I sometimes think Economics has more interesting questions than Physics, but less interesting answers than the latter. Perhaps that is so because an ideological position seems almost a pre-requisite before any work in the field is started. Below are a set of links on the issue of globalisation and its effects. Broadly speaking, its somewhat of the same old debate abou free market vs protectionism, but the agents are reversed, and it seems, so are some of the ideologues.

The old story was that, despite its intuitive appeal (and caution gained from the experiences of colonialism), protectionism was bad for developing nations and adopting a free market system was a quicker (and perhaps only) way to achieve economic progress. The Asian Tigers were a clear demonstration of this, it was argued. Closed and protected economies like India, which languished for decades, blossomed into dynamic capitalist success stories within years of “liberalising” their economies. China was a bit of an outlier, but could be explained away.

Then we hear from Ha-Joon Chang about the development history of today’s “first world” nations and the credibility of the critique of protectionism:

Kicking Away the Ladder:
How the Economic and Intellectual Histories of Capitalism Have Been Re-Written to Justify Neo-Liberal Capitalism

Ha-Joon Chang (Cambridge University, UK)

There is currently great pressure on developing countries to adopt a set of “good policies” and “good institutions” – such as liberalisation of trade and investment and strong patent law – to foster their economic development. When some developing countries show reluctance in adopting them, the proponents of this recipe often find it difficult to understand these countries’ stupidity in not accepting such a tried and tested recipe for development. After all, they argue, these are the policies and the institutions that the developed countries had used in the past in order to become rich. Their belief in their own recommendation is so absolute that in their view it has to be imposed on the developing countries through strong bilateral and multilateral external pressures, even when these countries don’t want them.

Naturally, there have been heated debates on whether these recommended policies and institutions are appropriate for developing countries. However, curiously, even many of those who are sceptical of the applicability of these policies and institutions to the developing countries take it for granted that these were the policies and the institutions that were used by the developed countries when they themselves were developing countries.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the historical fact is that the rich countries did not develop on the basis of the policies and the institutions that they now recommend to, and often force upon, the developing countries. Unfortunately, this fact is little known these days because the “official historians” of capitalism have been very successful in re-writing its history.

Almost all of today’s rich countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies.

[…]

Shortly after came the stories of the workings of the IMF and WB capped by a series of criticisms of erstwhile enthusiast Joseph Stiglitz.

Fast forward to today and we come to the role reversal, where countries like India and China are growing at near 10% rates while the US (and other parts of the West) is bogged down — of particular interest: jobs and outsourcing. And the result has been a strange morphing of positions among the intellectuals, theorists and assorted heavy-weights:

Guru of economics does an about-turn on free trade

At 89, after decades of speaking in favour of it, Paul Samuelson says it’s not such a good thing after all
Jay Bhattacharjee

A battle royale has just been initiated in the rarefied world of economic theory, although the rumblings have not yet reached these shores. The first salvo has been fired by no less a person than Paul Samuelson, and the targets he has chosen include some of his most prominent acolytes and disciples.

The MIT professor, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1970 and research mentor of countless economists, who later became major scholars in their own right, has re-assessed his entire stand on globalisation and the benefits that accrue from the process. In doing so, Samuelson has been scathing in his critique of some of his students, including Jagdish Bhagwati, once a member of his innermost circle.

[…]

The thrust of Samuelson’s analysis is that a country like China, basically a low-wage economy, will create a net negative impact on the American people, when it manages a substantial rise in productivity in an industry in which the United States was earlier a leader. Initially, American consumers may benefit from low-priced goods in their supermarket chains, but their gains may be more than neutralised by large losses sustained by American workers who lose their jobs.

[…]

Needless to say, this has not gone down well with Bhagwati (whom I like to think of as the intellectual version of Thomas Friedman ;-)). Not just a liberal like Samuelson, but also conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts have switched to a protectionist (of sorts) position, and Bhagwati takes on Roberts in the WSJ:

Top Economists Square Off In Debate Over Outsourcing[…]

[Bhagwati:]

Look at the facts for 1999-2002. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that, counting four IT-related sectors, the jobs expanded; slowly no doubt, but contract they did not. In 2002, the number of jobs in these sectors was over 17 million.

Contrast that with the estimate of gross numbers of outsourced jobs: They were around 100,000 per annum, and the upper estimates of job loss annually over the next 15 years has been put at 225,000, which is less than 1.5% of the stock of available jobs in 2002. I must add that the net estimates show that the U.S. has many more people employed in services that are exported than are “lost” in services that are imported.

