have a different problem.
Enterprise Resilience Management Blog: Litigating the Past There is an old joke that if you want to be competitive with a country like China all you have to do is send over a 1,000 lawyers and let them go to work -- the cost of China's goods will surely rise. The U.S. certainly has lawyers to spare. A decade ago BusinessWeek reported that Japan had only 16,800 licensed lawyers compared to 900,000 in the U.S. "In suits against Dole Food, Nicaraguan courts awarded $2.2 billion in damages to workers claiming they were made sterile by exposure to the pesticide DBCP on Dole banana farms in the 1970s. Dole may or may not have clean hands in this matter. "Shell denies any wrongdoing. Shell was likely willing to settle because the trial that was to be held in New York was going to accuse the company of "crimes against humanity" according to Mouawad. "The payout could also spark further court battles invoking the same American law, the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, originally intended to counter piracy, under which the Shell case was brought.
Party Politics: How Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality "Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Consider the debates over the economy. Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Of course, American history suggests that as well. But that history has been forgotten. Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government.
Polanyi Was Right About Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand « A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book I’m currently reading through some of Karl Polanyi’s less famous works. I had always thought Polanyi was not a fan of Adam Smith based on his amazing, “Oh, Snap!” worthy comment in The Great Transformation. Polanyi argues that Smith was wrong about the nautralness of the motivation to “truck, barter, and exchange” and that for most of human history, trucking, bartering and exchanging are nowhere to be found. In “The Place of Economies in Societies”, Polanyi shows a bit more love to Smith. Polanyi’s reading of Smith is equally helpful. Reference to the ‘hidden hand,’ which made the self-interest of the butcher and the baker ‘serve me with a meal,’ have been exaggerated out of all proportion. Given Gavin Kennedy’s recent work on the history of the invisible hand metaphor, and my own reading of the passage, I couldn’t agree more with Polanyi. But to reiterate the overall point of this post: Polanyi was right about Smith, and far less negative than I had originally thought.