Recently in International Affairs Category

Many people unfortunate enough to have been born in third world countries (and I know quite a few) would give their left arm to live in America. Since we can't take everyone who would want to come, the next best option is to bring slices of America to the third world. A couple of hundred years ago that would have been accomplished by British/Roman-like colonization, but these days that's just too uncouth: some third-worlders may prefer their present form of government to ours. Fine! Enter charter cities.

The deeper problem, widely recognised but seldom addressed, is how to free people from bad rules. I floated a provocative idea. Instead of focusing on poor nations and how to change their rules, we should focus on poor people and how they can move somewhere with better rules. One way to do this is with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new “charter cities,” where developed countries frame the rules and hundreds of millions of poor families could become residents.

How would such a city work? Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges. It could create economic opportunities and encourage foreign investment, and by using uninhabited land it would ensure everyone living there would have chosen to do so with full knowledge of the rules. Roughly 3bn people, mostly the working poor, will move to cities over the next few decades. To my mind the choice is not whether the world will urbanise, but where and under which rules. Instead of expanding the slums in existing urban centres, new charter cities could provide safe, low-income housing and jobs that the world will need to accommodate this shift. Even more important, these cities could give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under. ...

There are large swathes of uninhabited land on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa that are too dry for agriculture. But a city can develop in even the driest locations, supported if necessary by desalinated and recycled water. And the new zone created need not be ruled directly from the developed partner country—residents of the charter city can administer the rules specified by their partner as long as the developed country retains the final say. This is what happens today in Mauritius, where the British Privy Council is still the court of final appeal in a judicial system staffed by Mauritians. Different cities could start with charters that differ in many ways. The common element would be that all residents would be there by choice—a Gallup survey found that 700m people around the world would be willing to move permanently to another country that offers safety and economic opportunity.

Author Paul Romer cites Hong Kong as the archetype and compares its success under British rules to the decades of failure experienced by mainland China.

Why won't this happen? Despite the billions of average people who would benefit, consider the long list of powerful interests who would end up losers if charter cities took off: existing despots and their inner circles; the United Nations; zillions of Non-Governmental Organizations who parasitically exploit aid streams; socialists; nationalists; and probably many more. These loser groups would all band together to prevent the average people of the world from moving en masse into charter cities with better rules.

David Books is wrong: the problems of the third-world are primarily political, and poverty is an effect, not a cause.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

He touches on the corruption issue, but if we really want to help the third-world we'll probably need to resort to the sort of intrusive paternalism that we normally associated with colonialism. I doubt we have the will for it... it's a lot easier to just throw money into a pit and hope for the best.

In one of the most realistic and practical offers of long-term help I've yet seen for a devastated Haiti, Senegal is offering plots of land to Haitians who want to return to their ancestral home.

HAITIANS WHO survived the earthquake have been offered the opportunity to come back “to the land of their ancestors” by Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade.

Mr Wade told French radio he wanted Africa to make room for victims of the disaster as it was from there that many Haitians’ ancestors had originated. ...

Presidential spokesman Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye told reporters that Mr Wade had shared his plans with senior aides, and they involved offering voluntary repatriation and plots of land to any Haitian who wanted “to return to their origin”.

“Senegal is ready to offer them parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,” he said.

Senegal is hardly a wealthy nation, but they're in much better shape than Haiti.

In January 1994, Senegal undertook a bold and ambitious economic reform program with the support of the international donor community. This reform began with a 50% devaluation of Senegal's currency, the CFA franc, which was linked at a fixed rate to the French franc. Government price controls and subsidies have been steadily dismantled. After seeing its economy contract by 2.1% in 1993, Senegal made an important turnaround, thanks to the reform program, with real growth in GDP averaging over 5% annually during 1995-2008. Annual inflation had been pushed down to the single digits. As a member of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), Senegal is working toward greater regional integration with a unified external tariff and a more stable monetary policy.

If I were in Haiti, I certainly would have left for somewhere, long before the recent earthquake.

In the aftermath of the earthquake near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, it is useful to review the four stages of post-disaster misery and to consider how our expensive Western institutions and society are designed to protect us. Each successive stage is easier and cheaper to prevent or mitigate than the stage before it. Unfortunately, in the case of Haiti we're likely to see all four stages play out to their fullest.

Stage 1: Immediate aftermath. People are killed or injured directly by the disaster itself. Stage 1 is often impossible to prevent and very expensive to mitigate.

Stage 2: Zero to three days. Within the first 72 hours people who were injured during the disaster will start to die from their injuries if they do not receive treatment. People who are trapped in rubble or otherwise isolated will also die. Stage 2 can be mitigated by extensive search and rescue capabilities that are on-site in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and by a robust medical system that was not degraded itself by the disaster.

