Totalitarianism Today

TOTALITARIANISM TODAY

Friday, November 15, 2002

They're watching you

Radley Balko's post about the US Government's Information Awareness Office should beguile any fan of the formerly-excellent X-files.

Friday, November 15, 2002

All my homeland's insecurities

Two days ago, the House passed the homeland security bill with a vote of 299 to 121. The list for Republican Congressmen who voted "No" on the Homeland Security Bill, which attempts to establish the new Department of Homeland Security includes: Cannon
Duncan
Flake
Hostettler
Moran (Kansas)
Ron Paul (Texas)

On Tuesday, key Senate Democrats announced that they would vote for President Bush's homeland security department, despite vehement opposition from organized labor. Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and John Breaux, D-La., broke a months-long deadlock and paved the way for Congress to approve what some have called "the biggest reorganization of the federal bureaucracy since World War II".As noted by Senator Robert Byrd, who certainly took his time on the floor yesterday, the plan would consolidate 22 federal agencies in domestic emergencies and would increase intelligence capabilities against terrorism, with profoundly disturbing effects on privacy rights.

Director of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, has wasted no time in making new appointments to this department, thereby increasing the stakes of some civil servants in the extent to which the D.H.S. recieves enough money to pay their salaries. In addition, the Bush administration has suggested that it will draw largely on private contractors for goods and service procurement-- an idea which many conservatives have embraced. More savvy Congress-watchers, however, know that tightening links between government and business will eventually lead to increased special-interest lobbies with the potential to skew sound economic policy (i.e. the steel industry is a great example, as well as the military-industrial complex). Underlying the Republican confidence in this new bill is the wrong-headed assumption that "building a behemoth" will be easy. A quick peek at this picture showing government reorganization after this dept. becomes a reality suggests another outsome.

There are significant reasons for concern about the provisions of the Homeland Security bill. Writing for the Washington Times, Audrey Hudson expresses concern about a provision in the bill that will exempt exempt its employees from whistleblower protection, the very law that helped expose intelligence-gathering missteps before September 11. On this note, a comment made by Bush in a speech several months ago appears interesting:

" Right now, as many as a hundred different government agencies have some responsibilities for homeland security, and no one has final accountability. For example, the Coast Guard has several missions, from search and rescue to maritime treaty enforcement. It reports to the Transportation Department, whose primary responsibilities are roads, rails, bridges and the airways. The Customs Service, among other duties, collects tariffs and prevents smuggling -- and it is part of the Treasury Department, whose primary responsibility is fiscal policy, not security."

Human Rights watch admonished Congressmen for the lack of rights protection in this bill during a significant letter-writing campaign.

The biggest concern for Americans, however, should come from the fact that nothing in the attempt to establish the D.H.S., or any other governmental agency for that matter, conflicts with the Bush administration's officially articulated "National Security Strategy for the United States of America".

Friday, November 15, 2002

"Just war" or just another war?

According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' recent statement concerning the potential for a "just war" in Iraq. Their position was fairly ambivalent, given the Pope's view that a war on Iraq would be a moral hazard. An excerpt from the statement:

We offer not definitive conclusions, but rather our serious concerns and questions in the hope of helping all of us to reach sound moral judgments. People of good will may differ on how to apply just war norms in particular cases, especially when events are moving rapidly and the facts are not altogether clear. Based on the facts that are known to us, we continue to find it difficult to justify the resort to war against Iraq, lacking clear and adequate evidence of an imminent attack of a grave nature. With the Holy See and bishops from the Middle East and around the world, we fear that resort to war, under present circumstances and in light of current public information, would not meet the strict conditions in Catholic teaching for overriding the strong presumption against the use of military force.

Contrast this with a recent statement by the Pope which directly and unambiguously "called on Christian countries to work for peace rather than be dragged into what he described as a futile logic of conflict". War is a challenge for all religions, as it holds the fear of insecurity next to the primary, non-violent principles of religion. It will be interesting to see if American Catholics can resist the call to arms.

Friday, November 15, 2002

Taking sides

Brink Lindsey finally answers the much-debated question.

