Economic Growth – Page 18 – artdiamondblog.com

Fragile Governments Cling to Failed Foreign Aid

Source of book image: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-VL312_bkrvta_DV_20121122124330.jpg

(p. C12) Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Antifragile” argues that some people, organizations and systems are resilient in the face of stress because they are able to alter themselves by adapting and learning. The converse is fragility, embodied in entities that are immovable even when faced with shocks or adversity. To my mind, an obvious example is how numerous governments and international agencies have clung to foreign aid as a tool to combat poverty even though aid has failed to deliver sustainable growth and meaningfully reduce indigence. And nation-states, which rest on one unifying vision of the nation, tend to be fragile, while city-states that adjust, adapt and constantly evolve tend to be antifragile. Mr. Taleb’s lesson: Embrace, rather than try to avoid, the shocks.

For the full review essay, see:
Dambisa Moyo (author of passage quoted above, one of 50 contributors to whole article). “Twelve Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends to tell us what books they enjoyed in 2012–from Judd Apatow’s big plans to Bruce Wagner’s addictions. See pages C10 and C11 for the Journal’s own Top Ten lists.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 15, 2012): passim (Moyo’s contribution is on p. C12).
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date December 14, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House, 2012.

Capitalism Would Bring Economic Growth to Bitouga, and Thereby Save the Elephants

“SEIZED AND DESTROYED; Gabon burned 10,000 pounds of ivory in June to show its commitment against poaching, but elephants are still being slaughtered.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) But as the price of ivory keeps going up, hitting levels too high for many people to resist, Gabon’s elephants are getting slaughtered by poachers from across the borders and within the rain forests, proof that just about nowhere in Africa are elephants safe.

In the past several years, 10,000 elephants in Gabon have been wiped out, some picked off by impoverished hunters creeping around the jungle with rusty shotguns and willing to be paid in sacks of salt, others mowed down en masse by criminal gangs that slice off the dead elephants’ faces with chain saws. Gabon’s jails are filling up with small-time poachers and ivory traffickers, destitute men and women like Therese Medza, a village hairdresser arrested a few months ago for selling 45 pounds of tusks.
“I had no idea it was illegal,” Ms. Medza said, almost convincingly, from the central jail here in Oyem, in the north. “I was told the tusks were found in the forest.”
She netted about $700, far more than she usually makes in a month, and the reason she did it was simple, she said. “I got seven kids.”
It seems that Gabon’s elephants are getting squeezed in a deadly vise between a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory in Asia, where some people pay as much as $1,000 a pound, and desperate hunters and traffickers in central Africa.
. . .
In June, Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, defiantly lighted a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the ivory trade was reprehensible, a public display of resolve that Kenya has put on in years past. It took three days for all the ivory to burn, and even after the last tusks were reduced to glowing embers, policemen vigilantly guarded the ashes. Ivory powder is valued in Asia for its purported medicinal powers, and the officers were worried someone might try to sweep up the ashes and sell them.
Some African countries, like Zimbabwe and Tanzania, are sitting on million-dollar stockpiles of ivory (usually from law enforcement seizures or elephants that died naturally) that someday may be legal to sell.
. . .
(p. A10) The growing resentment of the government is undermining conservation efforts, too, with villagers grumbling about not seeing a trace of the oil money and saying Mr. Bongo should not lecture them about poaching for a living.
. . .
The children here eat thumb-size caterpillars, cooked in enormous vats, because there is little else to eat. Many men have bloodshot eyes and spend their mornings sitting on the ground, staring into space, reeking of sour, fermented home-brew.
. . .
International law enforcement officials say the illicit ivory trade is dominated by Mafia-like gangs that buy off local officials and organize huge, secretive shipments to move tusks from the farthest reaches of Africa to workshops in Beijing, Bangkok and Manila, where they are carved into bookmarks, earrings and figurines.
But often the first link in that chain is a threadbare hunter, someone like Mannick Emane, a young man in Bitouga. Adept in the forest, he was trained nearly from birth to follow tracks and stalk game, and was puffing idly on a cigarette he had just lighted with a burning log.
He conceded he would kill elephants, “for the right price.”
“Life is tough,” he said. “So if someone is going to give us an opportunity for big money, we’re going to take it.”
Big money, he said, was about $50.
His friend Vincent Biyogo, also a hunter, nodded in agreement.
“When I was born,” he said, “I dreamed of a better life, I dreamed of driving a car, going to school, living like a normal human being.”
“Not this,” he added quietly, staring at a pot of boiling caterpillars. “Not this.”

For the full story, see:
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. “In Gabon, Lure of Ivory Is Hard for Many to Resist.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 27, 2012): A5 & A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 26, 2012.)

