China’s Great Leap and Its Contradictions

Should you have 15 minutes to spare this Christmas Eve, go read Chris Hayes’ excellent article on China in The Nation. He delves into a number of the contradictions in China’s society and economy. Here are some key excerpts:
This marginal population freaks out the Chinese authorities because they desperately wish to avoid the experience of [...]

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Reshaping Economic Development

In MRZine, Jayati Ghosh says that our current framework for economic development needs to be changed.
So the recent boom was not stable or inclusive, either across or within countries.
He has eight elements for reshaping development:
Globally, everyone now recognises the need to reform the international financial system, which has failed to meet two obvious requirements: preventing instability [...]

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“G.D.P. R.I.P.”

In an NYT Op-Ed today, Eric Zencey argues that GDP should be subjected to “creative destruction.” He writes,
Creative destruction can apply to economic concepts as well. And this downturn offers an excellent opportunity to get rid of one that has long outlived its usefulness: gross domestic product. G.D.P. is one measure of national income, of [...]

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Why Are They Hungry?

Hint: it might not be the “poverty trap”…
Jeffrey Sachs has a new article about…the same thing he always talks about:
The G-8’s $20bn initiative on smallholder agriculture, launched at the group’s recent summit in L’Aquila, Italy, is a potentially historic breakthrough in the fight against hunger and extreme poverty. With serious management of the new funds, [...]

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Caritas in Veritate, Chapter Five

Note: This post is the fifth in a series of posts on Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in Veritate”. Also see posts on the Intro and Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, and Chapter Six and Conclusion.

A brief  note before I begin: I’m sort of rushing (in terms of timing, not intellectually, I hope) [...]

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The Happy Planet Index

The New Economics Foundation, a self-described “think-and-do tank,” has released its report (pdf) of the Happy Planet Index 2.0, which endeavors to measure the ecological efficiency with which countries achieve long and happy lives. Professor Herman Daly, a renowned ecological economist, writes in the foreword,
Economists like the concept of efficiency, and the Happy Planet Index [...]

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GDP and Its Shortfalls

Nate Silver (of election projection fame) has an excellent post demonstrating the shortsightedness of harping on GDP numbers, in this case with regards to climate change. He takes to task Jim Manzi, whose argument is that even pessimistic assumptions point to a 5% reduction in GDP from global warming down the road. Silver endeavors to [...]

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Poverty and Human Rights

The idea of human rights has been on my mind lately, and it’s good to know that I’m not alone. Bill Easterly, fresh off his battle in HuffPo with Jeff Sachs, has had a few posts this past week about the topic of poverty as a human rights violation. I think he makes some salient [...]

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Aid Skirmish, cont.

There’s more from Sachs and Easterly this week. See here for my roundup of last week’s tussle in HuffPo.
First, Sachs rebuts the idea of using Occam’s razor for development economics:
Bill Easterly takes a complex problem, African poverty, and tries to reduce it to a single factor: “the consensus among most academic economists is that destructive [...]

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An Aid Skirmish

Last week, Mark Thoma had a roundup (can’t link the specific post because his page won’t load…) over a three-way heavyweight battle in the aid world (I love applying sports lingo to academia, by the way). It appears to have started when Jeff Sachs had an article in HuffPo called “Aid Ironies,” in which he [...]

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