I had a read of a recent Jeffrey Sachs article from Project Syndicate. This spurred a spate of reading/watching/listening of his and of one of his counterparts Paul Collier.

Have a listen to this interview with Paul Collier from EconTalk, and to this interview with from Radio Economics. I prefer Russ Roberts (EconTalk) mode of interviewing to that of James Reese (Radio Economics), but that could just be me. I prefer Roberts's mode of inquiry, though I often disagree with his opinions.

Then, of course, there's the recent Ted Talk with Paul Collier.



And to top it off a conversation between Charlie Rose and Jeffrey Sachs.



Here's a link to Collier's book, The Bottom Billion. And to Sachs's books, The End of Poverty and Common Wealth.

The main reason that I am blogging about this is because, as always, these guys are in the media. Moreover, people take their opinions as gospel. Personally, I probably feel a greater affinity (ish) for Sachs than I do for someone like Easterly, and I think that a lot of Sachs's ideas coupled with ideas from Collier could result in fantastic improvements (or at least so I hope). In fact Sachs and his wife wrote a really cool and interesting article which I read during my Masters, and I will try to find. Ahh, here it is, I think, if my foggy, course-content filled memory serves.

I will attempt basic summaries of some of their arguments and make some comments.

Collier argues that there are 4 main problems for the bottom billion.
1) Conflict
2) Having natural resources
3) Being landlocked
4) Being really small

He argues that "Change must come from within...", which I think is justified, and moreover that "much more should be done to strengthen the hand of the reformers" in those countries that need assistance. Such as Okanja-Iweala below.
He says that international standards, say for resource revenues, are crucial. Commenting on whether resources are being save, or used for investment in capital in the country of their origin. In order to ensure that this occurs the governments in charge must curb corruption. The money from the resources should not be frittered away on white elephants. Moreover, there should be international standards on conducting elections, backed by enforcement (sanctions) through multilateral agreements. The current state of Zimbabwe comes to mind (this does however beg the question, as always, as to whom is actually hurt by sanctions, the innocent or the big boys, I think the former probably). Collier argues furthermore that trade policy should be improved, which is particularly relevant for countries like Kenya that aren't endowed with crazy amounts of natural resources.

In his Ted Talk, Collier highlight compassion (to get started) and enlightened self-interest (to get serious). He compares what is required today to save the bottom billion is the equivalent of what happened post WWII. I don't know if I agree with his whole Marshall Plan comparison, his argument though was that it was about reversing trade policy (US changed from isolationist to open) and reversing security policy from being isolationist (not sure what he thinks the armed forces should do though). He also argues that national sovereignty is overrated, and that the OECD, and other institutions that came into being post-WWII were crucial for the flourishing of those countries and assisted the operation of governance institutions.

"Aid, trade, security, governance." In the talk Collier highlights the role of governance and that it is 'enormously important' and needs to be upgraded dramatically throughout the governments of the bottom billion. He discusses the role of the commodity boom and how this this assisted and hindered development. This has led to a discussion of the 'resource curse' as a consequence of low levels of initial economic governance. If you have good enough governance then you go up in short term and stay there if you have resources, the converse if you have poor governance. Resource cursed countries do well in the short run, then shut down (military coups, corruption, etc).

Oddly enough, within this framework democracies make even more of a mess. But, there are two distinct aspects of democracy; electoral competition and 'checks and balances'. Electoral competition does damage, whereas checks and balances make resource booms good. African countries have had sudden democracies (post glasnost and perestroika), but they did not have the framework to govern and to use constructively the resources that they have. He argues again for the use of international Standards, for example the Extractive Industries Transparencies Initiative - adopted by reformers in Nigeria (more below). He comments that institutional transparency is crucial and can allow a country to move beyond a system of poor governance to one in which there is far better governance. Maybe this offers hope for poor African countries, commensurate with this are policies in which there CANNOT be corrupt relations, such as through the adoption of verified auctions, witnessed by international observers and subject to said international standards.

Collier argues finally that 'we' need a critical mass of informed society in the developed world, otherwise what politicians (in the developed world) do will just be gestures. Therefore, it is crucial that an informed citizenry is built up by people in the know, which is why Collier believes that he must participate in this process through the work that he has done.

One of the things that I think it is important for us not to do is to try to do is the 'let's place them (Collier & Sachs) on a (left-right?) continuum' thing. What many people do is put Sachs on the end of optimism, Easterly on the end of pessimism and Collier somewhere in the middle. I don't think that Easterly is anywhere is always correct (some insights are valid, others not), but I do think that paternalism can be problematic which is where the discussion with Sachs comes in.

