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From Bill Easterly’s blog post: …extreme dissatisfaction with aid agencies who ignore even the most obvious signs that some aid effort is not working. (Example cited in the Brookings book: a World Bank computer kiosk program in India celebrated as a “success” in its “Empowerment” sourcebook. Except that the computers sat in places without functioning electricty or Internet [...] Lord Acton has received empirical verification. Power does corrupt, according to a very interesting article from The Economist. (HT: Stephanie) I wonder if people who call for government intervention in our lives will take anything away from these experiments. Too often, people who want government intervention (in particular, liberals) claim that markets don’t always produce the [...] A couple of months ago, I wrote about David Goldhill’s excellent article in the Atlantic Monthly regarding healthcare. He emphasizes a consumer-centric system, one built around personal responibility for non-catastrophic healthcare costs. It is perhaps the best article I have read on the topic, although I don’t agree with all of Mr. Goldhill’s arguments. If [...] Normally, tips provide waiters and waitresses with an incentive to provide customers with good service. However, in Indian restaurants, I am routinely faced with waiters who mumble, never smile, and generally behave as though you are burden and their job is a chore. One possible explanation for this is that they may feel that serving others [...] Chris sends my way this article on how too much government has been slowly sucking the blood out of California. I wonder if California suffers from a kind of resource curse. Normally, the resource curse is used to explain why countries with an abundance of natural resources have underperforming economies and corrupt governance. In California’s [...] I recently watched this excellent Bloggingheads.tv between Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen. The topics discussed revolve around Tyler Cowen’s new book Create Your Own Economy. One interesting take-away: While the specialization we have seen beginning with the Industrial Revolution can lead to alienation, there is another side to the coin: The deeper specialization becomes in our [...] David Goldhill, a “media and technology executive”, has written an article for The Atlantic called “How American Health Care Killed My Father.” This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the poor state of health care in the United States; it is not some sentimental story about his father. It is long, but [...] This is certainly one of the best, most inspiring, defenses of globalization I have heard. Although, you really should listen to the talk (it is less than 15 minutes), here are some tidbits and some comments of my own: “China is the world’s greatest anti-poverty program over the last three decades.”
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Copyright © 2012 Amol Kapila - All Rights Reserved |
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