We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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As 2005 draws to its close it is customary to make some predictions about the following year. I won’t do so. The world’s stock markets are ending the year in better shape than I would have expected a year before, notwithstanding the impact of higher oil prices and the devastating hurricanes that hit the U.S. gulf coast. What is interesting to me though is how the market in making predictions has continued to accelerate, spawining exotic derivatives connected even to the weather.
More than two years ago in the United States, some policymakers toyed with the idea of a predictions market to help figure out terrorist threats. The idea was killed off, partly, so it was argued, due to some terrible PR for the idea as well as a cowardly refusal to embrace controversial ideas. Lawrence Lessig takes a different view here.
The market in making predictions has, of course, been around for decades, if one thinks about the commodity futures markets such as the great wheat futures markets in Chicago, for instance. This Wikipedia entry I linked to shows just how broad the prediction market now goes, such as people taking bets on future scientific innovations, and so on. And these markets can be harnessed to garner useful knowledge about where certain things may be headed as well as fund valuable research.
That’s my prediction, anyway.
(Wikipedia link fixed. Thanks to a commenter for pointing out the error).
As I sit in the Coffee&Co café in Bratislava (a town I am rather fond of visiting) taking advantage of its offer of free wireless broadband (ah, no more OWLS for me)…
…I am yet again struck by what changes are being wrought by the internet, and what amazing possibilities it opens up.
Although I studied Russian many years ago when the Cold War was steering me in certain directions, that knowledge has long since been flushed by my brain. Yet the other night just before I left London for Slovakia, I was exchanging e-mails with a chap in Moscow, translating (or more accurately transliterating) my Latin script English into Cyrillic Russian via a free on-line system and similarly translating his replies into English.
The results were rather crude and took a bit of smarts to interpret but we were able to conclude our business most satisfactorily. It really did bring home to me that even though we are only at the very start of the communications revolution (and revolution it is), the ways the internet will change everything are incalculable. The social, scientific, economic and political implications are so far reaching that I am sure the world twenty years from now will be hard to recognise.
Perhaps that is just stating the obvious but for me at least it is the very fact I am now so blasé about all the things the internet makes possible for me that makes it is useful to sometimes stand back and marvel at what an astonishing thing it is. Of course just as we take electric light as a given and only appreciate it when the power goes out, I might be unusually appreciative because at the moment I do not have my usual 24/7 broadband access and there is nothing like withdrawal to make you value getting a ‘fix’.
The Chinese economy is set to be bigger in GDP terms than that of Britain by the end of this year, according to this report. Of course, raw statistics, such as aggregate economic numbers, do not tell the entire story, such as the degree of upward mobility, quality of life, extent of personal opportunity and so forth, but even so, China’s growth remains for me the most compelling economic story of the past year. It is interesting to speculate just what the world economy would be like without the dynamo of China.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether China’s economic dynamism is eventually reflected in greater individual liberty. The jury is well and truly out on that question. Meanwhile, this article in Forbes is worth a look.
Tom Peters, who presumably found it in this piece, reports:
This banner, in Chinese, hangs in each room of the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd., amidst the Rongcheng Industry Zone, 100 miles from Beijing:
“THE CUSTOMER IS GOD AND THE MARKET DECIDES EVERYTHING”
People say things like this from time to time, but they seldom mean them, and they never mean them when at all severely challenged
I mean, suppose you were to ring up the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd. and to say: “Hello, God speaking. I want you to design my daughter’s wedding dress. It must be genuine silk, with genuine gold fiddly bits sewn into it, with miniature iPods for buttons, and must win numerous design awards. However, being God, I don’t want to pay more than 50 pence. Got that did you? Fine. Tomorrow morning then. The wedding’s tomorrow afternoon.” I know, I know, God has no daughter, and if He did have a daughter, she would probably not get married. She would do altogether more dramatic things than that. Not my point. Which is: would the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd. knuckle under to such a demand? Would they obey God, the customer, you, and supply an expensive product at less than it costs them to produce it? I think not. They would surely respond instead with something more along the lines of: “Not quite our kind of job. If you want lots of cheap dresses to sell in your shop, maybe we can do business. Take a look at our website, and see if there is anything there that you like.” God might not be satisfied with an answer like that, but you, a mere customer, would have to settle for that, or something like it.
Or to put all of the above another way, “the market” includes everyone, and everyone’s desires and plans, consumers and producers. Customers are indeed sovereign, over themselves and what is rightfully theirs, but so are producers. Customers do not have to pay for things they do not want, and producers do not have to produce things they do not want to produce. The market is not some ghastly new tyrant who tells you what you must do, regardless of your rights or wishes. The market is not some hideous and only slightly nicer collective reincarnation of Chairman Mao. The market is the outcome of everyone’s rights counting for something, and nobody’s rights counting for everything.