One must emphasise though one strong difference between Sachs and Collier. Sachs focuses to a dramatic extent on subsistence farmers and what they need simply to make enough food to survive and eventually to enable them to go to the market. His argument is that improved fertilisers, improved seeds and and educating farmers such that they are better able to use their skills is important. Moreover, the 'free market reform' that so many promote as a 'solution' to Africa's problem just wouldn't have any impact on these guys. They don't have enough money to buy seeds, to make their own food, let alone access to credit to get more land, more seeds and 'be entrepreneurial'. This is where I think that much of the criticism of Sachs is misplaced they argue that he is anti-market, he isn't anti-market, he is pro-market, but he wants people to understand that a market will not exist in some of these places, ever, unless people stop dying and are able to make enough money to actually create a market system.

Collier wants to focus on greater reforms, to natural resources, trade and to political systems in general. He also makes strong arguments for specific institutions, such as the existence of rule of law and of methods to assist countries that are resource rich to get the institutions that they did not have prior to finding the resources. He argues further for interventions, such as voluntary charters to which governments can sign and which pressure groups can try to get them to sign, such as transparency agreements for use of natural resources. He comments on an interesting attempt at publishing data in Nigeria, which resulted in death threats to the minister (Okonjo-Iweala - Right) who insisted on it, which probably means it was a good thing (she has since resigned her position in the Nigerian government and is back working with the World Bank where she held a position prior to working with the Nigerian government).

Ok. This has already become longer than intended and I haven't commented anywhere near as much on Sachs as I would have liked to. I think that he makes some good points, such as those about research and development in alternative sources of energy, to the possibilities of new technologies in the developing world by assisting through provision of credit. All of this is particularly valuable. One of the things though which it is also important to emphasise is that he almost always wants to get money to the people who need it directly, either through NGOs or possibly through government systems. He doesn't want a system (does anyone really?) in which corrupt relationships take away the money. He is concerned with the dying and the abjectly poor.

Anyway, here's a recent (HPR) comment on Sachs's End of Poverty.

Aside:
Jagdish Bhagwati commented on some of these problems late last year. Offering a "plague on both your houses" to William Easterly and to Jeffrey Sachs. He thinks that Easterly is wrong in thinking that foreign aid is entirely ineffectual, but he also thinks that the paternalism of Sachs is somewhat nauseating. lol.

Images from BBC, wikipedia, Amazon and farmers helping farmers.

As many of you will know there has been a fair amount of coverage of Zwelinzima Vavi's (the head of COSATU) statements relating to Zuma, specifically the statement "kill for Zuma", which the Human Rights Commission has asked him to retract, or to face subpoena and investigation. Similar statements have been made by Julius Malema (Motsoko Pheko has a comment on both here).

In this piece in the M&G he is quoted stating that "We are prepared to die in defence of one another and for our revolution." Maybe I'm a bit odd, but I see these as being qualitatively different things. Dying for a cause and killing for a cause are two substantively different moral positions (about which I think maybe Ghandi had a word or two to say).

What amazes me is that he doesn't seem to realize the difference. He doesn't seem to understand that killing for a cause and dying for a cause have such different meanings and imply very different moral propositions as to the the willingness to sacrifice your own right to life versus the taking of someone else's right to life. If I said "I am going to die for my belief in the non-racialist ethic"
(for example) relative to "I am going to kill racists", the one does
not follow from the other.

Moreover, he does not seem to understand the difference between dying for a cause and dying for a member of a cause who has been shown to be morally flawed. The two are, once again, substantively different propositions with substantially different repercussions. Personally, I think that there is a difference, once again in saying, "I am going to die for the non-racialism." vs. "I am going to die for Jacob Zuma" the two don't mean the same thing, they have substantively different connotations. Again, maybe I am confused, but every time that Vavi tries to 'clarify' his statements, he seems to dig himself deeper into this quagmire of confused moral propositions. Maybe someone can inform me as to why I should understand what Vavi is saying in a better manner?

Why, oh why, can't we have a better unionist movement?

Sigh.

is both interesting and crazy...

Here and

commented on here.

(Hat TIP: Mike).

Quality of education is essential to the achievement of students. This is the central thesis of two PodCasts with Eric Hanushek (left) offered on EconTalk (I am catching up on the archive, forgive me). Hanushek has written extensively on this topic and I read a number of his papers for my Honours Economics thesis back in 2004 when I was trying to comment on the South African adoption of Outcomes Based Education and the problem of resources, school and teacher quality.

