Lästips

• Smedjan: Stoppa pressarna – de etiska fonderna för kunder bakom ljuset
  Kristian Karlsson
• Smedjan: Det byggs och förtrycks
  Staffan Heimersson

Ena seklet är vår häpenhet stor över att kineser hade papper och krut innan dessa var uppfunna i Europa. Nästa kör vi huvudet i sanden och önsketänker, att den kinesiska kommunismen har ett mänskligare ansikte än den sovjetiska. I Sverige gick det så långt att den intellektuella eliten skrev hyllningstexter till folkkommunerna och teg om kulturrevolutionens barbari.

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Lästips

Bland de saker man missat när man haft annat för sig är att Institute of Economic Affairs har återutgett Friedrich Hayeks The Road to Serfdom (på svenska Vägen till träldom) och The Intellectuals and Socialism.

The Road to Serfdom är den version av boken som publicerades i Reader’s Digest 1945. Som sammanfattning kan man säga att den handlar om risken att den politik som förs vid undantagstillstånd, i det här fallet krig, fortplantar sig till mer normala omständigheter och därmed hotar det öppna samhället. Det sägs att boken enligt egen utsago gjorde Olof Palme till socialdemokrat, och eftersom boken har undertiteln “To Socialists of All Parties” kan man fundera över vad han var innan han läste den.

The Intellectuals and Socialism handlar om kollektivismen och hur man bekämpar den. Hayek försöker också förklara varför just de intellektuella föll för kollektivismen som de i stor utsträckning gjorde, artikeln är från 1949. Förklaringen är, kortfattat, inte att de gjorde det på grund av ondska eller illvillighet, snarare hade de ofta goda intentioner.

Hela boken går att ladda ner från IEA:s hemsida, och jag vill dessutom passa på att återigen tipsa om Towards a Liberal Utopia? som de gav ut i våras.

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Lästips

• Reason: The Iconoclast
  Salman Rushdie discusses free speech, fundamentalism, America’s place in the world, and his new essay collection
• Economics as a Coordination Problem: The Contributions of Friedrich A. Hayek
  Bok av Gerald O’Driscoll.
• EconLib: Everybody Loves Mikey
  Michael Munger

“Do people do things for us because those people are good, because they love us? Sometimes they do. Your family loves you, and your friends would sacrifice things for you. But for most of us, family and friends is a pretty small group…. Something other than love, and altruism, has to organize all the thousands of activities and choices we all depend on every day.”

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Lästips

• Copyriot: Gör Gotland till en självförsörjande polisstat!
• Mothugg: The Rough Guide to Castroland

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Lästips

• Reason: God vs. Darwin: No Contest
  Natural selection debate gets even dumber

“Intelligent design” boils down to the claim sarcastically summed up by aerospace engineer and science consultant Rand Simberg on his blog, Transterrestrial Musings: “I’m not smart enough to figure out how this structure could evolve, therefore there must have been a designer.” Simberg, a political conservative, concludes that this argument “doesn’t belong in a science classroom, except as an example of what’s not science.”

• Notiser från en ö: Cavefors tillstånd
  Det är tur att man inte är Bo Cavefors. Se också Erik Stattin för en kommentar på Jelenas inlägg.

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Lästips

• Human vs. property rights
  Walter Williams i Washington Times
• Håkan Jacobsson drar en korrekt parallell mellan Göran Perssons jobbvision och “pigavdrag”.
• Anders Åslund: Putin’s Decline and America’s Response

Russia’s regime has gone through a major aggravation during the first year of President Vladimir Putin’s second term. The regime suffers from serious overcentralization of power, which has led to a paralysis of policy making. Putin’s power base has been shrunk to a core of secret policemen from St. Petersburg. Although his popularity remains high, it is falling. Neither unbiased information nor negative feedback is accepted. As a result, the Putin regime is much more fragile than generally understood. Russia’s current abandonment of democracy is an anomaly for such a developed and relatively wealthy country, and it has made Russia’s interests part from those of the United States.

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Mer om sweatshops

Jag nämnde igår en artikel om s.k. sweatshops som, återigen, visar att lönen och arbetsförhållandena där är bättre än i “inhemska” fabriker. New Economist tipsar om en annan artikel [pdf] som tar upp kvinnors situation i Bangladesh:

…problems notwithstanding, my own research in the Bangladesh context suggests that the majority of women workers rated their access to employment in the garment factories in positive terms because of its improvements on what life had been like before (Kabeer,2000). They valued the satisfaction of a ‘proper’ job and the opportunity to earn a regular wage compared to the casualised and poorly paid forms of employment that had previously been their only options.

Some of the women in my study had used their newly-found earning power to renegotiate their relations within marriage, others to leave abusive marriages. Women who had previously not been able to help out their ageing parents once they got married now insisted on their right to do so. Yet others used their earnings to postpone early marriage and to challenge the practice of dowry.

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Lästips

• Reason: Steven Vincent, RIP
  The murdered journalist’s work transcends ideology
• Reason: Protectionist Capitalists vs. Capitalist Communists
  Energy security and the Senate’s Chinese puzzle

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Lästips

• Cristian Science Monitor: Don’t get into a lather over sweatshops
  Op-ed av Benjamin Powell och David Skarbek

We examined the apparel industry in 10 Asian and Latin American countries often accused of having sweatshops and then we looked at 43 specific accusations of unfair wages in 11 countries in the same regions. Our findings may seem surprising. Not only were sweatshops superior to the dire alternatives economists usually mentioned, but they often provided a better-than-average standard of living for their workers. [Studien ska publiceras i Journal of Labor Research nästa år, Working Paper här]

• Reason: All Happy Families
  The looming battle over gay parenting
• Make Trade not War? [pdf]
  Intressant, men man ska notera att det de undersöker egentligen inte är krig utan det något bredare begreppet konflikt. Hade det endast varit krig hade förmodligen datamaterialet varit alldeles för litet.

We show that the intuition that trade promotes peace is only partially true even though, in our model, trade is beneficial to all countries, war reduces trade and leaders take into account the costs of war.

When war can occur because of the presence of asymmetric information in negotiations between countries, the probability of escalation is lower for countries that trade more bilaterally because of the opportunity cost associated to the loss of trade gains. However, countries more open to trade have a higher probability of war because multilateral trade openness decreases bilateral dependence to any given country and therefore the opportunity cost of war.

Using a theoretically grounded econometric model, we empirically test the necessary conditions for these results and the predictions on a large data set of military conflicts on the 1948-2001 period. We find strong evidence for these contradictory effects of bilateral and multilateral trade. Our empirical results also confirm the theoretical prediction of our model that multilateral trade openness increases more the probability of war between countries which are close to each other. This may explain why military conflicts have become more localized and less global over time. We also find evidence that information flows between countries decreases the probability of war.

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Lästips

Jelena Selin (som ju också bloggar) har en intressant artikel om personnummer i Expressen, sidan 4. Tyvärr verkar inte den andra artikeln om Kuba på samma sida finnas med på nätet.

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