For something animated but no less thought-provoking for the Chinese New Year, a video clip produced by Annie Leonard about how our “stuff” (i.e. consumer goods) are produced and the dangers that have come associated with the production and consumption of these goods. I was first introduced to this video in Junior College by my Geography teacher, and I found it rather animating, enlightening and inspirational, as well as rather easy to digest yet still sufficiently thought-provoking.
The Story of Stuff is a 20 minute video that can be watched on YouTube as well as downloaded from the website for future broadcasts, as I did. Do watch because it alerts you about the behind-the-scenes situation which you have never really thought about when you do shopping. While her perspective is that of government-bashing and firm-bashing, it is still worthy of considering. It is suitable for the kids though they will probably need to be guided along to fully understand the video considering that she uses quite a bit of jargon that might be slightly inaccessible to the young.
While reading about Bihar’s Recovery, it dawned on me the importance of basic government structures in an economy. This sort of realisation had come to me while I was reading about the Haiti crisis and I really think all students of Economics should remind ourselves of the government structures working in the background implied in what we call a ‘Free Market’.
As observed from the article on Bihar, which interestingly is where the Buddha gained enlightenment (according to historical records), the state’s investment in infrastructure, maintaining order, a culture that respect the rights of all citizens (that can only be created from top down) often influenced very much by the enforcement of laws, as well as giving people freedom to pursue the market activities.
When we argue about the importance of not having government interventions in markets, and that state presence should only emerge in the case of market failures, we often neglect the notion that a government is in place in the background to honour the legal tender and anarchy is not the ruling ideology of the day. Trust in the free market is also important and it is upheld by law and order, which once again, falls on the government. As we’ve seen from the earthquake in Haiti, more room for market and less state is not always a good thing. Yet after acknowledging the need for a state we want to combat its advancement into various aspects of society that are usually governed by culture or self-organizing.
Maybe working on the margins of that would help Bihar discover this balance of state and market spaces.
First published in The New York Times on Wednesday, Thomas Friedman writes about the low likelihood of a “benign 2010” given the economic and geopolitical conditions currently brewing. I read the reprinted article on mypaper on Thursday and was rather amused by his arguments.
He started off by saying that 2009 was a pleasant surprise for being a rather peaceful year for “the world’s biggest economies” to heal without any major wars or political / geopolitical disruptions, and then asserts that 2010 would probably not be as peaceful. I do not really agree with him about the “three major struggles” we face (the banks vs President Obama, China vs Google & Iran vs the world), but he has managed to make rather substantial arguments.
Struggle 1: The banks vs President Obama
I did not quite think that this was a significant issue, but that is probably because Singapore is / was pretty sheltered from the full force of the economic breakdown in the West. At least in Singapore, the banks appear to be in rather good shape. But Singapore still bore some brunt from the crisis, thanks to our open economy. I will not go into an argument about how globalized our economy should be (suffice to say that I am for globalization, but not the “free-for-all” some Republicans seem to want) but I must agree that banking regulations need to be stiffened. President Obama has a very tough job balancing giving free rein to the banks to operate and continually grow their wealth (and hence America’s economy too) and managing expectations that as president he should be concerned more about his people who are suffering as a result of the folly of these bankers (and hence should punish the bankers). Either way, this tough balancing act is going to take much more than just “change we can believe in” or “yes we can” as President Obama promised before becoming president. His actions will have direct or indirect impact on the WHOLE world.
Struggle 2: China vs Google
Again, I never thought of this as a huge issue too, but it must certainly be one of much concern to quite a few if columnists keep writing every day about the relations between China and America and whether the trough in relations they are going through marks a change in tact or just posturing. The G2 (Group of 2 – China & America) notion aside, the assault on Google was certainly daring and bellicose. I am more inclined to side with Google and America, but you must also take into consideration the views of millions (of Chinese netizens) that the Chinese government have to assuage and calm. Many of them see the China-bashing as unwarranted and colonial bullying that is behind the times given the ascendant status of China, so I do not foresee that China and America’s retaliatory actions are going to end at just sanctions. I sure hope they do things calmly though… recall the saying “when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled”.