Stage 3: Four days to two weeks. Lack of water, sanitation, and electricity (depending on the climate) will begin to cause an explosion of communicable diseases within the first two weeks after a disaster. People who survive the disaster itself will fall sick with respiratory and digestive tract diseases, and minor injuries will become infected and cause further mortality. Caches of emergency water will be consumed, further weakening the survivors. Stage 3 can be prevented or mitigated by quick repairs to basic services and by the delivery of water and generators.

Stage 4: Two weeks to one month and beyond. Starvation will take hold in urban areas if basic infrastructure is not restored within one month. Urban population centers will begin to dissipate as survivors migrate into rural areas in search of food. Social unrest will quickly lead to the complete breakdown of pre-disaster political institutions, and survivors will form into ad hoc gangs or tribes. Violence will break out as these groups fight for control of resources. Stage 4 can be prevented by strong institutions that are powerful and organized enough to prevent food scarcity and provide basic physical security.

As we've seen in Haiti, most third-world urban centers are precariously balanced -- they wear a visage of civilization, but reality can come crashing down in an instant. The institutions required to mitigate suffering in the aftermath of a disaster are a form of insurance that must be built before a disaster strikes, but they're viewed as a luxury that poor countries are reluctant to invest in when money could instead be spent building an appearance of civilization. They choose to have a higher median quality of life with greater risk than a lower median quality of life with less risk.

The Obama Administration is charging panty-bomber Abdulmutallab with possession of weapons of mass destruction!

Just read Abdulmutallab charging docs. He's charged w/having a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Hmm. So, since we're using the 'criminal' standard, shouldn't all those thousands of pounds of mortars, bombs, missiles, etc in Iraq as WMDs? (leaving yellowcake out of it, since that was sold to Canada for energy)

So wait a minute, now the left is willing to admit that Saddam Hussein had WMD after all?

Despite finding saarin, mustard gas, and other chemical weapons, and despite various prison sentences for those who used them in Iraq or those who sold them, apparently, the only thing that would have satisfied the left that Saddam had WMDs would have been discovering a giant SPECTRE-sized Ken Adam-styled laboratory with men in white lab coats hard at work caught in the act.

Well it's nice to know that our invasion of Iraq are now justified in the minds of the left.

President Obama has been widely criticized for golfing more in his first nine months than President Bush did in his first two years, but the real crisis isn't the President's frequent vacations, it is his persistent vacation from history, as VP Cheney explains:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.

We didn't defeat the Nazis by appeasing them or by winning their friendship, we defeated the Nazis by killing them. After we won, there was plenty of time for (military) trials and executions, as well as the release of regular POWs. If we don't fight to win, we won't win, it's as simple as that.

Update:

Maureen Dowd asks who can we catch?

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.

If Obama has lost Maureen Dowd, it's not clear who is left in his base....

So you think International Community isn't doing enough to police the seas and prevent piracy? Then put your booty where your mouth is and buy shares in a pirate gang!

In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate. ...

"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said.

"The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity."

There isn't a prospectus, but here's some testimony from an current investor!

Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.

"I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony.

"I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."

Past performance is no guarantee of future results, etc.

(HT: Tyler Cowen and Eric Crampton.)

I'm hard-pressed to find an antonym to "surge", but perhaps our brilliantly eloquent President can help me. What do you call it when you promise to send 30,000 more troops but tell the enemy in advance how long they'll be staying? It's a surge of soldiers, to be sure, but it's a psychological retreat.

The problem is not troop numbers. When he declared on Tuesday, "These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011," the president has undercut the McChrystal plan and made success difficult to achieve.

There should be nothing wrong with an open-ended commitment to victory. In late 2006 and early 2007, when the Bush administration put the finishing touches on the strategy that would become the Iraq surge, Obama and many of his top aides questioned its wisdom. On July 19, 2007, for example, Obama declared, "Here's what we know. The surge has not worked." That a year later Obama scrubbed his criticism from his campaign website suggests that today he recognizes the positive impact of George W. Bush's decision. What Obama fails to understand, however, is that the surge is not only a military strategy, but a psychological one as well.

Victory over radical islamists won't be achieved by killing them all, it will be achieved by sapping their continuing will to fight. Surging troops but announcing our defeat in advance will result in more dead islamists while renewing the resolve of the movement as a whole. It's hard to see how that benefits America.

I'd venture that most software geeks are fairly leftist and generally support the theory that human activity is causing global warming. In that light, the biggest revelation from the recently hacked global warming emails might be the awfulness of the climate simulation code.