And these jobs will surely expand because the main driver of growth in our economy is our prodigious technical change. Technical change nearly always substitutes for unskilled labor, but it creates new skilled jobs, both by creating new products and processes but also because the maintenance of technology also requires skilled labor.

[…]

[C]ountless … new jobs in unforeseen and unforeseeable occupations, requiring new skills, have emerged and will continue to emerge.

True, we will need to extend our adjustment assistance programs beyond manufacturing. We will also need imaginative programs to assist the older folks who cannot readily acquire new skills for the new jobs. We will finally need to delink medical benefits from employment: a change whose time has come, now that increased exposure to trade means that flexible responses to changing opportunities are possible.

But what we do know is that protection will only compound manifold the difficulties of adjustment for our skilled workers.

[…]

[O]ur social safety net is not as strong; and the family has been frayed, so neither the social nor the personal safety net is available to meet difficult problems of adjustment to import competition. So, when the fear of job losses is high, anxiety
is immense, as now.

[…]

Astonishingly, a liberal leadership of the Democratic Party that professes to better credentials on altruism in regard to developing countries is now committed to policies that are aimed at the developing countries which are using the trade opportunity to work themselves out of poverty, while a Republican president has taken the high road on both outsourcing and on foreign investment!

I think Bhagwati is right[er] (as are people like Krugman who have made similar points) about the last point he raises, and it is interesting to note that he is willing to talk about things like safety net or the difficulty of retraining.

The below is an excerpt from a FindLaw article by Julie Hilden on the cartoon controversy and issues of government censorship or expression. The quoted segment itself deals with the twisted use of logic and the English language, by the administration, which I have long found incredulous but seems to go almost unnoticed by large segments of the population. The obvious criticism raised below is therefore worth repeating:

Hilden: The Cartoon Controversy…

[…]

Government Speech: Weighing In on Cartoons — and Misinterpreting Them

Let’s start with the Washington Post cartoon, by Tom Toles. As noted above, it depicts a quadruple-amputee soldier, with a bandaged head. He is being attended by ‘Doctor’ Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld comments, ‘I’m listing your condition as battle-hardened.’ At the bottom of the cartoon, in smaller type, is Rumsfeld’s further comment, ‘I’m prescribing that you be stretched thin. We don’t define that as torture.’

The Joint Chiefs deemed the cartoon ‘a callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this nation, and as a result, have suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds,’ and told the newspaper it had a responsibility not to ‘make light of [soldiers’] tremendous physical sacrifices.’

Column continues below %u2193

This kind of gross misinterpretation makes one wish there were a few more English majors graduating from West Point these days. The cartoon’s sympathies are firmly with the vulnerable soldier, and against Rumsfeld – plainly the callous one here. In light of reports of our troops being stretched thin because of the massive deployment in Iraq, and because soldiers’ tours of duty have extended well beyond their original discharge dates through a ‘stop-loss’ policy, the cartoon suggests – hyperbolically — that Rumsfeld is willing to put even such terribly maimed soldiers back on the front lines of battle in Iraq.

The Joint Chiefs seems to have entirely missed the cartoons’ message – but it ought to be a familiar one. Indeed, it is the same as that of Wilfred Owen’s famous World War I poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est.’ Here are its final lines:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori.

(The last phrase is Latin for ‘It is sweet and right to die for one’s country.’)

In sum, the cartoon simply did not express disrespect for the soldiers. Rather, it suggested, as Owen’s poem did, that they had been lied to, and hurt terribly because of the lie.

[…]

I haven’t posted an update for a while, but I plan to make this more regular (at least once a week, when there is news, which I guess is almost assured with this administration!). The below includes some dated material (unfortunately):

More coming up I am sure!

Hey, at least some parts of the Libertarian segment of the Right has a principled view/position:

Virtuous Violence Is Upon Us
by Paul Craig Roberts

[…]

If President Bush’s neoconservative administration were rational, the US would never have invaded Iraq. If Bush’s government were moral, it would be ashamed of the carnage and horror it has unleashed in Iraq.

The Bush administration has no doubts. It knows that it is right and virtuous. Bush and the neocons dismiss factual criticisms as evidence that the critics are “against us.”

People who know that they are right cannot avoid sinking deeper into mistakes. The Bush administration led the US into a war on the basis of claims that are now known to be untrue. Yet, President Bush and Vice President Cheney consistently refuse to admit that any mistake has been made. The chances are high, therefore, that the second Bush administration will be more disastrous than the first.

[…]

In a futile effort to assert hegemony in Iraq, the US has largely destroyed Fallujah, once a city of 300,000. Hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians have been killed by the indiscriminate use of high explosives.