Roberts and Hanushek discuss everything from the PISA tests (which for some reason South Africa hasn't participated in), differences in test scores worldwide and the impacts of education on growth, to the impact of individual teacher quality on the achievement of individual learners. One of the fantastic points was that if kids in Mexico were brought up to the level of math and reading capability of US students, then Mexico should experience an increase in growth of approximately 2%. This is phenomenal. Which obviously makes me wonder, what would happen if we had a similar increase in the quality of education in South Africa?

First off, I don't believe that simply altering the system of instruction from one to another (such as with the OBE transition) is going to do it. Hanushek and others have shown that there are all kinds of things that affect educational outcomes (here have a look at the work of Esther Duflo, Chris Udry and Pranab Bardhan).

One of the problems that I often found with Hanushek's work is that he discusses US work in the reduction of class size for to decrease learner:educator ratios (which is PC for student:teacher ratios the phrase they use in the US, but SA uses L:E ratios as far as I recall). Anyway, his research indicated that there aren't significant gains from a reduction in class size (not T-S ratios, but that was also a topic elsewhere) from say 23 to 16 or 17. This is all well and good, but I don't see how this is going to be in any way informative in terms of the effects of reducing a class size of 50 to a class size of 30 or even 24 (Hanushek's high range above). I think that for this research, some valuable input has been provided by the paper by Angrist and Lavy on Maimonides Rule, which is a particularly important paper on the Economics of Education in the past decade. Anyway, they made a more important comment that a class size over 40 is detrimental to educational outcomes using a regression discontinuity design and instrumental variable estimation.

Combine the above with weird phenomena in South African education regressions and you begin to wonder about South African education and what kinds of inputs could be used. Moreover, there are continued disparities across income levels. Could SA run randomized evaluations in order to improve the data accessible to those trying to understand education policy? Yes! Could the department of education make data more accessible to researchers? YES! (My word have you ever tried to get hold of the School Register of Needs Data?). One of the things I wish we had is better data on teachers, schools and individual students (family background, detailed demographics, etc), then we could better measure the impact of teacher quality on student achievement and try to isolate what teacher quality is (it seems to be independent of experience and education level of the teacher by the way).

All of this has led me to believe that there is still a phenomenal amount that can be done in SA education. I still don't think that OBE is 'the answer'. I sincerely wish that there were more randomized evaluations and more research into possible other strategies for impact evaluation of programs. Maybe I just don't know about them, maybe they're out there and I haven't been told. I just wish that this kind of stuff was more readily available and promoted better for us to have a more rounded and scientific understanding of what we can do in SA in order to improve educational outcomes. This is one of the most crucial ways for us to attempt to correct for inequality (more on which in later posts soon).

Andy Shlafly - have a look here and here


Larray Fafarman - have a look here (in the comments) and here

These two humans are on some kind of war against Dr. Richard Lenski and his co-researchers. It really is rather entertaining. What will random humans battling against evolutionary theory do next?

If you haven't yet read it, I strongly advise having a look at Chris Anderson's article Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business, it is the lead-up to his new book on Free. I was listening to the PodCast from Russ Roberts at EconTalk where he interviews Anderson on the concept of 'free'. This is a fantastic concept and the rapport between the two of them is brilliant. Anderson is a superb interviewee. You can have a look at Anderson's blog on the interview. I've also tracked a couple of other points on the same topic, one blog (don't bother), an op-ed by Paul Krugman (do bother) and some other commentary here and there.


One of the areas that I think the economics of Free (sorry, hence the silly schwag image above) is going to have problems is the perception that people have the price = quality (summarized in some articles at Bad Science). Roberts also tries to promote, implicitly, the Chicago idea of '2 is enough for competition' (but he was thankfully knocked off that pedestal by Anderson). It's going to be interesting to see how Anderson overcomes this problem in his book as I think it is going to be a crucial element of the Free Revolution, i.e. getting people to get rid of their price prejudices. Something can still be a worthwhile product if you aren't paying for it. Linux is my favourite example of this (I'm an Ubuntu user), Wikipedia is another good example of value free of charge.

This reminds me of one important point, when Anderson talks about 'Free' he means that something has no price attached to it, he is not going on about the concept of opportunity costs as we can never really get rid of those and, as a consequence, nothing is free. But don't get all stupid on poor Chris Anderson because he can't overcome the opportunity cost problem.


