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Pedro de Verona Rodrigues Pires Wins Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership

“Pedro de Verona Rodrigues Pires” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A10) MONROVIA, Liberia — Pedro de Verona Rodrigues Pires, the former president of Cape Verde, the desertlike archipelago about 300 miles off the coast of West Africa, has won one of the world’s major prizes, the $5 million Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership.

The record of governing in Africa has been poor enough lately that the Mo Ibrahim Foundation decided not to award the prize for the past two years. In many African countries, leaders have refused to leave office after losing elections, tried to alter constitutions to ensure their continued tenure or gone back on pledges not to run for re-election.
. . .
Mr. Pires served two terms — 10 years — as president until stepping down last month. During that period, the foundation noted, Cape Verde became only the second African nation to move up from the United Nations’ “least developed” category. The foundation says the prize is given only to a democratically elected president who has stayed “within the limits set by the country’s constitution, has left office in the last three years and has demonstrated excellence in office.”

For the full story, see:
ADAM NOSSITER. “Ex-President of Cape Verde Wins Good-Government Prize.” The New York Times (Tues., October 11, 2011): A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 10, 2011.)

Few Banks Give S.B.A. Loans, They Take Two Years, and Have “Absolutely No Flexibility”

“Neil Blumenthal, one of the founders of Warby Parker, an online eyewear company, was invited to Washington in an initiative to encourage companies owned by members of the millennial generation.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B7) Mr. Blumenthal, 31, one of the founders of Warby Parker, an online eyewear company that sells designer frames for less than $100, was among 150 young chief executives invited to Washington by Our Time, a youth advocacy group, . . .
. . .
The following is a condensed version of a recent conversation in which Mr. Blumenthal spoke, among other things, about what politicians don’t understand about business, . . .
. . .
Q. What was it like trying to get an S.B.A. loan?
A. Finding a bank that did S.B.A.-term loans was a challenge. We were surprised that they needed two years and that banks had absolutely no flexibility. Many of the loan officers said we had a reputable business that was cash-flow positive and we had the most sophisticated business plan they’d ever seen, but they can’t provide loans to people who don’t have two years of tax returns.
Q. Isn’t that a reasonable request when you’re talking about using taxpayer dollars to guarantee a loan to a private company?
A. I understand where the banks are coming from. It probably was necessary to implement hard and fast rules to stop the bleeding when the crisis hit, but they should be looking at the policies and thinking: Does this make sense now?
Q. Was the application process difficult?
A. We had to sign so many documents that my hand hurt after I was done. I had to pledge not to open a zoo, swimming pool or aquarium. It struck me as strange. Yes, it’s the bank’s duty to do due diligence, but this was just a silly restriction.
Q. But there was a happy ending, right?
A. Yes, after being turned down by 15 banks, it was a personal relationship that introduced us to a regional bank in New Jersey that gave us a $200,000 loan.
Q. What reasons did the 15 banks give for turning you down?
A. They didn’t have the authority to bypass the rule that you have to have two years of tax returns.
Q. Was your company profitable at the time?
A. Yes, we were profitable and we had a ton of traction. We had higher customer satisfaction scores than Zappos or Apple. A rational bank should have wanted to support us, even though we were a more risky bet than a company that had been around longer.
Q. What did the bank that lent you money do differently? Did it demand collateral?
A. We came through a personal relationship at a very high level at a regional bank in New Jersey that didn’t have the draconian guidelines because their management was empowered to make decisions. For the $200,000 S.B.A.-backed loan that we got, the bank wanted $100,000 in collateral in either cash or marketable products. The reason they wanted so much collateral was that if we default, the regional bank is not going to go through the process of getting the money from the S.B.A. because it’s so onerous.
. . .
Q. Are you involved in the political process?
A. We have never met with politicians. I don’t know the first thing about how to get heard. My suspicion is that it’s to donate a lot of money.
. . .
Q. What do you make of the economic turmoil we’ve been experiencing?
A. It highlights that it might be too much to ask Washington to help with entrepreneurship when they can’t even get the basics right, like maintaining a decent credit rating.

For more of the conversation, see:
HANNAH SELIGSON. “SMALL BUSINESS; Young Entrepreneur Sees Little Help In Washington.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 18, 2011): C12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 17, 2011.)