To cover up the extensive civilian deaths, US authorities count all Iraqi dead as insurgents, delivering a high body count as claim of success for a bloody-minded operation.

[…]

On November 17, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for investigation of American war crimes in Fallujah. This is a remarkable turn of events, showing how far US prestige, and the morale of our armed forces, have fallen.

However, for Bush administration partisans, war crimes are no longer something of which to be ashamed. Reflecting the neoconservative mindset that America’s monopoly on virtue justifies any and all US actions, Fox “News” talking heads and their Republican Party and retired military guests have arrogantly defended the marine who murdered the wounded Iraqi prisoner.

Iraqi insurgents are condemned for deaths that they inflict on civilians. But when American troops fire indiscriminately upon civilians and US missile and bombing attacks kill Iraqis in their homes, the deaths are dismissed as “collateral damage.” This double standard is a further indication that Americans have come to the belief that US ends justify any means.

A number of former top US military leaders and heads of the CIA and National Security Agency have condemned Bush’s invasion of Iraq as a “strategic blunder.” These are people who gave their lives to the service of our country and can in no way be said to be “against us.”

However, the Bush administration and its apologists regard critics as enemies. To accept criticism means to be held accountable, something the Bush administration is determined to avoid. Condoleezza Rice, who failed as National Security Adviser to prevent the Pentagon from using fabricated information to start a Middle East war, is being elevated to Secretary of State in Bush’s second term.

[…]

Many Bush partisans send me e-mails fiercely advocating “virtuous violence.” They do not flinch at the use of nuclear weapons against Muslims who refuse to do as we tell them. These partisans do not doubt for a second that Bush has the right to dictate to Muslims and everyone else (especially the French). Many also express their conviction that all of Bush’s critics should be rounded up and sent to the Middle East in time for the first nuke.

These attitudes represent a sharp break from American values and foreign policy.

[…]

Read in entirety at the link (click on the title in the quoted section above).

These days you won't get much attention (at least in debates on the Internets) unless you sound all intellectual and academic. Legion are the stories of legitimate viewpoints dismissed by failing to meet buzzword compliance. So, inspired by the most excellent tips referred to in an earlier entry on this bog, below is a guide on how to win your next debate on the Internets, even if you are totally in the wrong:

References

People

DO: Mention a bunch of obscure philosophers and experts but make sure they are from an unrelated field. Some philosophers are particularly employable both in terms of their reputation and their mutterings. Wittgenstein is a perennial favourite, though he is becoming rather commonplace these days. Try to refer to such people by their positions, e.g: What I propose is convergent with the post-empiricist Gödelian thesis. Make sure the people you mention are well respected in some serious community, not some wackjob with a following.

DONT: Contrary to what Bush might say, Jesus is not a philosopher.

Places and Time

DO: Nothing like a good historical reference: Weimar Germany (watch out for Godwin's Law if you head down this path), Vichy France, the post-reconstruction years… people eat that kind of stuff up (I mean, can you believe that there is a large World War section at the bookstore and an actual profitable History channel?!).

DONT: Don't fall back on the Holocaust. For one thing its a bit in poor taste. For another you may get sued by the Weisenthal Center or the ADL!

Ideas

DO: Rise above the crowd. Interject yourself as a disinterested party summarising the positions and presenting the large picture. References to Hegelian synthesis are useful here, but throw it in somewhere in the middle of your text. Classify any argument into one of these dualisms: liberal/conservative (left/right), science/religion (scepticism/faith), reductionism/holism, selfishness/altruism, nature/nurture, individualism/collectivism. Then tag your opponent with the position you wish to argue against and tear down that position using the methods described here. Refer to classic ideas, conundrums and paradoxes: the mind/body problem, consciousness, Cartesian idealism, radical scepticism/empiricism, untenable solipsism, etc.

DONT: Don't ever propose a directly opposing idea to an idea that is presented. That exposes you to the danger of real debate. Refuse to answer questions directly and counter with references to other ideas and their inadequacies.

Words and Phrases

DO:

Use these wherever remotely applicable:

• Phrases like: Antebellum south
• Paeleo-anything
• Latin, Latin, Latin: inter alia, ceteris paribus, modus ponens, stuff like that
• Throw a neo- in front of your opponents position to discredit him: neo-Darwinian, neo-conservative, neo-liberal, etc.
• Just big fancy words: antidiluvean, avancular, hagiographic, etc.
• Scientific or technical terminology: counterfactual, contrapositive, underdetermined, asymptotic, and so on.