“A man in Bitouga, where people live in extreme poverty and say they resent the government’s telling them not to poach.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT story quoted and cited above.

Descartes Saw that a Great City Is “an Inventory of the Possible”

(p. 226) Joel Kotkin writes about “The Broken Ladder: The Threat to Upward Mobility in the Global City.” “A great city, wrote Rene Descartes in the 17th Century, represented ‘an inventory of the possible,’ a place where people could create their own futures and lift up their families. In the 21st Century–the first in which the majority of people will live in cities–this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility will become ever more critical.”

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.

Poor People Want Washing Machines

The wonderful clip above is from Hans Rosling’s TED talk entitled “The Magic Washing Machine.”
He clearly and strongly presents his central message that the washing machine has made life better.

What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading.

Source of video clip summary:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html

The version of the clip above is embedded from YouTube, where it was posted by TED: http://youtu.be/BZoKfap4g4w

It can also be viewed at the TED web site at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html

(Note: I am grateful to Robin Kratina for telling me about Rosling’s TED talk,)
(Note: I do not agree with Rosling’s acceptance of the politically correct consensus view that the response to global warning should mainly be mitigation and green energy—to the extent that a response turns out to be necessary, I mainly support adaptation, as suggested in many previous entries on this blog.)

Garcia “Wanted to Get an Education and Get Out of” the “Sustainable” Life

“In a straightforward sense, Mr. García, 44, is a Mexican ecologist. More broadly, though, he is a self-appointed emissary from the land once known as Pimería Alta, an interpreter of its culture, plants and people.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D6) Over the weekend, Mr. García would be driving back to his family seat in the mission town of Magdalena de Kino, Mexico. In a way, his personal mission is to recreate the orchards he knew there. He has started with dozens of seedlings in the backyard of the small ranch house that he shares with his girlfriend, Dena Cowan, a Spanish-language interpreter and videographer. (The couple recently produced a documentary, in Spanish and English, about the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project called “Tasting History.”)

Yet he remembered the orchards with something other than simple nostalgia.
As a child, he packed boxes of fruit to load onto his uncle’s truck. “My father had this farm that he was renting, probably two acres,” Mr. García recalled. By necessity, “the only things we bought from the store were salt, sugar, coffee and kerosene,” he said. “Everything else we produced.”
“Our mother, she made our underwear out of the wheat sacks,” he continued. “My father used to make these homemade shoes for my brothers: leather, with used tires on the sole. They would hide them in the river on the way to school and then go to school barefooted.” Better that, he recalled, than let classmates see their privation.
By the time Mr. García reached junior high, his older sister has become a teacher and the family’s lot had improved. They installed indoor plumbing, for a start. There was nothing trendy about what he ironically calls their “sustainable” years. “I got the tail end,” Mr. García said. “But I got enough to realize how hard work it is. I learned enough to realize I wanted to get an education and get out of that life.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL TORTORELLO. “Seeds of an Era Long Gone.” The New York Times (Thurs., November 22, 2012): D1 & D6.
(Note: the online version of the article was dated November 21, 2012.)

Rajan Hired to Open India to Entrepreneurship

“Raghuram G. Rajan criticized Indian policy makers during a speech in April at the Indian School of Business. In August, the Indian government offered him a job.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) NEW DELHI — In April, the economist Raghuram G. Rajan gave a speech to a group of graduating Indian students in which he criticized the country’s policy makers for “repeating failed experiment after failed experiment,” rather than learning from the experiences of other countries. A week later, he assailed the government again, this time in a speech attended by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

But instead of drawing a rebuke from India’s often thin-skinned leaders, he got a job offer. In August, Mr. Singh, who has frequently sought Mr. Rajan’s advice, called and asked him to take a leave from his job as a professor at the University of Chicago to return to India, where he was born, to help revive the country’s flagging economy. Within weeks, he was at work as the chief economic adviser in the Finance Ministry.
Analysts say the appointment of an outspoken academic like Mr. Rajan, along with the recent push by New Delhi to reduce energy subsidies and open up retailing, insurance and aviation to foreign investment, signal that India’s policy makers appear to be serious about tackling the nation’s economic problems.
. . .
Mr. Rajan said he would like to focus his efforts on three big themes: liberalizing India’s financial system; making it easier to do business, particularly for entrepreneurs and manufacturers; and fixing India’s dysfunctional food distribution system, which wastes a lot of food even as many of the country’s poor are malnourished.

For the full story, see:
VIKAS BAJA. “As Its Economy Sags, India Asks a Critic to Come Home and Help Out.” The New York Times (Sat., October 6, 2012): B3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated October 5, 2012.)

