As David Eisenthal points out, the election of Michelle Bachelet to the presidency of Chile is a significant for a hemisphere where only four women have been elected to the highest office. But the story has also given us casual followers of world events pause to reflect on the transformation of Latin American politics, toward […]
Tim Burke has more on images of Africa:
Africa is the place where it’s ok to capaciously envision grand projects of various kinds with little concern for the specific humanity of specific African individuals or communities, where you treat them as generic, faceless objects to be saved, remade, to be waved about as totemic proof of […]
This program at Tufts sounds like big news to me. I’m just wondering if microlending really works or if it’s a big Economist-driven fad. Reading about it, I still can’t figure out how it works. And why, for instance, if it generates a 9 percent return, it takes a philanthropic gift to jumpstart it. Or […]
I’ve written a bit on the housing bubble here, and why, if anything, it’s more a macroeconomic danger than anything else. But there’s a greater, more easily identifiable problem: our currently low savings rate. Kash at Angry Bear considers capital flows and savings behavior and provides a useful chart comparing the savings rate of several […]
If you’re interested in the politics and economics of ending Third World poverty (and we all should be more!), go read William Easterly’s Washington Post review of Jeffrey Sachs’ End of Poverty and Sachs’ reply. [thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer].
Not having read Sachs’ book nor having any real expertise in the field of […]
Doug Merrill at Fistful of Euros looks at the news of Paul Wolfowitz’s nomination to head the World Bank and wonders what the news means and what chill it will have on currently thawing US-European relations. Admittedly it’s a surprising pick on Bush’s part.
No expert myself, I immediately read the appointment as a) a raised […]
I should clarify that I have nothing against the Fair Trade movement per se. In fact, I’m drinking fair trade coffee as I write. Equal Exchange Coffee does a great job in finding a market niche for superior product and in turn supporting Third World farmers in smaller-scale agriculture. In fact, their approach - of […]
Slate’s Seth Stevenson files a travel dispatch from India that reads uncannily like a scene from an Eric Ambler novel, and Brad DeLong takes him to task:
Seth Stevenson thinks that those who do not buy the [Kerala-made] coir mats are morally superior to Debbie and the rest of us: they are not complicit in the […]
The story til now: Third World country, in breaking off the shackles of colonial rule, ends up fighting a civil war, with Marxist-Leninist side getting the upper hand. U.S. fights brutal but ultimately unsuccesful war to prevent Communists from getting power. After a couple of decades of self-rule but subsistance economy, this “Communist” country begins […]
“Best man gets the job,” proclaims Brad Delong in response to the selection of economist Manmohan Singh as prime minister for the new coalition Indian government after recent elections. I’d recommend reading the comments to his post, which seem to offer more analysis than the American press has generally done. In sum, the story is […]
Slate’s William Saletan picks apart the new anti-Bush ads from one 527 organization, the Media Fund. His verdict? The ads are perhaps politically smart but morally ugly. Criticism of economic policy has morphed into claiming that Bush is “creating jobs” overseas; criticism of Iraq has morphed into treating the Iraqis as the new welfare-queens. Here’s […]
In the TPM interview with Wesley Clark that I mentioned yesterday, Clark criticized the Bush administration’s “underlying ideological drive that overrides pragmatism.” For Clark (and for many in the center-left), the lack of a pragmatic expert culture has been particularly lacking in both foreign policy and the economy. Which makes Jeff Madrick’s discussion of Iraq’s […]
The Guardian has launched a new weblog dedicated to ending first-world agricultural subisidies. For an explanation of the website and its reason, they have a leader polemic against subsidies today. (And worth checking out too are a series of NY Times op-eds on the subject). As they note, this is one of the few topics […]
Yesterday I joined in the New Republic’s criticism of the extent to which the left’s anti-imperialism has blinded it to a more accurate analysis of the problems facing the developing world. But there is one realm in which the analysis of the U.S. as neo-imperalist power holds the most explanatory power: Latin America. As if […]
The New Republic has a sharp polemic against the left for ignoring Africa.
As the preeminent umbrella organization of the hard left, ANSWER directs its outrage across the globe. This September, for instance, it plans “International Days of Protest against Occupation and Empire, from Palestine to Iraq to the Philippines to Cuba and Everywhere.”
But, as […]