DONT: Palaeontology is a real word! Avoid the overused Latinisms like anything that starts with Reductio.

Other Concerns and Techniques

Preemption

DO: Preempt counter arguments by: (a) admitting to certain limitations in your position, (b) creating strawmen critiques and dismissing them, (c) employing the technique of BushCo by questioning the ulterior motive of the person (anyone who supports our troops will find little reason to suggest withdrawal). Your opponent might employ the very Guilt By Association technique described earlier, against you. Preempt it: e.g., It would be a grave disservice to confuse this explication with vulgar Lamarckianism.

DONT: As per the cautions above, make sure your argument is obfuscated enough that you do not expose yourself to trivial refutation. Do not, by error, end up constructing a real critique of your position while attempting (b).

Prolong Debate

DO: Prolong the debate as long as possible. Achieve that by constantly expanding the scope of the issues while leaving your own argument vague enough to defy immediate and conclusive refutation. Keep posting responses. Include snippets of poems and song lyrics (preferably not Springsteen, Beatles or Brittney Spears), parts of speeches by personalities, Unix man pages, whatever… keep the thing going!

DONT: Stop posting! In the eyes of the audience on the Internets the last guy to speak is the winner. If you are stuck, return to an earlier point of strength and start expounding on that.

Many of this blog’s readers have complained that the content tends to be boring. In particular a large segment has expressed disappointment over lack of exciting news (infotainment). What better way to address that than this entry with some comments by Die Hard hero Bruce Willis:

CHUD.com – Cinematic Happenings Under Development:

[…]

I’m a Republican only as far as I want a smaller government, I want less government intrusion, I want them to stop pissing on my money and your money, the tax dollars that we give 50 per cent of or 40 per cent of every year, and I want them to be fiscally responsible, and I want these goddamn lobbyists out of Washington. Do that and I’ll say I’m a Republican. But other than that, I want the government to take care of people who need help, like the kids in foster care, the half a million kids who are in orphanages right now, they call them foster homes but they’re orphanages. I want them to take care of the elderly and give them free medicine, give them whatever they need. There’s tons, billions and billions of dollars that are just being wasted. Okay? I hate government. I’m apolitical. Write that down. I’m not a Republican.

[…]

Violence — look, we live in a violent world, man. This country was founded on violence. Who’s kidding who? We came here and said to the Native American Indians, ‘OK, we got some bad news, we got some pretty bad news, and we got some really bad news. The bad news is we’re here. The pretty bad news is we’re not leaving. The really bad news is we’re going to take all your land, every tiny little bit of land that you guys have and put you on this little postage stamp of desert where you can’t grow a thing, unless of course we find oil on that land. Then we’re gonna move you to another little postage-stamp place in Arizona, and we’re going to fuck you over and give you blankets filled with smallpox,’ and if that’s not violence, then what is, my man. What is?

[…]

I don’t like the world. I don’t think it’s being run correctly and I think it could be done a lot better and because I’m old enough to have grown up at a time – look, I remember when Jack Kennedy got shot. I remember when the news was just ‘Here’s what happened and we’re going to show you what it is.’ Now the news is manipulated and managed and it’s all meant to scare you. They don’t show you anything good. They don’t show you anything good coming out of Iraq, all they say this many dead since President Bush took office. But a lot of great things are happening over there, I went over and saw things for myself and there’s a lot of jacked up things.

[…]

Look at what happened to James Frey in the last two weeks. That’s a great book, a great book and so is the follow up book. And just because his publisher chose to say these are memoirs, it took it out of being a work of fiction – a great work of fiction, very well written – to this guy being sucker punched on Oprah by one of the most powerful women in television just to grind her own axe about it. Hey Oprah, you had President Clinton on your show, and if this prick didn’t lie about a couple things, I’m going to set myself on fire right now.

[…]

Malian “bluesman” Ali Farka Touré died last night. The story goes that he fell in love with [African-]American blues music and adapted his own native music to that style. The picture to the left is the cover of his collaborative album with Ry Cooder. If you have not heard Touré before, find a site (perhaps last.fm or Amazon) which will let you listen to snippets of “Ai Du”. Its a great song.

Not just because I was a denizen at old Ma Bell, or because I harbour an irrational hatred for Verizon, but primarily for the "I told you so" pleasure of it, a report of news that AT&T (SBC that is) is buying Bell South:

AT&T near $65 bln deal to buy BellSouth
Plan to aqquire No.3 regional phone company could be announced Monday.
March 5, 2006: 7:50 AM EST

LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. telecoms group AT&T is planning to acquire No.3 U.S. regional telephone company BellSouth, U.S. newspapers reported on Sunday, adding a deal worth $65 billion could be announced as early as Monday.