Struggle 3: Iran vs the World
Now this is an issue that I think people do not believe is a sufficiently major problem. Iran’s nuclear proliferation will be very dangerous to America as well as the world, and it will derail all the economic efforts put in by the world’s major economies given the potential changes it will cause to the geopolitical arena. This I think would be the most difficult struggle to resolve, given the ramifications that could spillover into the economic and social spheres (e.g. war). Unfortunately, given all the other problems that America and the world is facing now, it is inevitable for the Iran issue to be placed on the back-burner. But there must be understanding that neglecting the Iran issue and letting it fester will not make it any easier to solve.
I echo Friedman’s wishes that “cooler heads prevail” this year. Or else, as he says, “fasten your seat belts”.
In January 27’s The Straits Times, Susan Long writes in the Review column about why sanctions will not work in curbing Iran’s nuclear tendencies. Whether sanctions work or not has been a long debated issue, and simply googling the title of Long’s article “Why sanctions dont work now” will yield many articles that have been written on this subject, mostly arguing for the end of sanctions against “evil” countries like Iran and Cuba.
First, regarding Long’s write-up. She asserts that sanctions may not be as messy as outright fighting or war, but they harm the innocent civilians most and not the leaders and perpetrators. The poor suffer the most as they have limited access to food, medicine and daily necessities amongst other things, whereas the rich are not affected very much by economic sanctions since they already have the monetary ability to purchase high-end goods like “Swiss chocolate”. The elite will “thrive on the black market” while the poor suffer unnecessarily.
Sanctions can also backfire, such as when it unites a country against the perpetrators of the sanctions (often the United States of America together with the United Nations). Take the sanctions against Iran. Instead of isolating the Islamic regime led by Ayatollah Khamenei & President Ahmadinejad and causing displeasure towards the leaders by the populace, it could end up bringing together the forces that wanted to overthrow Khamenei & Ahmadinejad, led by the Green movement whose leader is Mir-Hossein Mousavi. This would make it even more difficult to “overthrow” the current Islamic regime should the incumbents unite with the opposition against the United States and the outside world.
Of course, sanctions are only sanctioned when the country that imposes the sanctions does not stand to lose much. And often countries that impose sanctions or threaten to do so end up revoking them out of other motivations, such as the United States’ threat to impose sanctions on Myanmar which in the end were not realised because such sanctions would have benefitted China and other rogue regimes that would increase their sphere of influence in the country.
Some other articles that disbelieve in sanctions can be found online as well. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times has similar views to Long, published in the Global Policy Forum. David Henderson of Hoover Institution in Hoover Digest even goes as far as to propose that free trade with “rogue” nations would help to engineer collapses in these regimes when the people open their eyes to the world out there and what is on offer. Dursun Peksen in Foreign Policy names other plausible alternatives such as “engagement / dialogue” and even economic incentives like foreign aid.
In essence, the idea seems to be that should the stick fail, the carrot might be the only way out. In a globalized world such as ours, penalties like sanctions have a high chance of backfiring.
A search query on Wikipedia for ‘Big Brother‘ offers a disambiguation page that offers a link to their ‘Authoritarian personality‘ article. Today, we sometimes allude to the concept of ‘Big Brother’ when we talk about our governments but we hardly picture the government being authoritarian, perhaps just more of nannying. Today’s problem for the world, however, is that our Big Brothers are getting too big, as Leader of The Economist this week pointed out.
The cover of The Economist features a big fat monstrous lump attempting to devour a corporate executive reflecting their perception of how appallingly huge and scary governments have become. As a matter of fact, developed world governments might have taken up to much of economic breathing space because of the recent events and will need to scale down their footprint more. It’s always easy to get involved in many activities in the economy but difficult to pull out. The Briefing talks about state spending ballooning and makes a fierce assault on the weaknesses of government.
One of the case mentioned was their failure to make good use of management consultants, who ends up being portrayed as conman treating “the public sector as dumping grounds for airy-fairy ideas”. Oh well, in a crisis everyone suffers, even the management consultants themselves are not doing well.