Thursday, November 14, 2002

The transition blues

In an excellent article for the London Review of Books, John Lloyd makes a powerful (and I believe, true) statement:

If we know one large thing after the fall of communism, it is that there is no such thing as a transformation, or at least not one accoplished with consent".

Though the jury is still out on this one, the commencement of NATO Round 2 accession talks in Prague this week might shed some light on the varieties of the postcommunist experience as well as its likely effect on future political and economic events in CEE states.

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Daniel Pipes' black-list of American professors who are thinking outside the box

Daniel Pipes has taken it upon himself to found Campus Watch, described as an organization to "monitor, assess, and improve Middle East studies in North America". To understand what he means by this, a recent article for the New York Post, "Profs Who Hate America", is illuminating. Pipes has a nuclear bone to pick with the professors on American university campuses who are inane enough to "consider the United States (not Iraq) the problem and oil (not nukes) the issue". Just who are these misinformed academic souls?

Pipes' black-list includes Noam Chomsky, linguistics professor at MIT and publisher of dozens of books on US foreign policy and manufactured consent, whom Pipes chides for saying that Bush and his cronies are not really going after Saddam for his crimes against humanity, but rather for Iraqi oil. Apparently, Pipes has not studied foreign policy enough to know that strategic resources, like oil, have been at the heart of many 20th century wars. Chomsky is merely arguing from the realist position in assuming that the US is not going after Saddam because of dead Iraqi children. If that were the case, as Pipes prefers to believe, then bombing would not even be considered, as it will definitely kill Iraqi children.

Pipes also attacks Jim Rego, a visiting assitant professor at Swarthmore, for his comment at a post-Sept. 11th panel dicussion (rather blunt, I grant: "I think we've run out of people's butts to kick and that we essentially want to keep the butt-kicking going." Would Pipes have us believe that the defense industry and the oil coalition DOES NOT take an interest in US wars? Would Pipes have us refuse to think about these questions, choosing instead to accept the official line, even though doing so before did not prevent the events of Sept. 11th?

Then there is that shyster, Eric Foner, professor of 19-century American history at Columbia University, who suggested that a preemptive war against Iraq "takes us back to the notion of the rule of the jungle". Pace PipesI'm not sure that Bush would disagree. Or Glenda Gilmore, an assistant professor of history of the American South at Yale University, who told the Yale school paper that:

confrontation with Iraq represents a plot to expand American power. It is nothing less, she asserts, than "the first step in Bush's plan to transform our country into an aggressor nation that cannot tolerate opposition." She concludes by quoting the wisdom of a cartoon character: "We have met the enemy, and it is us."

Pipes goes on to mention other professors who undercut this need for national unification behind the war effort. But he confuses the job of professors with the job of sycophants or public-relations officers. Academia is supposed to provide an open forum for the discussion of ideas and their consequences. Academia is not a pep-rally for the current US government. If Pipes enjoys that sort of thing, he might have been happier in Ceausescu's communist Romania, where photographs of a smiling, airbrushed Ceausescu lined the inside cover of every Romanian textbook. I hope that I am misreading Pipes' intent. I'll let you be the judge and jury. What exactly does Pipes want from American university professors? How can they live up to his nefarious expectations of patriotism? Pipes does offer a few clues.

" The time has come for adult supervision of the faculty and administrators at many American campuses. Especially as we are at war, the goal must be for universities to resume their civic responsibilities.

This can be achieved if outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others) take steps to create a politically balanced atmosphere, critique failed scholarship, establish standards for media statements by faculty and broaden the range of campus discourse."

What Pipes should note is that NONE of these professors have attacked or blamed the American people for these events. Indeed, reading their works, one realizes that they very much view the American people as victims of bad US foreign policy and the horrors of international terrorists.

Thursday, November 14, 2002

I Ask You by Billy Collins

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Another argument for private schooling: The problem of autism

Writing for the New York Times, Polly Morrice explains her decision to place her autistic child in a private school, given that autism is a "window-of-opportunity disorder" with treatment succeeding more depending on how young the child is at the age of starting treatment. The concurrent rise in the number of autism cases has combined with fiscal education problems to make public schools increasingly less capable of teaching and treating autistic children. Notably, in Texas, government-sponsored programs for children with autism and other developmental disabilities have waiting lists of up to nine years-- too late for early intervention.