The Kauffman Foundation’s Startup Act Would Encourage Entrepreneurs

The WSJ tells us the credentials of the authors of the following advice: “Mr. Muller is CEO of GenOn Energy. Mr. Zimpleman is president and CEO of the Principal Financial Group.”

(p. A15) In our view, there is no hope of giving consumers renewed confidence in America unless governments at all levels mount a vigorous effort to get rid of rules that discourage entrepreneurs from launching and growing new businesses.

The Kauffman Foundation recently proposed a way to do that with a set of ideas aptly called the Startup Act. Those ideas, which would cost the government virtually nothing, include:
• Letting in immigrant entrepreneurs who hire American workers.
• Reducing the cost of capital through capital gains tax relief for early stage investments.
• Reducing barriers to IPOs by allowing shareholders to opt out of Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Charging higher fees for patent applicants who want quick decisions to remove the backlog of applications at the Patent Office.
• Giving licensing freedom to academic entrepreneurs at universities to accelerate the commercialization of their ideas.
• Having the government provide data to permit rankings of startup friendliness of states and localities.
• Regular sunsets for regulations and a consistent policy of putting new ones in place only if their benefits exceed their costs.

For the full commentary, see:
EDWARD R. MULLER and LARRY ZIMPLEMAN. “OPINION; An Entrepreneurial Fix for the U.S. Economy; Several reforms can make it faster and easier for new business startups..” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., AUGUST 29, 2011): A15.

Federal Subsidies Create Few Green Jobs

(p. F2) . . . solar power, which makes extensive use of robots in fabricating the cells, and has no moving parts to service once it is up and running, may be an odd choice for job creation.
“It’s just not that labor-intensive,” said Howard Axelrod, an engineer and economist. And as for the jobs it creates, there may be a price elsewhere, Dr. Axelrod said.
. . .
Build enough solar plants and some coal plants will shut down; that would amount to firing Peter to hire Paul.
. . .
And, economists point out, some of the work that renewable energy creates goes to people who already have jobs — roofers who install the panels or truck drivers who move them around, or steel workers who make towers for new wind machines.
Some of the jobs could eventually go elsewhere. Two years ago, Evergreen Solar, which got $58 million in aid from Massachusetts for a factory in Devens, said it would shift production to China instead.
. . .
The debate is part of a larger discussion of what constitutes a “green” job. In October 2009, Congress gave the Bureau of Labor Statistics a special appropriation to count them.
. . .
“Driving a bus is driving a bus, right?” said Connie Mack, Republican of Florida. Hilda Solis, the secretary of labor, said they were “green buses.” But aides later clarified that the bureau counted any bus driving job as green because it preserved natural resources.
None of this suggests that green is bad, just that it is not particularly job-heavy. In December 2010, Susan Combs, the comptroller of Texas, reported that school districts in her state were giving tax abatements to lure new jobs, but had to give $1.6 million for every wind energy job. Manufacturing jobs could be created for $166,000 each.

For the full story, see:
MATTHEW L. WALD. “Solar Power Industry Falls Short of Hopes in Job Creation.” The New York Times (Weds., October 26, 2011): F2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 25, 2011.)