I've examined two files in some depth and found (OK so Harry found some of this)

• Inappropriate programming language usage
• Totally nuts shell tricks
• Hard coded constant files
• Incoherent file naming conventions
• Use of program libray subroutines that appear to be
• • far from ideal in how they do things when the work
  • do not produce an answer consistent with other way to calculate the same thing
  • but which fail at undefined times
  • and where when the function fails the the program silently continues without reporting the error

AAAAAAAAAARGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!

More code analysis.

I'm pretty proficient at writing simulation software: it's how I earned my PhD and how I earn a living. I've also worked closely with self-trained programmers who only write code to advance their research in other fields, and I can tell you that their code is almost always terrible. Writing good software is extremely difficult, and it doesn't surprise me at all that the climate modeling software is so bad as to be useless. It is always wise to be skeptical about the outputs of simulations, especially if you cannot see the source code for yourself.

I'm not sure how the anonymous writer can characterize this as a wrongness by the Right while agreeing that Obama humiliated himself and America by groveling before Japan's emperor.

Obama's handshake/forward lurch was so jarring and inappropriate it recalls Bush's back-rub of Merkel.

Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first year English teacher trying to impress with Karate Kid-level knowledge of Japanese customs.

The bow as he performed did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms....The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.

I'm glad our current president is so much more subtle and nuanced than our previous.

I find this display of obsequiousness both distasteful and insulting to me as an American citizen.

(HT: Gateway Pundit.)

Eamon Javers asks a contrarian question: "Is China headed toward collapse?".

Chanos and the other bears point to several key pieces of evidence that China is heading for a crash.

First, they point to the enormous Chinese economic stimulus effort — with the government spending $900 billion to prop up a $4.3 trillion economy. “Yet China’s economy, for all the stimulus it has received in 11 months, is underperforming,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in Forbes at the end of October. “More important, it is unlikely that [third-quarter] expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.”

Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics — like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption — indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth. ...

This, Chanos and others argue, is happening in sector after sector in the Chinese economy. And that means the Chinese are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.

So how to hedge against China's failure?

The Obama administration is apparently negotiating a secret copyright treaty whose absurd contents have been leaked.

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

That's just the start of the badness. The whole thing is completely impossible to enforce, so I'm not particularly worried about it. intellectual property is dead and a piece of paper won't bring it back to life.

(HT: RD.)

Ezra Klein notices that American pay more per unit of health care than other countries, but completely fails to understand why.

In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn't set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you'll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers. You'll also notice that the bit showing American prices is separated into blue and yellow: That shows the spread between the average price (the top of the blue) and the 90th percentile (the top of the yellow). Other countries don't have nearly that much variation, again because their pricing is standard.

Other governments set prices that are artificially low, often barely above the marginal cost for drug and equipment manufacturers. These prices are just barely high enough that it's worth selling products in these countries given that the products have already been developed, but the margins aren't high enough to actually finance the research and development that goes into creating the drugs and equipment. These R&D costs are carried by American consumers, which is why our costs are higher.

The problem, however, isn't that our costs are too high -- the problem is that foreign countries are free-riding on the American consumer and thereby paying too little. If the American government attempts to set our prices as low as those of other countries, the health care industry that cares for the world will wither and die. Instead, we should be looking for ways to force foreign countries to pay more reasonable prices.

One possible approach is to pass a law prohibiting the sale of any specific drug or equipment in America at a price more than X% higher than that paid by an average of the next 10 highest price countries. Such a rule would force the health care industry to either push for higher prices in foreign countries or stop sales there entirely, instead of settling for prices barely above their marginal cost.

Anyway, the point isn't that the health care industry is ripping off Americans, but that foreign countries are free-riding off our mostly free market.

The Obama administration as been on the wrong side of this issue from the very beginning, but now it's worse: Honduran government caves into US pressure, agrees to Zelaya’s restitution.

The interim leader of Honduras says he is ready to sign a pact to end its crisis which could include the return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

Roberto Micheletti said the agreement would create a power-sharing government and require both sides to recognise the result of November’s presidential poll.

Mr Zelaya said the deal, which requires the approval of the Supreme Court and Congress, would be signed on Friday.
…
The opponents had earlier been told by US Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon that they had to reach an accord in order to ensure international support for the election on 29 November.

Zelaya was removed from power by the Honduran supreme court and congress because of his attempts to circumvent the country's constitution and make himself dictator-for-life. So why is Obama forcing his return?

Why is this administration siding with Zelaya and his main supporter, Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez? Chavez is known to be hostile towards the U.S while working closely with Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is on the brink of obtaining a nuclear weapon and has established a bank in Venezuela with Chavez to avoid the sanctions already imposed against Iranian financial institutions responsible for transferring funds to Tehran's nuclear program. Actually, the Obama Administration and the Chavez regime sponsored a UN resolution that condemned the government of Honduras for legally removing Chavez's puppet "Mel" Zelaya.