Experts say the most effective treatment in very young children is intensive education -- that means one-on-one teaching of language and skills, which costs an average of around ,000 a year. Despite provisions of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, less than 10 percent of children with autism receive the amount of therapy that a national panel of experts recommended last year. Then there is of course the problem of insurance coverage. Despite mounting research showing that autism is a genetically-based brain disorder, some health insurance companies do not accept it as a health condition and refuse to pay for such services as speech and occupational therapy. In situations like this, the application of a Rawlsian veil of ignorance is appropriate in attempting to decide what the best policy options might be.

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

The burning of US flags should be considered an international crime against humanity. And Ross Perot should oversee court prosecutions.

According to an RFE report filed yesterday, a court gave two unnamed Macedonians suspended jail sentences on 12 November for burning the U.S. flag during a 1999 protest against the NATO-led intervention in Kosova, Reuters reported from Skopje. These were the first convictions for burning the U.S. flag in Macedonia, which receives extensive U.S. political, economic, and military support. Silly Macedonians... didn't they realize that the NATO bombing of Kosovo was in the best interests of humanity? Sure, it created a tremendous refugee flow which just-so-happened to nearly double the Albanian population in Macedonia, eventually leading to a civil catastrophe in this previously-peaceful state, but NATO didn't intend for any of that to happen. Consider it a case of "collateral damage". When will those ungrateful Europeans ever LEARN? Sometimes I think we just ought to take our troops out and stop helping them. (If my sarcasm is not apparent at this point, I would advise you to check the premises of your alleged earnesty.)

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

Bubble economics

Everyone, economists and non-economists alike, has a pet theory on why the bubble burst. Take Steven Pearlstein, for example, who blames it on excess "euphoria" and "money culture".

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

Why it is not useful to make a boogeyman out of general "dialectic"

Despite the failure of "communism" in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc states, some political theorists still attempt to operationalize Marxist dialectic for the purposes of explaining political outcomes. This isn't so much dangerous as it is useless. Joshua Murvachik provides an insight as tho why this is the case in a recent article for Foreign Policy. Engels argues for dialectic on the grounds that, under conventional logic, "a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else". Given this view, Engels believed that dialectic allows us to view how a thing can both exist and not exist-- it lets us map the evolution of an idea, as a thing's precise moment of death is hard to determine.

The notorious Sidney Hook protested the Engelian approach to dialectic with a very powerful question:

"State a proposition that would false accrding to conventional logic but true according to dialectic."

Muravchik poses a similar, and equally compelling question. Just because the precise moment if death is hard to determine, does that really mean that at some point a creature is both dead and alive?

There is, however, a problem with Muravchik's critique of dialectic, as he fails to explain precisely what makes Hegelian dialectic different from Kantian, Aristotlean, and Platonic dialectic. The word dialectic, itself, comes from the Greek word dialektike, which translates to "the art of conversation or debate". Dialetic can describe methods of inquiry as dissimilar as the Socratic method or basing rational inferences on probable premises (the Aristotlean version). For Kant, dialectic is "the logic of illusion", or the misuse of logic to deliver the appearnce of solid belief. What matters for the sake of Muravchik's position is how Hegelian dialectic, which Engels absorbs to construct the idea of "dialectical materialism" (the real communist boogeyman), differs from other forms. For Hegel, dialectic refers to the necessary process-- that of overcoming the contradiction between thesis and antithesis through synthesis-- that makes up progress in both thought and the world. On the Hegelian view, this dialectic will continue until perfection, or the perfect thought or being, is reached. Engels and Marx extended this to economic history, arguing that the progression of various economic systems (socialism, capitalism, etc.) would eventually lead to perfect communism. Inevitably.