The Case Against Fluoridating Public Water Supplies

(p. A18) Last week, Pinellas County, on Florida’s west coast, voted to stop adding fluoride to its public water supply after starting the program seven years ago. The county joins about 200 jurisdictions from Georgia to Alaska that have chosen to end the practice in the last four years, motivated both by tight budgets and by skepticism about its benefits.
Eleven small cities or towns have opted out of fluoridating their water this year, including Fairbanks, Alaska, which acted after much deliberation and a comprehensive evaluation by a panel of scientists, doctors and dentists. The panel concluded that in Fairbanks, which has relatively high concentrations of naturally occurring fluoride, the extra dose no longer provided the help it once did and may, in fact, be harmful.
. . .
The movement to stop fluoridating water has gained traction, in large part, because the government has recently cautioned the public about excessive fluoride. A report released late last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked fluoride to an increase among children in dental fluorosis, which causes white or yellow spots on teeth. About 40 percent of children ages 12 to 15 had dental fluorosis, mostly very mild or mild cases, from 1999 to 2004. That percentage was 22.6 in a 1986-87 study.
Fluorosis is mostly a cosmetic problem that can sometimes be bleached away. But critics argue that spotted teeth are a warning that other bones in the body may be absorbing too much fluoride. Excessive fluoride can lead to increases in bone fractures in adults as well as pain and tenderness.
“Teeth are the window to the bones,” said Paul Connett, a retired professor of environmental chemistry and the director of the Fluoride Action Network, which advocates an end to fluoridated water.
Experts say that one possible factor in this increase may be that fluoridated water is consumed in vegetables and fruit, and juice and other beverages as well as tap water. And the consumption of beverages continues to increase.
. . .
The conclusion among these communities is that with fluoride now so widely available in toothpaste and mouthwash, there is less need to add it to water, which already has naturally occurring fluoride. Putting it in tap water, they say, is an imprecise way of distributing fluoride; how much fluoride a person gets depends on body weight and water consumed.
Doctors, scientists and dentists, including Dr. Bailey of the Public Health Service, mostly agree that fluoride works best when applied topically, directly to the teeth, as happens with brushing.
“The fact that no one really knows what dosage a given person receives from fluoridated water makes the subject of benefits and harms very difficult to quantify,” said Rainer Newberry, a professor of geochemistry at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who sat on the committee that studied the issue prior to the June vote in Fairbanks. “And this presumably explains the number of studies with diverging conclusions.”

For the full story, see:
LIZETTE ALVAREZ. “Looking to Save Money, More Places Decide to Stop Fluoridating the Water.” The New York Times (Fri., October 14, 2011): A18.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 13, 2011.)

When a Graph Is a Matter of Life and Death

(p. 72) In her authoritative book The Challenger Launch Decision, sociologist Diane Vaughan demolishes the myth that NASA managers ignored unassailable data and launched a mission absolutely known to be unsafe. In fact, the conversations on the evening before launch reflected the confusion and shifting views of the participants. At one point, a NASA manager blurted, “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?” But at another point on the same evening, NASA managers expressed reservations about the launch; a lead NASA engineer pleaded with his people not to let him make a mistake and stated, “I will not agree to launch against the contractor’s recommendation.” The deliberations lasted for nearly three hours. If the data had been clear, would they have needed a three-hour discussion? Data analyst extraordinaire Edward Tufte shows in his book Visual Explanations that if the engineers had plotted the data points in a compelling graphic, they might have seen a clear trend line: every launch below 66 degrees showed evidence of (p. 73) O-ring damage. But no one laid out the data in a clear and convincing visual manner, and the trend toward increased danger in colder temperatures remained obscured throughout the late-night teleconference debate. Summing up, the O-Ring Task Force chair noted, “We just didn’t have enough conclusive data to convince anyone.”

Source:
Collins, Jim. How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2009.
(Note: italics in original.)

Feds Increase Seizure of Property from Those Who Have Not Been Convicted of a Crime

“Mr. Caswell, here in the motel’s lobby, is not accused of any wrongdoing but stands to lose his business under a law that calls for the forfeiture of properties linked to crimes.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) TEWKSBURY, Mass.–The $57-a-night Motel Caswell, magnet for hard-luck cases, police patrol cars and the occasional drug deal, is the unlikely prize in a high-stakes tug-of-war between conservative legal activists and the government.

The motel’s owner, spurred by a recent Supreme Court decision, is trying to convince a federal court that the Constitution bars the U.S. Department of Justice from seizing his property, where guests have been found guilty of drug offenses. The owner, Russell Caswell, isn’t accused of any wrongdoing. But he stands to lose his business nonetheless under a law that calls for the forfeiture of properties linked to
Mr. Caswell’s federal court case challenges the U.S. government’s ballooning asset-forfeiture system that in more than 15,000 cases last year confiscated cash, cars, boats and real estate valued at $2.5 billion. While many asset forfeitures are tied to convictions, the federal government can seize properties stained by crime even if owners face no charges.
“People shouldn’t lose their property if they haven’t been convicted of any crime,” said Scott Bullock, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm in Arlington, Va., that has joined in the motel’s defense. “Mr. Caswell hasn’t even been accused.”
(p. A14) Civil rights groups, libertarians and attorneys defending against seizures say the government is overstepping its bounds in a practice that has swelled in the past decade to encompass some 400 federal statutes, covering crimes from drug trafficking to racketeering to halibut poaching.