Ok, so I am not going to talk about the economics of free now, I just wanted to include that as a little trick to get you to read this. I wanted to mention how Roberts dismisses the research into altruism in Economics. This wasn't a crucial point in the discussion, but this fact (coupled with the Chicago 2 = competition mantra) reminds me of the fact that I have to be continuously skeptical of some Professors understanding of Economics. Altruism is an incredibly well-researched topic in economics, going everywhere from the Henrich, Boyd, Bowles & Camerer (2004) in their Foundations of Human Sociality, to the modeling by Rabin, Levine, Falk-Fischbacher to that by Fehr (right) and Schimdt. Rabin has won the JBC Prize, so I don't see why one would dismiss his work, and Ernst Fehr is an absolute god of experimental econ. Moreover, for theory on strong reciprocity in the economic world a good starting point is the book by Gintis, Bowles, Boyd and Fehr (eds.) Moral Sentiments and Material Interests. Bowles also covers social preferences and other-regarding preferences in his Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution. Is being somewhat heterodox that anathema people?

The rest of the PodCast is pretty cool though.

Edit: Have a look at this post by Dave Spurret on the wine-value rating referred to above.

Chinese opinion on Obama.

Plants Recognising their Relatives - Loyal to Its Roots (NYT)

Cooperation of humans as a function of being a prey species - will have to read the book to comment rigorously on this.

Wake up and Smell the Coffee - is the effect of smelling coffee as good as drinking it?

Blinder on Bubbles - fairly sensible look at financial bubbles

Responsibility of the media in the Property Bubble - Brad DL

Dumb people and sinning - Spurret

Cool ancient link between South American and Australia

This is brilliant.



Hat tip to Brad De Long (can I hat tip Brad De Long?).

I was listening to this podcast (April 2008) from EconTalk where Russ Roberts (he and Don Bordreux blog at Cafe Hayek) provides his theories about jobs, unionization, inequality and the stratification of the economy. I will comment solely on his argument about unionization.

He argues that unionization rates in the United States dropped on account of the movement away from labour intense work, such as manufacturing and agriculture. He argues that they had moved from this into industries in which there wasn't as much of a need for unionization (lack of harsh conditions, etc), such as the service industry.

So that, in and of itself, isn't an unconvincing argument. So I went and
looked at one of my textbooks to see if I could find anything about
unionization rates. Lo and behold (and quite serendipitously), one of
the problem sets that I was doing as part of my prep for an exam includes a graph about unionization in OECD countries. Shown adjacent (courtesy Bowles, 2006 from Luxembourg Income Survey Data). (aside: Roberts also argued that the change began in the 50s, I don't have data on that period).

Now if the assertion that a shift to services, which Roberts asserts drove the change, and which has occurred in most of the OECD countries is 'the reason' behind the de-unionization of the US then this de-unionization should occur throughout the OECD. If not, then not. (Note I am struggling to find a paper/data on this change cross country, looked at some data from the OECD factbook).

Which begs the question, what are the real reasons? Were I a better labour economist than I am, I could probably tell you in detail. What I can talk about is one of the models that we looked at in the course was a behavioural updating model in which you would expect a priori for there to be local homogeneity and global heterogeneity in the distribution of some trait in which there are certain empirically observable characteristics and which the model can replicate (depending on parameter values), in the case of this study the trait union density. What does this mean? With certain starting conditions, and certain random perturbations, or alterations in institutional setting (acceptability of being in a union say, or lack of union-breaker politicians such as Thatcher and Reagan) you would expect there to be differences in the distribution of unionization, even if countries started at relatively similar starting points, i.e. the divergence we observe in the graph above. Things like culture, politics and historical contingency (path dependence) enter as a factors into these models, which, for me, gives them more flavour, but which for others could be problematic.

I will give a technical analysis of it in a couple of days time if anyone is interested. If so, get ready for some LaTex2html...

Please note that the model is not meant to 'explain' unions and unionization, but is intended instead as a description of what could be a reason (given institutional setup and other factors) and to which Roberts' point could be a contributor. I just don't believe that his argument holds water as the sole explanation in the face of the data.

Edit: I found another graph that could be interesting in the context of the above.

You might have seen a recent post of mine commenting on the fact that polls show that Obama has substantially more support amongst most countries in Europe than Mr McCain does (quelle surprise?). Anyway, I wish to refer you to an Op-Ed piece by Thom Friedman on him, indicating that Obama seems to have fairly good support in Egypt too.



