Economics principles

Our China who art in heaven, hallowed be thy growth rate

UPDATE 4: thanks to all the critics on this post, too bad I couldnt get Chinese censoring technology to work:)
UPDATE 3: 9:30am Sat 10/9: links to Nobel Peace Prize and Charter ’08
UPDATE 2: 1:30pm. New Yorker writer Evan Osnos generously replies to my criticisms (see end of post)
SCOREBOAD UPDATE 10 AM 10/8: understanding key to China’s future development: Nobel Committee 1, New Yorker 0; Liu Xiaobo 1, Justin Lin, 0.
A writer in the New Yorker has an article fawning all over China’s rulers and Chinese economist Justin Lin (currently the Chief Economist of the World Bank).

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:00:20 -0700

Talking to Mozart about how rapid economic growth is temporary

Update 8/6/2010 3:30pm Response to RT @auerswald People r (Not) Statistical Noise http://bit.ly/bAwtpQ:
on objection that small bursts of creativity can have very large effects. Um, yes, it’s called non rivalry of ideas (and music scores). Many people can simultaneously use the same idea/score. And everyone wants to use the best ones. So the scale effects can be Gigantic. I guess I had noticed I’m not the only one who likes Mozart.

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:01:28 -0700

Why African women and girls are still manual porters

The Washington Post this morning carries a story on a DC couple who went on safari in Tanzania and then decided to start an NGO to donate bicycles to give relief to the vast number of female manual porters they encountered.  Whether their project fits into the well-populated category of poorly informed good intentions I leave to the readers to judge (although the NGO name is the cring

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 06:48:49 -0700

Could aid revive business instead of stamping it out?

This post is by Claudia Williamson, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI.

 This is a central question of The Aid Trap, by Columbia professors R. Glen Hubbard and William Duggan. Instead of supporting development, the authors argue, aid creates additional hurdles. While aid ‘crowds out or corrupts the business sector,’ we remain caught in an aid trap because business doesn’t pull at the heartstrings the way charity does.

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:01:56 -0700

The coming end to China’s rapid growth

China’s remarkable growth rate is unlikely to last. No country in history has managed to grow nearly so fast for so long.
“China is defying the law of gravity at the moment,” says New York University economist William Easterly, who has tracked economic development for decades. “But that doesn’t mean that gravity is wrong.”
…
From 1900 to 2000, NYU’s Mr. Easterly says, per-capita growth of all countries ranged between 1% to 3% a year. Nearly all the nations on the high end so far, he says, are democratic capitalist countries — and the additional growth over long periods of time made them rich.
“When we make too much of growth spurts,” he says, “it like making too much of a basketball player who has a hot hand.”

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:01:09 -0700
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