You may not be surprised to learn that international evil-doer Goerge Soros is involved.

(HT: Fausta's Blog, with lots more links.)

George Friedman writes about why (some) Europeans love Obama, framed with a discussion of the President's recent Nobel Peace Prize.

Let's begin by being careful with the term European. Eastern Europeans and Russians -- all Europeans -- do not think very highly of him. The British are reserved on the subject. But on the whole, other Europeans west of the former Soviet satellites and south and east of the English Channel think extremely well of him, and the Norwegians are reflecting this admiration. It is important to understand why they do.

The Europeans experienced catastrophes during the 20th century. Two world wars slaughtered generations of Europeans and shattered Europe's economy. Just after the war, much of Europe maintained standards of living not far above that of the Third World. In a sense, Europe lost everything -- millions of lives, empires, even sovereignty as the United States and the Soviet Union occupied and competed in Europe. The catastrophe of the 20th century defines Europe, and what the Europeans want to get away from.

The Cold War gave Europe the opportunity to recover economically, but only in the context of occupation and the threat of war between the Soviets and Americans. A half century of Soviet occupation seared Eastern European souls. During that time, the rest of Europe lived in a paradox of growing prosperity and the apparent imminence of another war. The Europeans were not in control of whether the war would come, or where or how it would be fought. There are therefore two Europes. One, the Europe that was first occupied by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union still lives in the shadow of the dual catastrophes. The other, larger Europe, lives in the shadow of the United States.

(HT: LM.)

Does anyone really think that President Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

A beaming President Barack Obama said Friday he was both honored and humbled to win the Nobel Peace Prize and would accept it as a "call to action" to work with other nations to solve the world's most pressing problems.

Obama told reporters in the White House Rose Garden that he wasn't sure he had done enough to earn the award, or deserved to be in the company of the "transformative figures" who had won it before him.

Even the meglomaniacal Savior himself is unsure of his worthiness. If he were at all in touch with reality he would have scored major kudos by refusing to accept the award. As it is, I expect the prize will hurt him more than it helps him by drawing attention to the hyped-up aura he exudes.

Oh, and maybe it's unconstitutional?

Article 1, Section 9:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Well Obama is the constitutional scholar, so I'm sure there's no problem.

Why is everyone saying "no" to President Obama?

The Saudis twice said no to his request for normalization gestures towards Israel (at Barack Obama's meeting with King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, and in Washington at meetings with Hillary Clinton). Who says no to the American president twice? What must they think of Obama in the desert kingdom?

The North Koreans said no to repeated attempts at talks, by test-launching long-range missiles in April; Russia and China keep on saying no to tougher sanctions on Iran; the Iranians keep saying no to offers of talks by saying they're willing to talk about everything except a halt to uranium enrichment; Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is saying no by refusing to meet with Binyamin Netanyahu until Israel freezes all settlement construction; the Israelis said no by refusing to agree to a settlement freeze, or even a settlement moratorium until and unless the Arabs ante up their normalization gestures. Which brings us back to the original Saudi no.

The only thing Obama did manage to get Bibi and Abbas to say yes to is a photo-op at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in NY. Mazel tov.

At least Obama is accomplishing the primary goal that he has articulated: weakening America's power and influence around the world.

Thanks to economic and political liberalization from almost 30 years ago, Chile is poised to be South America's first "developed" nation.

The role and achievements of Chile’s team of classical liberal economists is well known. They were the ones who in 1975, once the quasi-civil war was over, decided to carry out a principled, “friendly takeover” of the military government that had arisen from the breakdown of democracy in 1973 (here is my essay, published in “Society”, on that drama). Much less well-known, however, is that they were also the foremost proponents of a gradual and constitutional return to a limited democracy.

In fact, on August 8, 1980, a new Constitution, containing both a bill of rights and a timeline for the restoration of full political freedom, was proposed and approved in a referendum. In the period 1981-1989, what Fareed Zakaria has called the “institutions of liberty” were created—an independent Central Bank, a Constitutional Court, private television and universities, voting registration laws, etc—since they were crucial for having not only elections but a democracy at the service of freedom. Then on March 11, 1990, an extraordinary event happened: the governing military Junta surrendered its power to a democratically elected government in strict accordance to the 1980 Constitution (here is my note on the restoration of democracy in Chile).

Sounds like a nice place to retire.

(HT: LM.)

Interesting observations about a Chinese Wal-Mart in Beijing.

They can’t compete on price in China, of course. So my guess is that they are trying to compete on selection, convenience, and customer service (thus all the sampling). That you can return stuff was very clear.

Also, they sell live turtles... for food or pets? Unknown.

(HT: BM.)