[…]

Update: AT&T confirms.

NYT Op-Ed piece about Khruschev:

How a Speech Won the Cold War – New York Times
By WILLIAM TAUBMAN

FIFTY years ago today, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a “secret speech” at the 20th Communist Party Congress that changed both his country and the world. By denouncing Stalin, whose God-like status had helped to legitimize Communism in the Soviet Bloc, Khrushchev began a process of unraveling it that culminated in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This great deed deserves to be celebrated on its anniversary.

[…]

Reading this kind of thing reminds me of how surprised I was to learn the differing versions of history between the USA and other parts of the world. I guess I was still young and naive then! While we learn of perestroika and glasnost and how Gorbachev brought about the momentous changes that led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the end of the so-called “cold war”, Americans (at least a large segment), behind their own velvet curtain, subscribed (or currently subscribe) to the idea that Ronald Reagan “won” the cold war, sealing it with his speech: “Mr. Gorbachev bring down this wall” (referring to the Berlin Wall). Perhaps the title of the piece quoted above is cleverly chosen to bring out this difference in our versions of history!

In an NYT Op-Ed piece, Matthew Pearl talks about the recent Larry Summers eviction at Harvard and ties it to larger historical developments. He starts out normally enough:

How the Liberal Arts Got That Way – New York Times
By MATTHEW PEARL

BEFORE Lawrence Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard on Tuesday, the last upheaval of equal magnitude at the university was 140 years ago. That older drama was perhaps the most consequential episode in the history of American higher education; one that not only created the institution where a Larry Summers could flourish as a graduate student and professor, but oddly also laid the seeds of his presidential breakdown.

Except there is already a hint of the paradox that is about to be manufactured. And that hint is in the insertion of the word ‘oddly’. Which permits Pearl to (after outlining the emancipating liberalism of Harvard’s history) go on to:

In a long-gestating paradox, however, the very changes that freed Eliot to renovate Harvard with a more independent and egalitarian framework also did in Larry Summers by leaving Harvard presidents without an identifiable constituency or a body to which, in the end, he may be said to answer. The president could no longer concentrate on pleasing the finite body of individuals who approved and could censure him. From Eliot’s term onward, each president had to be acutely aware of negotiating between competing and in many cases incompatible demands from the various factions — the administrative governing boards, the faculty, the students, the alumni, the donors and those holding the federal purse strings.

What are the changes Pearl is alluding to (that freed Eliot)? He lists a whole lot in the passages leading up to this one. Student resistance is one. Advances in the sciences is another. Yet another is a law shaking up the Board of Overseers. Let us assume it is all of the above changes that “freed” Eliot, as president, to “usher in large-scale reforms”. Now these same changes, Pearl seems to claim, led to Summers being answerable to all and hence not in possession of the freedom for large-scale reform that Eliot enjoyed. This, I guess, is the paradox.

Except it rests on the question of what the changes were and whether they provided freedom for Eliot to perform arbitrary large-scale reform, or more reasonably, gave him the backing to carry out meaningful reforms? In other words, the “tide of liberalism” empowered Eliot to carry out the very changes that the liberalism rightfully demanded. The case of Summers is quite the opposite, for he was not attempting to create a “renaissance of the liberal arts” but to shout them down into a submissive role (to himself and to his pet notions). His actions were to push back against the “tide of liberalism” and towards more traditional notions, and it is no paradox that he was done in by his regressive actions, which were repulsed by the progressive changes that empowered Eliot.

The laments of the various reductionists in Biology (EP, Sociobiology, Cognitivei science, etc) by appeal to the injustice of suppression of radical new ideas by the establishment is a parody of real anti-establishment ideas that faced persecution. Not only are these ideas anything but radical (one does not need to look as high as Harvard presidents to find negative speculation on the abilities of women), they are no different (in their reasoning) from the twisted usage of the Bush crowd of notions such as whistle-blowing (which they use to defend their man Libby’s leaking of a CIA operative) or supporting the troops.

Pearl reveals his own axe shortly thereafter, in the article:

The Harvard experience had long ago been liberated from politics in its most concrete attachment — that tie to the Massachusetts Legislature — but it has been politicized in a different way, subjected to the realm of public politics and opinion.

Aha! Public politics and opinion we learn is what did old Larry in. Not surprisingly, Pearl seems to employ the same twist of logic I outlined above, for the truth is that Larry’s politics and opinion is what did him in.