The rub is in the assumption of "inevitably". There is no reason to believe that dialectic ultimately leads us closer to the perfect, the good, or the truth. Granted, it gives us different ways of understanding the perfect, the good, and the "truth". But this is not reason to assert its final victory. Muravchik would do better to focus on the utopian assumptions inherent in Hegelian dialectic (as opposed to the wiser Socratic or Aristotlean versions) for his criticism, for the real monster is usually the messianic one who promises "not now, but someday". The tragic moments in history are replete with such failed promises.

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

A prince worth watching

Prince Leonard supposedly got sick of Australia's inefficient farming quota system and decided that the only way to preserve his land would be to remove his property from Australia, declaring himself a prince of his lands, notifying the Queen and here he is today, issuing postage stamps, passports, currency and anything else a sovereign state chooses to do.For my friends in Alabama: looks like sugar-coated secession to me. How's about it boys?

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

In search of a quorum, or even just a forum...

Franz Kafka once wrote:

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Alan Dershowitz: Is it "just revenge" or just revenge?

Since Sept. 11th of 2001, Harvard law school professor Alan Dershowitz altered his tune on civil liberties in order to deal with the growing security threat posed by terrorism. He has been voraciously public about his new views, going so far as to expound on the "five myths of terrorism" in foreign policy arenas (clearly not his area of expertise). While Dershowitz's views have received commendation in the DC area, his peers in Boston have not been quite so supportive. An NPR-based Boston radio program described his position condescendingly, perhaps assuming that logic doesn't matter to lawyers as much as it used to.

The celebrated trial lawyer known for fighting death penalty convictions says terrorism works because we let it, that terrorists succeed because the governments of the world listen not just to the sound of the bomb, but also to the grievances behind it. Dershowitz says we reap what we sow by accommodating criminals, and we should, in fact, ignore the "root causes" behind attacks on embassies, airplanes, and discos. Jail time, new levels of security, torture, even targeted assassinations are among his answers. Get serious, he says, or the cycle of violence will just continue.

In the first chapter of Why Terrorism Works, Dershowitz begins with a quote from not-quite-civil-libertarian George Bush:"[Terrorists] need to know that these crimes only hurt their cause." From there, he goes on to argue that appropriate responses to terrorism include collective punishment of those who merely approve of attacks, bypassing the judicial process with targeted assasinations, creating national ID cards to provide more targeted population monitoring for enforcement authorities, and forcing terrorists to talk by torturing them. Kinky? No, not really-- just the new face of civil liberties in the post-Sept. 11th world.

Some of Dershowitz's assertions, like the statement that Palestinian terrorist tactics have proved a success for the Palestinian cause, reveal the extent to which personal emotions are entangled in his legal and ethical reasoning. The only thing Palestinians have "gained" from terrorism is martial law, the continuining excuse of the part of international groups to deny them a state, and an increase in the number of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In addition, (hopefully) casual comments like--"The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldoze all of the buildings"-- fail to convince an audience of Dershowtiz's alleged policy-driven, pragmatism-based position on dealing with Palestinian terrorism.

It should come as no surprise that Dershowitz's fiction-writing career has been of increasing personal importance in the past few years. Granted, writing about the law isn't very much fun when you lack respect for the rule of law, or when you have earned nicknames like "professor of torture". Discussing his latest fictional venture, Just Revenge, Dershowitz admits that it is "a very personal book", whose them is jutice, retribution, or revenge when the legal system does not work. Nan Goldberg describes the plot as follows:

The case in "Just Revenge" involves an old man, Max Menuchen, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor who discovers that the man who murdered his entire family, along with the rest of the Jewish population of Vilna, is living outside of Boston only a few miles from Max himself. The mass murderer, Marcellus Prandus, had never been charged with a crime; he had emigrated to America, married and fathered two sons, and is now a grandfather, a model citizen and devoted family man. Prandus, an old man himself, has cancer, and there is no possibility of using legal means to bring him to justice; he would be dead long before the U.S. government could gather enough evidence to deport him. So Max, who survived the massacre by clawing his way out of a mass grave between the corpses of his relatives and neighbors, takes the law into his own hands. He exacts a terrible retribution, for which he is arrested and tried for murder. At trial, he is defended by an old friend, Abe Ringel�also the protagonist of "The Advocate's Devil"�a man who bears a strong biographical and philosophical resemblance to Alan Dershowitz, as well as Dershowitz's mother's family name.