For the full story, see:
JOHN R. EMSHWILLER, GARY FIELDS and JENNIFER LEVITZ. “Motel Is Latest Stopover in Federal Forfeiture Battle.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., OCTOBER 18, 2011): A1 & A14.

In Greece’s Bloated Bureaucracy “It’s All about Who You Know”

“Police officers, firefighters and coast guard officers protested austerity measures in Athens on Monday.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) ATHENS — Stories of eye-popping waste and abuse of power among Greece’s bureaucrats are legion, including officials who hire their wives, and managers who submit $38,000 bills for office curtains.

The work force in Greece’s Parliament is so bloated, according to a local press investigation, that some employees do not even bother to come to work because there are not enough places for all of them to sit.
. . .
Some experts believe that Greece could reap significant savings by reducing its bureaucracy, which employs one out of five workers in the country and by some estimates could be trimmed by as much as a third without materially affecting services. But though salaries have been cut, the government has yet to lay off anyone.
The main reason is also one of the very reasons that Greece got into trouble in the first place: The government is in many ways an army of patronage appointments built up over decades. When election time rolls around, state workers become campaign workers, and their reach is enormous. There are so many of them that almost every family has one.
. . .
Whether the right workers will be laid off remains an open question. “A lot of people in the government are terrified,” Mr. Hlepas said. “They don’t think any of those people over in Parliament are going to go. They think the ones that do the work will get cut.”
Thomas Tsamatsoulis, 41, who works for the Greek equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration, said he found himself on an early list headed for the reserve pool, though he had been sent to the United States for electronics training and now has a skill that is rare in his agency. At the same time, Mr. Tsamatsoulis said, the agency, which has just two airplanes, has more than 15 pilots.
“You want to believe the government will do this right,” he said. “But it is very difficult. It’s not how it has worked in the past. It’s all about who you know.”
Greece’s bureaucracy has been growing steadily since democracy was reinstated in 1974, with each new administration adding its supporters to the payroll — and wages rising steeply in the past decade, experts say.
“There was really a party going on,” said Yannis Stournaras, an economist and the director of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research in Athens. “The government kept adding bonuses and benefits and pensions. At election time there was a boom cycle as they handed out jobs.”
“Now they need to cut,” he added. “But they have already lost precious time.”
Stories of excesses abound. Mr. Papandreou told Parliament that one of his ministers found a predecessor’s $38,000 bill for curtains when the Socialists returned to power in 2009. Mr. Mossialos said he found that his own ministry, for media and communication, was spending $750,000 a year for office space for just 11 people.
But some experts question whether the culture of bloat and favoritism will ever be conquered.

For the full story, see:
SUZANNE DALEY. “Bureaucracy in Greece Defies Efforts to Cut It.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., October 18, 2011): A2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 17, 2011.)

Justice for He Who Taxed Unjustly

(p. 444) At the height of the agricultural crisis, the British government under the Liberals did an odd thing. It invented a tax designed to punish a class of people who were already suffering severely and had done nothing in particular to cause the current troubles. The class was large landowners. The tax was death duties. Life was about to change utterly for thousands of people, including our own Mr Marsham.
The designer of the new tax was Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, the chancellor of the exchequer, a man who seems not to have been liked much by anyone at any point in his life, including his own family. Known familiarly, if not altogether affectionately, as ‘Jumbo’ because of his magnificent rotundity, Harcourt was an unlikely persecutor of the landed classes since he was one of them himself. The Harcourt family home was Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire, which we have visited in this book already. Nuneham, you may remember, was where an earlier Harcourt reconfigured the estate but failed to recollect where the old village well had been, fell into it and drowned. For as long as there had been (p. 445) Tories, the Harcourts had numbered themselves among them, so William’s joining of the Liberals was seen within his family as the darkest treachery. Even Liberals were startled by his tax. Lord Rosebery, the prime minister (who was himself a big landowner), wondered if some relief should at least be granted in those cases where two inheritors died in quick succession. It would be harsh, Rosebery thought, to tax an estate a second time before the legatee had had a chance to rebuild the family finances. Harcourt, however, refused all appeals for concessions.
That Harcourt stood almost no chance of inheriting his own family property no doubt coloured his principles. In fact, to his presumed surprise, he did inherit it when his elder brother’s son died suddenly, but heirlessly, in the spring of 1904. Harcourt didn’t get to enjoy his good fortune long, however. He expired six months later himself, which meant that his heirs were among the first to be taxed twice over in exactly the way that Rosebery had feared and he had dismissed. Life doesn’t often get much neater than that.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Venezuelans Flee Chávez’s Socialism

