Say Rodrik, Zedillo, Frieden & Pettis.
Sadly, I think they’re correct. This is one of the reasons we see governance shifting to regional blocs like the EU and regional mega-states like China.
Don’t count on global governance…
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Category Archives: Political Economy
The information economy doesn’t pay its taxes
At least, it doesn’t in California. Click for graphic (courtesy of a site bizarrely called “MastersDegreeOnline.org”)
Kenya vs. Jersey
Open access publishing and not-for-profit publishing
Is the UK government’s new requirement of (slightly delayed) free access to publications based on government-funded research a blow to the extortionate power of commercial academic publishers, or will it just entrench them further? Continue reading
ECB in Spain: finally hitting the bondholders?
It’s about time. If this is true, it’s a step in the right direction – towards a fairer sharing of the burden of the crisis, towards increased demand (reduced austerity), and towards creation of a more stable financial system through a reduction in moral hazard.
Save the poor German banks!
In case you were still wondering who was being bailed out (h.t. Counterparties) in Spain…
Blaming the governments of the Eurozone periphery for the current banking & currency crisis is not so different from blaming the mayors of Atlanta and San Bernardino for the US housing bubble.
Innovation in Europe during the crisis
Here’s a report from La Republica on a paper Andrea Filippeti and I are working on.
Bureaucracy and financial crisis in universities
Richard Evans, writing about the University of California system:
In the decade beginning in 1997, while faculty increased by 24 percent and student enrollment increased 39 percent, senior management grew by 118 percent.
He suggests that this might have contributed more than a little to with the financial crisis in those universities, which has been seen in temporary salary cuts (which earn the nice euphamism “employee furloughs”) and higher student fees. He provides the gruesome graphic seen below. (Note: all from a website run by that Council of UC Faculty Associations – so no dog in the fight, right?)
University of California: the cutting edge of red tape
Where I work we do worry a bit about future finances. To preview that future I naturally look to California, where I grew up, since we always liked to think of ourselves as leading the way in everything from psychedelics to electronics. And certainly it has been leading the way of late in the field of problematic public finances, so perhaps this is the shape of things to come.
(A prediction I can make with more confidence is that somebody will write to say that this is not the shape of things to come, but what we have now. About that, I really can’t say.)
War and carbon dioxide
Resource wars. On the occasion of the USA’s Veterans Day, Joe Romm reflects on forthcoming food and water shortages, and the prospect of resource wars. Good discussion, good links. That conflicts over food or other resources can lead to war is not new news, of course: it is in the history of every empire. Last summer in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Snyder reminded us that in the cases of Stalin in the 1930s and Hitler in the 1940s, most of the killing of civilians took place neither in the gulag of Siberia nor death camps in or near Germany, but in the wheat fields of eastern Poland, Ukraine and environs. Whatever the contributions of ideology and madness to those events, Russian and German desires to control that breadbasket had a big hand in the deaths of millions. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain kept food exports flowing from India, in the midst of famine; Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts gives a gripping account of this, and of the link between El Niño, drought, and famine. So when you think of climate change, don’t think of hot weather, hurricanes or dead polar bears: think of just how nasty human society can become when there is a conflict over food.
Carbon dioxide and methane. Recent attention to the warming role of methane has led some in the denial community to use this – as they use everything – to claim that carbon dioxide isn’t so important. At RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt of NASA details the relative contributions of these and other agents to the problem.
Skills, pensions, sustainability: electoral systems have consequences
Electoral reform is back on the British political agenda, which is good. There are some very important things that the British state simply cannot do properly because of its present electoral system, and which it would stand a good chance of doing if it had a well-designed proportional representation (PR) system.
The British state is very bad at providing for a workforce adequately skilled for the twenty-first century, establishing a pension system that doesn’t take your retirement funds for a flutter at the casino-on-Thames, or facing up to big environmental problems like climate change.
For the rest of the story, see my posting at openDemocracy.net, or the longer version, with references here.)
Frederick Guy 