Dershowitz also confesses that he is not categorically opposed to the decision to take justice into one's own hands. Then again, neither is Osama bin Laden. When he suggests it is "approptiate" and fair for Jews to murder former Nazi Germans, when he says that "there should have been more biblical justice-- an eye for an eye", he opens a little door for post-communist brats like myself, who would love to see justice done to the former communists controlling the CEE states right now. Considering the broad sweep of biblical justice, however, he might also be opening the door to "just killings" of those who steal parking lot places when you are late to work, suicidally-slow government bureaucrats, or members of the American Armed forces. To his credit, Dershowitz's fiction rises above the average John Grisham or Michael Crichton. Even his concept for a new literary genre, "the ethical thriller", intrigues more than it fetishizes. Yet there is a profound disconnect between the Dershowitz known for his civil libertarian approach to the law and the sad, cynical, angry man he has become.

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Stand back

If you haven't been reading Stand Down, then you will probably get a raise, be eligible for government employment, and remain a citizen in "good standing" (i.e. one who can't stand for sitting down). Aside from my own entry posted yesterday, I've been adding a few useless comments to the entries of my peers. Seek and ye shall find. Stand and ye shall learn not to fear falling.

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Homo economicus seems to have non-rational feelings about the economy

Nobel-Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a significant contributor to the study of behavioral economics, conducted an experiment a few years ago which revealed that people often lack the ability to forsee what will make them happy, or be conducive to their well-being.. It seems that while people often know when they are happy, they aren't very good at predicting what will make them happy. In Kahneman's experiment, some of the students who predicted that they would enjoy eating ice-cream while listening to their favorite music for a designated time-period eight days in a row eventually found themselves disgusted by it. Likewise, some of the students who thought they would hate it turned out to love it. Surely there are more complicated reasons for such results than the familiar adage of the family matriarch-- "If you eat your spinach, you'll learn to love it."

Modern neoclassical economics, as expanded through rational choice theory, assumes that people act on the basis of their own self-interest. It also assumes that people know what is in their self-interest. Since agents are both rational and knowledgeable, the outcomes of aggregated economic decisions provide a firm basis upon which to conduct economic analysis. So why are economists discovering situations in which the ever-cold, hard, and rational Homo economicus appears warm, slippery, and even a tad bit confused?

To understand market conditions, political trends, and social developments (among many other things), it will not suffice to design aggregates of what people do-- it is also crucial to know how people feel. Dropping for a moment the assumption of Homo economicus encourages economists to move beyond idealistic comparisons, like perfect competition, by forcing them to face the skeleton in Keynes' closet, which is that utility-maximization and rational-choice-based analysis fails to account for the powerful role of social norms, brute uncertainty, and the knowledge problem in effecting individial behavior. More particularly, it might help economists explain why economic sentiment remains so pessimistic even as the American economy is about 4 trillion dollars bigger and much more productive than it was a decade ago.

Essentially, behavioral economists seek to answer two inter-related questions. First, are the assumptions of utility or profit maximization good approximations of real behavior? Second, do individuals maximize subjective expected utility? Dismissed as a mere "trend" by senior economists a few years ago, behavioral economics has already evolved into what Matthew Rabin calls "second-wave behavioral economics". Rather than justifying their reasons for expanding on the traditional bare-boned neoclassical approach, behavioral economists have begun the actual examination of economic problems (such as the problem of collective good and other-regarding preferences) using a combined approach. Skeptics might do well to remember that ten years ago, economists predicted the same trend-life for game theory, which is now part of most graduate economic studies curriculums.