Oh, and if you haven't seen this piece (or this one) on how Japanese residents of Obama support Obama then have a look just for the laugh value, it's a bit old but I only saw it recently.

Global Food Crisis vs. Pop Growth

Another person doesn't seem to understand Malthus properly, or modern development economics. The capabilities of hybrid seeds and fertilizer (NYT) in Sub-Saharan Africa (read this comment on the NYT article for a critique, Jeffrey Sachs and other support this, De Long and others are more skeptical, Rodrik gives some good commentary.) are completely avoided by the article.

Mashimbye comments:

I know that economists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists,
historians, and philosophers might disagree with this hypothesis and
probably have theories of their own.

Um... yes. What about demographers? Do they know nothing about population? Have you forgotten that Malthus was an economist? That probably slipped your mind. Economists needing to comment on the work of other economists? Perish the thought...

I particularly don't like Mashimbye's idea of 'situations resonating', does this mean that there is evidence to support your theory? What, specifically, is this evidence? Have you looked at demographic models that indicate that we are at the disaster stage that Malthus predicted (though models predict this should happen later)? Maybe the concern for M&G bloggers to have evidence is just my issue, oh well.

Yes, overpopulation is (potentially?) a problem, but be more knowledgeable about what development economists (Rodrik, Sachs, Collier...) are saying please. Also, look at the evidence on the food crisis as assessed by them and others (even Paul Krugman has commented and Mark Thoma too over at Economist's View).

Also the claim that:

Increased production of food is long-term suicide. Our environment can take no more.

Is just plain inaccurate. Please look at the comments previously on how there can be dramatically increase food production in Africa without harming the environment. I refer you to Jeffrey Sachs's book The End of Poverty, moreover if you're skeptical about Sachs's commitment to the problem of the environment, think again and look at his more recent book, Common Wealth.

If you're interested in a note on Malthus, look at Bryan Caplan's commentary and another item of his here also commenting on Malthus and Clark's book A Farewell to Alms. Not directly relevant, but at least brings some of the ideas of Malthus directly to the table with some models, graphs and decent critique.

*sigh*

Biti Arrested & Charged with Treason

MDC Leaders Arrested

Mbeki Firm on Zim Stance

DA: Mbeki must rebuke Zim villains

Vote for MDC is a vote for war

Mugabe deploys war vets

Mbeki says that "We will also continue to argue that the people of Zimbabwe will have to unite to extricate their country from the economic crisis in which it is immersed, and that we will contribute everything we can to support the realisation of this objective."

Firstly, the crisis is not only ECONOMIC! It is HUMANITARIAN! Maybe I'm a crazy person in the woods with this kind of ranting, but seriously.

And "We will contribute everything we can?" except of course if you read 'contribute' as contributing to the dislodging of a human rights abusing dictator. That would never do. What I don't get is that he (Mbeki) doesn't come down hard on the crazy abuses of power going on in Zim. It makes no sense to me. None whatsoever.

It's not like during apartheid people outside of South Africa were saying, "oh yes, it's somewhat bad there, we'll assist them, we'll contribute to in any way we can, except of course by doing anything, such as actually indicting the actions. Ho ho ho, we'd NEVER do that, bad form, bad form to indict another country's internal affairs."

Kaushik Basu is giving a series of lectures here at UniSi as a chair of Economics and Ethics for Collegio St. Chiara.

He gave his first lecture today, which was a theory-based seminar on a paper, which includes a model that he and a student of his have constructed on child labour in which consumer boycotting can result in negative outcomes for the household. The main counterintuitive result that they present is the fact that increased boycotts can result in a lowered wage to child labour, which results in households having to provide increased amounts of child labour in order to maintain a tolerable (subsistence) level of consumption.

This means that potential protesters should do research into the market that they plan to boycott before they go about boycotting it and possibly result in worse outcomes for the households whose interests they are nominally trying to defend. He argues, moreover, that some of the current international best practices have done all kinds of damages to small businesses. He offered evidence on companies such as Reebok, in the market of soccer balls in Pakistan, which came under immense pressure to disallow any form of child labour. The problem is that many individuals worked in a decentralized manner in their homes, or sheds close to their homes stitching these soccer balls. The fact that children could have been in the presence of these sheds or these (almost certainly female) labourers, or at least the fact that it is impossible to verify whether any child labour at all would have gone into the production of these balls has resulted in a complete centralization of the production in factories, and a shutting down of all the outsourcing to these women. This is an instance in which boycotting, combined with the informational problem of unverifiability has probably resulted in a reduction in welfare to those involved. Very interesting.