American Innovators Created Synergies and Interchangeable Parts

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) . . . the post-Civil War industrialization had an important and largely overlooked predecessor in the first decades of the 19th century, when, as Charles Morris writes in “The Dawn of Innovation,” “the American penchant for mechanized, large-scale production spread throughout industry, presaging the world’s first mass-consumption economy.” It is a story well worth telling, and Mr. Morris tells it well.
. . .
Whole industries sprang up as the country’s population boomed and spilled over into the Middle West. The rich agricultural lands there produced huge surpluses of grain and meat, especially pork. The city of Cincinnati–whose population grew to 160,000 in 1860, from 2,500 in 1810–became known as “Porkopolis” because of the number of hogs its slaughterhouses processed annually.
Mr. Morris does a particularly good job of explaining the crucial importance of synergy in economic development, how one development leads to another and to increased growth. The lard (or pig fat) from the slaughterhouses, he notes, served as the basis for the country’s first chemical industry. Lard had always been used for more than pie crust and frying. It was a principal ingredient in soap, which farm wives made themselves, a disagreeable and even dangerous task thanks to the lye used in the process.
But when lard processing was industrialized to make soap, it led to an array of byproducts such as glycerin, used in tanning and in pharmaceuticals. Stearine, another byproduct, made superior candles. Just in the decade from the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s, Cincinnati soap exports increased 20-fold, as did the export of other lard-based products. Procter & Gamble, founded in Cincinnati in 1837 by an Irish soap maker and an English candle maker who had married sisters, grew into a giant company as the fast-rising middle class sought gentility.
Mr. Morris goes into great detail on the development of interchangeable parts–the system of making the components of a manufactured product so nearly identical that they can be easily substituted and replaced.

For the full review, see:
John Steele Gordon. “BOOKSHELF; The Days Of Porkopolis.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., November 20, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was updated November 19, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2012.

Chamber Blitz Clip for Tort Reform

“Blitz gasoline cans, at Ace Hardware in Miami, Okla., will soon disappear from stores. The company closed because of the costs of lawsuits contending that the cans were unsafe.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The “Mr. Flick” quoted below is Rocky Flick, the former CEO of Blitz.

(p. B1) Crusading against what it considers frivolous lawsuits, the United States Chamber of Commerce has had no shortage of cases to highlight, like the man suing a cruise line after burning his feet on a sunny deck or the mother claiming hearing loss from the screaming at a Justin Bieber concert.

Now, the lobbying group’s Institute for Legal Reform is showing a 30-second commercial that uses Blitz USA, a bankrupt Oklahoma gasoline can manufacturer, to illustrate the consequences of abusive lawsuits. The ad shows tearful workers losing their jobs and the lights going out at the 46-year-old company as a result of steep legal costs from lawsuits targeting the red plastic containers, according to the company and the institute.
The closing of the 117-employee operation this summer became a rallying point for proponents of tort reform. . . .
. . .
(p. B2) Blitz executives note that the company, which was the nation’s leading gas can producer, sold more than 14 million cans a year over the last decade, with fewer than two reported incidents per million cans sold. The company said the most serious incidents usually involved obvious misuse of the cans, like pouring gasoline on an open fire.
. . .
A decade ago, Mr. Flick said, the company would face one or two lawsuits a year. The number grew to six or seven a year, and finally to 25 or so last year when Blitz filed for bankruptcy.

For the full story, see:
CLIFFORD KRAUSS. “Two Sides of Product Liability: A Factory’s Closing Focuses Attention on Tort Reform.” The New York Times (Fri., October 4, 2012): B1.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 5, 2012 and has the shorter title “A Factory’s Closing Focuses Attention on Tort Reform.”)

View the Chamber video clip on the Blitz example:

“Rocky Flick, Blitz’s former chief executive.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“The New Upper Class Must Start Preaching What It Practices”

Source of book image: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-RO889_bkrvmu_DV_20120130124608.jpg

(p. C2) There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need–not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending “nonjudgmentalism.” Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

For the full essay, see:
CHARLES MURRAY. “The New American Divide; The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 21, 2012): C1-C2.

The essay quoted above is related to Murray’s book:
Murray, Charles. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. New York: Crown Forum, 2012.

Macaulay Argues that a Limited Government that Protects Property Will Promote Economic Growth

Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.

Source:
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord. “Review of: Robert Southey’s “Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society”.” In Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1830.
(Note: the quote above appeared on the back cover of The Cato Journal 30, no. 1 (Winter 2010); Macaulay’s full review, including the quote, can be viewed online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/macS1.html )
(Note: the online version does not give page numbers, but gives what I think are “screen” numbers. The passage quoted is all of “SC.96” which appears at the very end of the essay.)