I was looking for George Arkelof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits in the library but it was on loan so I decided to look for something else in the Call Number 330 (which some library-goers might note is the ‘Economics’ section) area. I stumbled on ‘Free Market Madness‘ by Peter Ubel.
Ubel’s book is a pretty simple and short one, I took only one and a half day of on-and-off reading to finish it, one of my fastest timing for a non-fiction. Admittedly, the text and paragraph spacings are pretty wide and the book is thin for a hard-cover one. It is largely about behavioural economics, a topic which I hardly have a hard time understanding so the speed by which I finished the book didn’t really surprise me. Nevertheless, I hardly consider Ubel’s Free Market Madness to be that good a book.
For a start, I understand that Ubel is trying to make a case for government intervention in the economy for markets where consumers are ill-placed to make wise choices and where market imperfections like the inadequacy of useful information and the apparent misalignment of producer’s interests and consumer’s interests are significant. He focuses on the case of junk food causing obesity though he touched on other cases such as insufficient retirement funding and overspending on branded drugs. Unfortunately, while he makes a good case for the fact that humans are not entirely rational (something we all know at least implicitly), based mainly on the study of other behavioural scientists and economists, he didn’t give very outstanding or original proposals on how to get around this problems. Even then, he fails to make a good connection with how the conflict between the short-term-self and long-term-self can be resolved by the governments; the question of what sort of happiness/well-being (long term or short term) the ‘Big Brother’ he is advocating should maximize it left to speculation by the reader.
The little technical issues in the examples he cited in his book is by and large criticized by David Gordon, senior fellow of the Mises Institute. Austrian School economists probably think that no one can be innocently obese; it takes two hands to clap and producers and consumers must agree on the transaction for it to take place. In other words, people are obese through a process of attempting to maximize utility within their own accounting. On the other hand, Ubel thinks that the faculty accounting on the part of the consumers need to be rectified – in other words, internalities need to be addressed. The problem is we cannot exactly agree on which accounting is correct; after all, if one’s belief in the goodness of a product can provide additional positive experience in consuming it, the faculty accounting can have such a self-fulfilling effect. I believe I have the tendency to agree with the ordinary economists that humans would have a fair degree of foresight and self-control and in an event where they lack such discipline and ability, the market punishes them very much in the way evolution eliminates those who lack the fitness.
His proposals are rather unoriginal, citing stuff like fat taxes once mentioned in The Economist, default options, persuasion campaigns (largely moral suasion) and possibly outright ban. He did discuss implications on liberty and such but doesn’t dwell much on it – often it seems to me like he’s saying ‘I just want everything to be good and right, I don’t care how’.
I do agree with Ubel, that humans in our age needs more self-control and the public’s awareness of the ills of the markets, the ills of different products that are so ubiquitous in our world today needs to be improved. This self-improvement in discipline and improvement of public knowledge can come from bottom-up rather than top-down. After all, given the circumstances today, it is likely that the group with better knowledge of the markets, those making wiser market decisions and the ones who have better self-control is going to thrive. Parents will have to recognize that and respond accordingly (not too much to hope for given the limited rationality of humans I hope) when educating their children and developing them. And I must have to say that in markets like healthcare and pharmaceutical products, doctors like Ubel himself will have to take the responsibility of protecting their patients from the ills of the market/industry. The imperfect information is really too serious in this market and Ubel is right to say that doctors are practically making decisions for patients – doctors’ recommendations are almost equals to patients’ choice (doctors can’t possibly give their diagnosis to patients and get them to choose medicine for themselves). The government can only do so much to protect the doctors from manipulation by the industry and thus defend the interests of the patients. Physicians themselves will have to take the big step to be responsible doctors.
On the whole, Free Market Madness gives us good idea of how behavioural economics came into being and how traditional economic analysis of indifference is difficult to apply in today’s complex world. As a result, rationality of human beings becomes undermined today. Beyond that, it makes a good alert on the problems humans might have with markets that makes us poor economic agents – in long run we will get exploited somehow. We will need to exploit back by becoming producers of certain exploitive products ourselves or try to defend ourselves through self-restraint and aggressive self-education. Otherwise, if the book is hoping to inspire any sort of action, it might need to be much more.
