China’s one-child policy has created an imbalance between men and women that is producing some unrest that has potentially serious consequences. This interesting article analyzes the feasibility of one of the better ways of mitigating this problem.
Politics
In Reason Magazine, James Bovard reports on some strange discrepancies in the media stories about Rigoberto Alpizar, who was killed by air marshals in December. It seems that the passengers in the plane said that Alpizar never claimed to have a bomb. Yet the majority of media reports seem to conclude that the air marshals acted correctly.
Why do the storytellers find this controversy much less entertaining than Cheney’s shooting accident?
Cass Sunstein writes about an experiment that shows that political discussions tend to produce polarizing groupthink rather than understanding.
Arnold Kling reports that free markets are more popular in China than in the U.S.
That reminds me that I should give more thought to investing in China-related companies.
Book Review: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman
It’s subtitle is almost accurate, but it would be more accurate to say it’s a verbose history of a brief part of the 21st century.
I didn’t learn very much from this book, but people who haven’t been paying much attention to the news might. I normally expect reporters to be much more superficial than authors with more substantive specialties who write about what they know, and this book only weakens that expectation a tiny bit.
He does an eloquent job of disputing the notion that offshoring means sweatshops by reporting evidence that Asian workers are doing well enough that Americans should be worried more about being outcompeted on skill and motivation than on low wages. “[Bill] Gates is recognized everywhere he goes in China. Young people there hang from the rafters and scalp tickets just to hear him speak.”
He’s less eloquent at describing how offshoring affects the U.S. For a good, concise analysis, I recommend The Armchair Economist‘s chapter on the Iowa car crop (how farmers grow cars by sending food to Japan).
He doesn’t do much to anticipate new effects of globalization. For instance, his advice on what jobs won’t be outsourced suggests specialized lawyers, brain surgeons, robot operators, nurses, etc. Many of those only require modest advances in communications infrastructure to be offshorable, the rest would require some improvements in robotics to be offshorable. And he ignores the possibility that most offshorable jobs will be replaced by more intelligent software in a decade or two.
His descriptions of the large companies that are playing interesting roles in flattening the world tends toward acting as their PR agents. For example, he reports that Google has had an equalizing effect (e.g. Colin Powell used to rely on aides to do better research than I could afford, now he uses Google routinely for research that typical users can do just as easily), but neglects to notice the risks of having so much of the world’s access to information go through one company in one political jurisdiction.
He says “If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism”. It’s somewhat unlikely that jihadists would otherwise get much money from oil. It’s wildly implausible that the U.S. government is as good at affordable mass production as it was at solving a prestigious problem by throwing money at it. And the amount of money that investors have poured into photovoltaics companies in the past few months leaves me wondering why we should think there are opportunities that will be overlooked if the government fails to throw money at energy problems.
But he makes up for that with occasional gems such as this quote from Bill Gates: “Someone estimated that the cost of saving a life in the U.S. is $5 or $6 million – that is how much our society is willing to spend. You can save a life outside the U.S. for less than $100.” I suspect that $100 is a bit misleading because it ignores the time needed to inform yourself about whether the money is going to be spend productively, but the double standard is quite real.
In the past few months I’ve heard from both Eric Drexler and from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat that the Chinese government is run by engineers. This sounds important enough that I checked for confirmation on the web.
this page says “Every member of the Politburo in China is an engineer.”
An article titled Made in China: The Revenge of the Nerds reinforces the point.
This must imply some interesting things about the policies of the Chinese government. I wish I could predict whether this is the result of forces that will persist for a significant time or whether (as this page hints) it was a one-time result of Deng Xiaoping’s personality.
The Bush administration’s abuse of innocent Muslims hasn’t been getting as much coverage as it deserves, so I’m encouraging you all to spread the word about this account of the government’s continuing abuse of Muslims that it admitted months ago were innocent (thanks to Andrew Sullivan).
What is Congress doing about this boost to Al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts? Trying to restrict the habeas corpus rights of the victims so that we don’t hear about them.
Monopolies tend to become insensitive bureaucracies, and governments tend to be some of the most monopolistic entities around. (If you think of monopolies as bad only because they get monopoly profits, or think other kinds of harm are avoidable given monopoly power, I recommend reading Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas : The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World). Democracy has sometimes been effective at reducing the extent to which governments have acted as monopolies, by creating competition between factions. In recent years, gerrymandering has virtually eliminated that competition for many legislative bodies.
California Proposition 77 would eliminate the conflicts of interest that make current gerrymandering a major threat to democracy, and would give us instead something that works more like our judicial system. Our judicial system isn’t ideal, but it’s better than what a legislature does when the voters are unable to influence the legislature.
Critics have complained that Prop 77 is imperfect, but haven’t provided a clear explanation of why the alleged imperfections could be considered large in comparison to the difference between the current gerrymandering and a competitive democracy, or why it would be harder to adopt improvements to Prop 77 later than it is to adopt it now.
For a while now I’ve been bothered by the absence of an eloquent phrase for monopolies on ideas that doesn’t perpetuate the recent claim that those monopolies deserve the same respect as ownership of physical objects. That claim has caused some presumptions which distort discussion of copyrights and patents, and lead to thoughtless conclusions such as this attack on Google’s Print Library (a project which sounds like it will respect copyrights more carefully than Google’s main search engine does).
Eric Drexler recently mentioned that “intellectual pseudo property” is an appropriate term, and pointed out that many of the rules it refers to are more like a lease than ownership. Apparently Markus Krummenacker used the phrase first (without a succinct argument that it should replace the phrase intellectual property).
Finally someone has produced a quantitative measure that tests the ideological biases of supreme court justices, and it shows a good deal of bias. It looks more like a collection of small biases rather than a simple polarization into left and right.
An article titled Alito isn’t “pro-life” or “pro-choice” but “pro-law.” by Jon Adler (who I knew when he was an undergrad and whose opinions I respect) has led me to believe that Alito will be less influenced by his personal biases than the average justice.