“Street crime, such as a man’s killing in Caracas last year, is high.” Note the big-brother-sized image of Chávez surveying what his socialism has wrought. Source of quoted part of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

Those who favor socialism should observe Venezuela carefully and ponder whether they like what they see.

(p. A13) Gerardo Urdaneta moved to Houston from Venezuela for a job in 1998, the same year Hugo Chávez was first elected president. Mr. Urdaneta, an energy-shipping specialist, planned for a temporary stop and wouldn’t even buy a house.

Thirteen years later, Mr. Chávez is still in power, Mr. Urdaneta is still here. He has been joined by thousands of other Venezuelans, and Houston shops now stock native delicacies like Pampero aged rum and guayanés cheese.
“There are Venezuelans everywhere,” Mr. Urdaneta, 50 years old, said. “Before we were passing through. That’s not the case anymore.”
Waves of white-collar Venezuelans have fled the country’s high crime rates, soaring inflation and expanding statist controls, for destinations ranging from Canada to Qatar. The top U.S. destinations are Miami, a traditional shopping mecca for Venezuelans, and Houston, which has long-standing energy ties to Venezuela, a major oil exporter.
There were some 215,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. in 2010, up from about 91,500 in 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The number of Venezuelans living in Spain has quintupled in the same period to more than 40,000, and the number of Venezuelan-born Spaniards has more than doubled to 90,000.

For the full story, see:
ÁNGEL GONZÁLEZ and EZEQUIEL MINAYA. “Venezuelan Diaspora Booms Under Chávez.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 17, 2011): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the following phrase, at the end of the quoted portion above, is in the online, but not the print, version of the article: “and the number of Venezuelan-born Spaniards has more than doubled to 90,000.”

“Venezuelan exile Stefano Zullian owns a Houston chocolate shop.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

“What Happens in America Is Defined by Tort Lawyers”

“CHILDHOOD RELIC; Jungle gyms, like this one in Riverside Park in Manhattan, have disappeared from most American playgrounds in recent decades.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) “There is no clear evidence that playground safety measures have lowered the average risk on playgrounds,” said David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University in London. He noted that the risk of some injuries, like long fractures of the arm, actually increased after the introduction of softer surfaces on playgrounds in Britain and Australia.

“This sounds counterintuitive, but it shouldn’t, because it is a common phenomenon,” Dr. Ball said. “If children and parents believe they are in an environment which is safer than it actually is, they will take more risks. An argument against softer surfacing is that children think it is safe, but because they don’t understand its properties, they overrate its performance.”
Reducing the height of playground equipment may help toddlers, but it can produce unintended consequences among bigger children. “Older children are discouraged from taking healthy exercise on playgrounds because they have been designed with the safety of the very young in mind,” Dr. Ball said. “Therefore, they may play in more dangerous places, or not at all.”
Fear of litigation led New York City officials to remove seesaws, merry-go-rounds and the ropes that young Tarzans used to swing from one platform to another. Letting children swing on tires became taboo because of fears that the heavy swings could bang into a child.
“What happens in America is defined by tort lawyers, and unfortunately that limits some of the adventure playgrounds,” said Adrian Benepe, the current parks commissioner.

For the full story, see:
JOHN TIERNEY. “FINDINGS; Grasping Risk in Life’s Classroom.” The New York Times (Tues., July 19, 2011): D1 & D3.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 18, 2011, and has the title “FINDINGS; Can a Playground Be Too Safe?.”)