So yes, the market does decide a lot of things, but the customer is not God.
This is an exaggeration for the sake of effect. The effect may, in a business sense, be good, but it is still an exaggeration, and that is putting mildly.
In search of things to write about for the Globalisation Institute blog, I came across this report, itself about a report issued by the International Labour Organisation.
Global economic growth is increasingly failing to translate into new and better jobs to reduce poverty, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said in a report Friday.
As a summary of what follows in this report of the report, this turns out to be severely misleading. Globalisation, according to what follows, is cranking out new jobs, and it is cranking out better jobs. True, it is not cranking out “new and better” jobs, all in one go, if by that is meant people in dirt poor countries now being able to leap in their thousands from having no jobs to having nice jobs, but that is hardly surprising.
Half of the world’s workers still do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the $2 a day poverty line, the fourth edition of Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM), said.
There is still a lot of poverty in the world, in other words. So?
“The key message is that up to now better jobs and income for the world’s workers has not been a priority in policy-making”, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said.
This is, at best, thoughtless bluster, and probably a flat lie. If he thought at all about this claim, Juan Somavia would realise that it is false, but he makes it anyway. I believe that he assumes that only the spending of tax money in explicitly labelled better job creation schemes would count as the intention to create better jobs. But I support globalisation, and write regular contributions for the Globalisation Institute blog, because I believe that globalisation is creating and will continue to create “better jobs and income for people” all over the world. This is a big part of why I do this. And I am definitely not the only one who thinks thus. Does Juan Somavia sincerely believe that all of us who enthusiastically support globalisation are indifferent to “better jobs and income for people”? Maybe he really is that ignorant, but I doubt it.
“Globalisation has so far not led to the creation of sufficient and sustainable decent work opportunities around the world. That has to change, and as many leaders have already said, we must make decent work a central objective of all economic and social policies.”
Once again, bad policies to achieve “decent work” – making indecent work illegal, and making it obligatory to perpetuate all decent work (“sustainable”) indefinitely, I assume – are confused with wanting lots of decent work. I do want lots of decent work for people, but believe that making indecent work illegal, and all firing of people from decent work illegal, is the absolute worst possible way to achieve that outcome. Making indecent work illegal hurts the very poorest people in a downright lethal way, by taking away even the crap jobs that they do now have and can now get, and it kicks away a vital rung in the ladder from no work to indecent work to decent work, which guarantees that the lethality will continue indefinitely. Charming. Demanding that all decent work be “sustainable” is to demand the impossible, and to guarantee idleness for all.
The other thing to say about that weasely paragraph is that all that it really says is that poverty is not being got rid of as fast as it might be, and as fast as would be nice. My interpretation of that truism being that globalisation is not working as fast as it might to make all that decent work (some of it perhaps even somewhat sustainable), all that “better jobs and income for people”, and my conclusion is that globalisation should be intensified, and that Juan Somavia and his ilk should get out the way and let that happen. → Continue reading: Juan Somavia and the ILO lose the globalisation argument
It is nice to see that a compatriot of mine is presently making the case for free trade at the WTO summit in Hong Kong, at which the usual bunch of vested interest and anti-globalisation protestors have shown up.
Seriously, that anyone can go to Hong Kong and then attempt to argue that free trade is against the interests of the poor just boggles the mind. But they do.
(link once again via Tim Blair).
Those smart fellows at the Marginal Revolution economics blog like to track all manner of strange and innovative ways in which Man engages in the age-old routine of truck and barter. Sport has spawned all manner of new business enterprises in recent years and now it is possible for investors to build assets by investing in the future market value of footballers.
Makes sense, really. These days football players, even quite mediocre ones – never mind great talents like Pele or George Best (RIP) – are paid enormous amounts of money in their careers. Rather like the bloodstock trade, I think. The idea of getting a financial stake in a player is also likely to bring investor pressure on players to be monitored off the field as well as on it (do we really want a potentially lucrative asset to be carousing down the pub?)
Personally, I am sticking to equities, bonds, cash and a bit of brick and mortar.
My first posting on the Globalization Institute’s blog is about the almost hidden but massive transfers of cash by migrants workers to their families in under-developed countries. The following quote comes from Time magazine:
Mass migration has produced a giant worldwide economy all its own, which has accelerated so fast during the past few years that the figures have astounded the experts. This year, remittances – the cash that migrants send home – is set to exceed $232 billion, nearly 60% higher than the number just four years ago, according to the World Bank, which tracks the figures. Of that, about $166.9 billion goes to poor countries, nearly double the amount in 2000. In many of those countries, the money from migrants has now overshot exports, and exceeds direct foreign aid from other governments. “The way these numbers have increased is mind-boggling,” says Dilip Ratha, a senior economist for the World Bank and co-author of a new Bank report on remittances. Ratha says he was so struck by the figures that he rechecked his research several times, wondering if he might have miscalculated. Indeed, he believes the true figure for remittances this year is probably closer to $350 billion, since migrants are estimated to send one-third of their money using unofficial methods, including taking it home by hand.