Will the second-wave be able to offer insight into the quantitative problems which have plagued the examination of economic well-being so far? They are certainly willing to try. James Surowiecki notes that Princeton economist Alan Kreuger has joined Kahneman in an attempt to find a way to measure economic well-being, or what he calls "a GDP of mood":

There was, for example, the pleasant experiment devised by an M.I.T. psychologist named Dan Ariely . Ariely had each of forty volunteers put "a selected finger" in a vise. Each volunteer endured a series of trials, in which the pressure was kept constant for the whole trial, increased, or decreased. (There was no ice cream.) After each trial, the volunteers, having removed their fingers from the vise, were asked to rate the pain. On average, they said�not surprisingly�that it hurt a lot. What was notable, however, was that when the volunteers had been subjected to decreasing pressure they reported less pain than when the pressure was maintained or increased, even though Ariely had made sure to apply the same amount of total force in each trial.

The vise experiment was a perfect illustration of something that Kahneman calls the Peak/End rule. When people assess a past experience, they pay attention above all to two things: how it felt at the peak and whether it got better or worse at the end. A mild improvement�even if it's an improvement from "intolerable" to "pretty bad"�makes the whole experience seem better, and a bad ending makes everything seem worse. That might help explain why Americans feel so gloomy. Even after the stock-market crash and the recession of 2001, the country is still a lot richer than it would have been had we muddled through the past decade. But the severity of the bust has overshadowed all the real benefits that we reaped from the boom. We might actually feel better now if we had endured years of mediocre but steady growth instead of a precipitous rise and fall.

Surowiecki also points out that empirical evidence doesn't support the idea that being richer actually increases people's happiness.

The first important study of national well-being, by the economist Richard Easterlin, found that once a country achieves a certain level of wealth getting richer makes no difference. And a famous 1978 study of lottery winners found that a year after hitting the jackpot they were barely happier than a control group of regular shlubs.

Instead, the "hedonic treadmill" prevents us from appreciating the good when it is no longer the excellent. A man who gets his second jet airplane will probably not be as ecstatic as he was when he got his first jet. Similarly, the American acculturization to good economic times makes it more difficult to be happy in mediocre ones. The question raising its hand for an immediate answer, Surowiecki believes, deals with the relationship between unhappiness and economic downturns. Can an unhappy public create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the economy gets worse because most people believe that it will get worse?

Can unhappiness hurt an economy? Studies have shown that self-described happy people earn more and are more productive. (Of course, we don't know if success makes them happy, or vice versa.) And, clearly, economic malaise can feed on itself: glum investors turn miserly, consumers get tight, and businessmen balk at risk.

I think the answer to this question is an emphatic "Mais, oui", as social norms and herd instincts trump rational deliberation in situations where people are excessively provoked or extremely panicked. Mark Frauenfelder describes social-norms marketing as the �science of persuading people to go along with the crowd�. According to Frauenfelder, �the technique works because people are allelomimetic - that is, like cows and other herd animals, our behavior is influenced by the behavior of those around us�. When we see a crowd of people running for the emergency exits, we tend to follow them. Likewise, it might be argued that when one big investor starts hording capital or down-sizing his product supply, insecure investors are apt to follow in his footsteps.

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Love in the EU

My best French friend, Aurelie Girard, whom I met when studying in France during 7th grade, is doing Ralph the honor of a ceremony otherwise known as marriage. Always the conscientious political activist, Aurel told me that she and Ralph "decided to be good european citizens and strenghten the franco-german relations... and do a european wedding". Which makes me wonder what strange, unfortunate breed I should marry to do my share for the global peace movement. Suggestions, anyone? Right now, I'm leaning towards the cute kid with the dashing red hat in the photo. (Don't scowl-- I'm following a well-established precedent set by some Catholic priests of America.)

Monday, November 11, 2002

Balcerowitz talks about economic transition

The London-based Institute of Economic Affairs released Post-Communist Transition: Some Lessons by Leszek Balcerowicz. The author, president of the National Bank of Poland, former Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, and one of the leading reformers in eastern Europe, discusses the varying outcomes of transitions in different countries, concluding that it was policies more so than initial conditions that produced the differences in transitions. Balcerowicz argues that the larger the scope of marketingof market-oriented reforms, the better the performance in in terms of growth, low inflation and environmental improvement. The presence of competent and determined reformers has also been a crucial factor in successful transformations.