He does argue though that a lot more work and consumer objections/protesting could be done about industries in which children are at great risk, mining or certain dangerous factories and so forth, rather than those less malign industries, such as sewing or carpet weaving. I don't quite know what position to hold as of yet, except to say that it has made me think about this in a way that I might not have prior to reading the paper.

I'll see if I can find the paper, it was online earlier... darn.

Something which has been hot in the science news of late. If you haven't read it, the please do it is one of the most important pieces of work to have been undertaken in some time and provides incredible evidence for evolution at play.

Also, read Mike's commentary on this he gives some cool insights and it makes it easier for me not to have to worry about convincing you of the relevance of this study.

Here are a couple novels of late (past few months), which I enjoyed a fair amount, but didn't managed to finish.

The one is Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park. I enjoyed some of it, but it just didn't seem to have the energy of his earlier books, it seemed more self indulgent and a bit staid, as if he were trying to do the whole drugs and sex thing he'd done in other novels, but with a depressed, middle aged, I don't know, mien? I read and read, and then I just really couldn't get around to finishing it.

The second book is Benjamin Black's (aka John Banville) Christine Falls. Again, I have enjoyed Banville's other writing, but this I just couldn't sustain. Maybe I wasn't in the right 'space' as people say, for these books, or maybe they just aren't as good as I was hoping they'd be. Either way, I didn't finish them.

In general though, I am trying to take Tyler Cowen's advice and if I don't feel like it, don't finish a book. This way I will try more books (and discard more books), but in so trying will hopefully find more books I would like than if I hadn't tried them at all.

Hints of structure beyond the known universe

Why the brain follows rules

'Logical Proof' of the Existence of a Divine Creator (Sorry but I had to put that in quotes, hat tip to Mike, central argument of this piece is that 10 000 buildings can't build themselves, a variant on the 'spontaneous Boeing 747 argument, the author seemingly hasn't read enough science, evolutionary biology or chemistry).

Anticipating the Future to 'See' the Present, more on visual perception, might interest Richard.

Brainpower May Lie in Complexity of Synapses

And... the Martin Luther King Jr. I have a Dream Speech, because, for some reason I had never watched it up to today and found it on YouTube, obviously.

Have a look at this. Absolutely fantastic.

Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite contemporary fiction writers. From Dance, Dance, Dance to Norwegian Wood to Kafka on the Shore his writing is sublime.

This article from The Guardian is an extract from his essay on running What I talk about when I talk about running, which itself is a play on the title of Raymond Carver's legendary collection of short stories, What we talk about when we talk about love, which, if you haven't read it, you should!

Ok, so one of the topics in the course for which I have an exam soon has some references to Hayek. I have thoroughly enjoyed the articles of his that I read, The Use of Knowledge in Society and The Pretence of Knowledge. The latter was his Nobel address.

Probably my favourite quote in the Nobel address was "I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false." He is commenting here on the problems, in 1974 and probably still now, of the obsession that economists have with finding the exact magnitudes of the effects of specific variables. He argues, quite convincingly, that even when economists think that they have 'data' they actually are being faux-scientific.

He asserts that "We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibriumwill establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium. We can merely say what the conditions are in which we can expect the market to establish prices and wages at which demand will equal supply. But we can never produce statistical information which would show how much the prevailing
prices and wages deviate from those which would secure a continuous sale of the current supply of labour."

This is in reference to the data that economists were gathering and attempting to use for prediction in the 70s with respect to the problems of stagflation. Though I believe strongly that statistics and computing capabilities have improved dramatically since 1974 when he gave delivered this address, I think that a number of his arguments are still relevant and definitely worthy of our inspection and assessment.

Give both of these a read when you have the time. I would put them up, but I think I'd be infringing copyright laws.

So I am not a Hillary supporter. Personally, I support Barack Obama. Not that this is particularly relevant for a South African, but nevertheless. The video below though is particularly disturbing in terms of how people in the media in the US have and, in all likelihood, will continue to contribute to the oppression of women in power. It really is despicable.



Sexism Sells -- But We're Not Buying It

For all those fans of the academy out there, take a look at this debate between Sam and Milton in 1990. It was a part of Friedman's revamp of his 1980 series 'Free to Choose'. Download it and then fast forward to around the 30th minute.