There are two things I especially like about this growing trend. One is that unlike other forms of aid (including private giving by Westerners), the money tends to be better spent, because the donor is immediately related to the recipient. The second is I think unique to migrant workers. Normally there is a dependency trap: the money coming in is for a set term and will only be renewed if the recipient pleads continuing poverty. But migrant workers who leave their families behind have a strong incentive to watch out for improving economic conditions back home. As families achieve a tolerable standard of living they tend to reduce the amount of migration. The whole bureaucracy of aid is bypassed.
Thinking about it, perhaps giving a Christmas bonus of £100 to the office cleaner from Ghana or the Ukraine does more to make the world a better place than £200 given to an aid charity. We often hear about the benefits of cutting taxes, but here’s a new one. For each pound in taxes saved by low-income migrant workers, up to 40p will be transferred to a family in the developing world. That’s got to be a better return than the government makes of our money.
The price of gold on the world commodities market is at the highest level since December 1987 (god that seems a long time ago). A number of reasons are given for why it is so strong, such as being a default resting place for investors who are shy of holding stocks, bonds or cash. Gold is also strong because commodity prices in general, such as nickel, zinc, iron ore and bauxite are being driven higher by the voracious appetite for metals and other goods by China.
There may be another factor, though, which ought to set off a few red lights in the central banks. Gold is often a hedge for people against inflation. It seems a long time ago when Britain endured double-digit inflation, but inflation is creeping higher, although that may be simply due to the temporary effects of higher oil prices. Anyway, the gold stuff may be issuing a gentle warning. Let’s hope the Bank of England takes note of it.
From David Tebbutt:
This is the promise: “The Habitat JAM will gather your input and add it to thousands of others to identify actionable ideas for the Vancouver World Urban Forum agenda and influence the Forum’s content. It will start conversations and build new networks that bring enormous potential to global problem solving.”
It sounds more like a threat to me. At best, manipulated bullshit. Problem solving is a fine thing, but the fewer conversations and networks devoted to “global” problem solving, the better, I would say. This is, I think, because “global” bundles together lots of difficulties into one huge impossibility, which you then blame on global capitalism. But the way to actually solve problems is to do what actual capitalists actually do, which is break the problems up into solluble particles.
Still, “actionable” means that someone will at least be able to sue these people, yes? No. Non-responsibility for resulting chaos is of the essence of gatherings like this.
I have devoured pretty much most of John Le Carre’s spy stories, such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, A Small Town in Germany and Smiley’s People. His novels have a chilly, grittily believable quality that stands in contrast to the sophisticated romps of Ian Fleming (Who is actually a pretty good read, as Anthony Burgess once said). More recently, Le Carre, bereft of a Cold War to provide his theme, has turned his attention in a different direction. He has turned it towards the supposed evil of global capitalism and big drug firms.
The Constant Gardener, a film which hammers the allegedly rapacious activities of drug companies, has now been turned into a film starring the British actor Ralph Fiennes (whom I once saw live giving a somewhat histrionic performance in London in the Ibsen play, Brand). The Social Affairs Blog, has a fine demolition job of the book and film here by UK academic Kenneth Minogue. Minogue’s treatment of the film is brutal.
Now I can see why, as pointed out on this blog concerning the firm Pfizer, some drug companies get a deserved hammering. But what I don’t quite understand is the sheer venom directed at drug firms in general by people who presumably must realise that developing and researching drugs can be highly expensive. If drug firms cannot be sure that their products won’t be instantly copied by other manufacturers, who can be sure that drugs to combat AIDSand other killers would make it to the marketplace? The issue of intellectual property rights does of course remain a very tricky issue among libertarians, but do the opponents of any such property rights imagine that we can or should leave drug development to the State, given the experience of our own Soviet model of national health care? It seems as if the attacks on drug firms stems from a desire to seize the hard work and graft of others because one has a “right” to curative drugs.
But if, as Le Carre and others contend, we should give drugs to the poor of the Third World for nothing, the bill for this could be enormous. I don’t really like the idea that the wealth creating capabilities of people should be held in partial ransom by the open-ended needs of billions of other people.
On the subject of AIDS, it is always worth reading Andrew Sullivan, who has HIV, on why he loves drug companies.
Those strange-sounding financial entities known as hedge funds, which are sometimes depicted as the Darth Vaders of the modern market, often have rather odd or dull names. So I was glad to come across a firm in the United States with a name that proudly celebrates the free market with unabashed gusto.
The firm has a great merchandise selection, too.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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