In today’s The Straits Times, occasional columnist Tom Plate writes about ‘an optimist’s wish list for 2010‘. Tom Plate is a relatively regular columnist for The Straits Times and writes for many other newspapers in the Asia-Pacific as well. His articles also often make for interesting reading because he writes in a rather cheerful and casual (yet still professional) style, a style not exactly like Paul Krugman’s whose writings I recently referred to in my last entry for erpz.net but I enjoy his writings as much as Krugman’s.
In this article, he tries to infuse some optimism into his hopes for the coming year. Some of the wishes are really wishful thinking, but still no harm keeping your fingers crossed.
His wishes: 1. World pays more attention to South Korea, less to North Korea
Well, actually this tactic might work. North Korea is sometimes like an attention-seeking kid throwing a temper-tantrum and sometimes you need to ignore the kid for a while so that he calms down. But then again, does your kid have nuclear weapons that he can throw at his ‘friends’?
2. These bad big shots will resign: Britain’s PM Gordon Brown, Burma’s junta leader Than Shwe & North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il
I agree on the latter two but Gordon Brown… he’s not doing a good job at all in Britain, but he’ll probably be kicked out through the elections this year. Why is Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not on this list? He’s a greater danger to the world than Gordon Brown is.
3. India’s Odd Couple named Time’s Man and Woman of the Year: PM Manmohan Singh & Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi
Like Plate says, US needs to pay more attention to India. It will make not ‘just a good strategic partner’ as US President Obama claims, but a staunch ally and friend not just in the War on Terror but in terms of the global economy and climate change for instance. US needs to soothe the frayed nerves of their Indian counterparts.
4. China’s President Hu opens up, gets down with Western media
This is not that hard to do on a personal perspective, but if you think about the Chinese leadership and how they go about doing things… this is pretty much like expecting Wish Number 2 to magically be granted.
5. Japan finds a successful premier: NOT Yukio Hatoyama
In all honesty, is anything so wrong with current PM Yukio Hatoyama? I think he is hamstrung by his 2 parties allied to his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) that are imposing many demands on him and not toeing the official alliance line. And then there’s DPJ Chairman Ichiro Ozawa who pulls strings behind the scenes… which makes the current PM’s life so difficult. Give him a chance to learn the ropes. We are so willing to give President Obama chances to make mistakes as a newly-minted leader without much experience, so why not PM Hatoyama?
He did not tackle climate change in his article as I hoped he might have, but let’s just stick to politics and economy for now. Or he probably feels pessimistic about climate change as well? We dont really know what he doesnt write, but from what he has written in his above list, if any of the wishes came true it’d make global affairs less complex and less troublesome for America at least.
Paul Krugman’s article, published in The Straits Times, regarding the 2000s, gives quite a bit for thought. Paul Krugman is a famed American economist from Princeton who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2008 for his theories on trade and economic geography. I have always loved to read his articles in The Straits Times because they have always been very insightful and succintly written, and always hit the nail on the head. This article that I introduce here is no different, but it’s slightly different in tone from what he writes.
Usually, he adopts a rather neutral or slightly positive tone in his writings, even if they are regarding the economic crisis today (he studies economic crises, hence his expertise in commenting on them). But in this article he takes a rather pessimistic, negative view towards the decade that just passed us: the Noughties (2000s). He proposes calling it ‘The Big Zero’ because ‘nothing good happened’ and ‘none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true’.
And then he justifies with some general statistics based on America: almost zero job creation, private-sector employment decline, fall in median household income after adjustment for inflation, zero gains for houseowners, zero gains for stocks. Read the article for moredetails, but we all have seemed to come back to square 1, in 1999, or gotten worse off. So what’s with all that optimism about the economy?
By right things were supposed to go well. There was confidence in the financial system, expressed by Lawrence Summers in 1999. Summers is, by the way, the current administration’s top economist and in 1999 then deputy Treasury secretary. He believed then that America had ‘honest corporate accounting’, but this seemed to just vapourise if we look at this century. Even before the current financial meltdown, much earlier on there was Enron and WorldCom, two large and supposedly reliable firms that were exposed for dishonesty.
And then American politics does not seem to have a solution to the problem. The Democrats try to seek compromise in what they seek and their ideas are vehemently opposed by many as being too socialist, while the Republicans seem to believe that the solution to the problems caused by ‘tax cuts and deregulation’ is more ‘tax cuts and deregulation’.
Certainly not a very inspiring decade. But this restricts itself to America of course. I must say that for most other countries it was probably not this bad. If we take the example of China, to call this decade The Big Zero would be to forget its ascent onto the global arena as a superpower. So… the Americans have it bleak but the Asians are having it better.
Key states have announced what they call a “meaningful” agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Summit to tackle climate change. The agreement between the US, China, Brazil, India and South Africa would set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than 2C and, importantly, to take action to meet this objective.
The five-nation brokered deal promised to deliver $30bn of aid for developing nations over the next three years, and outlined a goal of providing $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change. The agreement also included a method for verifying industrialised nations’ reduction of emissions. The US had insisted that China dropped its resistance to this measure.
However, it seems that only the US and China are supposedly “happy” from a meeting which seemingly had a “positive result”, or rather, what I term as a poor return from the 2 weeks worth of discussion.
In the face of a globalized world and the many challenges that we face, what the US and China put forth together seemingly only benefits them. For instance, nothing is done about limiting carbon emissions and on a legally binding treaty, something which sort of “liberalizes” the major powers in the form of US, China and India. With US out of Kyoto and the lack of a legally binding contract, China and India can be said to be free to do whatever they want, with all three nations insisting that national sovereignty comes first.
Now, I’m not saying national sovereignty should be ignored, but as we attempt to tackle a problem that we should have been engaged in long ago, we realize that the Copenhagen Accord, as Jo Leinen, chairman of the European Parliament’s environment committee described, is a completely “disappointment and below our expectations”.
Selfish interests of the global powers dominated the discussion table in Copenhagen, while the rest of the world are let down by their inability to co-operate and come up with a more radical approach to the problem. Yes, this is progress from what has come before, a necessity, but whether it will truly solve the problem, no. The roots of the problem ultimately lie in the countries’ inability to break out of their shell – their inability to come to a solid-enough compromise, and their covert belief that the economy should come first. This inability to commit to this cause from the US, China and India seemingly portrays them in a green limelight.
Progress has been made, yes, but it’s no longer about the ability to make progress, that almost didn’t happen, but rather, how fast we can reach humanity’s goal.
With the Subprime Financial Crisis, the global economy tumbled, trade flows scaled down rapidly as economies started contracting. Initially, during the boom, trade was growing faster than global income, implying that the global growth, mainly concentrated in the already developed parts of the world economy was gained from increasing specialization and division of labour through trade and exchange. And for a slight contraction in the global economy, a lot of these supply chain will face problems in-between and go bust, resulting in a huge contraction in trade since the businesses relied on each other heavily for business. Daniel Gross discusses the decline of trade, and the implied slowdown/reverse of globalization on Slate.com. The situation is probably not as serious as Gross makes it sound.
The crisis is leading to a re-organization of globalization, towards greater degrees of cooperation and perhaps with less imbalances. With economists finding a better means of carry trade, and more reasons for Asia to get together, the world won’t be drifting apart that soon. In the latter article from Banyan column, The Economist highlights the strengths of a more integrated Asian economy and the challenges facing Asia.
The world seem to have accepted the global multilateral trade isn’t exactly going to be possible with all that decline in trade and rise of calls for protectionism and so regional multilateral trade and economic integration is the second best thing. Forming trade blocs or even common markets would do a great deal to help further globalization and put it on a path with more supranational bodies’ control. The idea is that having authorities in the process of globalization might help make it a better force in this world.
