“Now we feel free”




The photos are by Ashley Gilberston, and the source was the online version of the article cited below.

The American invasion has been a bittersweet episode in the lives of many Iraqis here. In two afternoons of interviews in the parks this week, with both Shiites and Sunnis, mostly secular working people, they said the dangers that had shrunk their lives in certain ways had come along with new advantages.
Hind Jabr, a 16-year-old in a head scarf with bangles on her wrists, spoke proudly of the red Toyota her parents bought used two years ago. The salaries of her mother, a teacher, and her father, a police officer, have jumped since 2003. “We were suffering under Saddam,” said Ms. Jabr, sitting on a stone ledge that overlooked the lake. “It was safer, but we couldn’t get things.”
. . .
For Mr. Sadiq, there was a lesson in the day’s serenity. “Don’t focus on these bombs – they will end definitely,” he said. “What’s most important now is that Iraqis feel comfortable inside themselves. Now we feel free.”

For the full article, see:
SABRINA TAVERNISE. “In a City of Mayhem, a Respite in the Park.” THE NEW YORK TIMES (Fri., January 13, 2006): A4.

Nebraska’s Ban on Corporate Farming May be History (Three Cheers)

(1A) Initiative 300 generally bans corporations and certain other business entities from owning farmland or engaging in agricultural activity in Nebraska, although there are a number of exceptions geared toward family-based organizations.
It was added to the Nebraska Constitution through a petition drive and vote of the people.
Since receiving 57 percent of the vote in 1982, Initiative 300 has survived several state and federal court challenges, a petition drive to repeal it and attempts by state lawmakers to circumvent it.
The ban was promoted as a way to protect family farms in Nebraska from large corporations.
But Camp ruled that the effort to protect Nebraska farmers violated the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause because it discriminated against out-of-state interests.
“There is considerable evidence to support the premise that Initiative 300 was conceived and born in a protectionist fervor,” the judge said.
Camp acknowledged that the ban might promote legitimate state interests, such as conservation of natural resources and rural economic development. But she said the state had not shown that the ban was the only (p. 2A) way to reach those goals.
In the lawsuit, Jones said the result of the ban has been a loss of income because he cannot contract with out-of-state corporations for raising and feeding livestock. The ban also reduces the value of his land and his stock in the family farm corporation by barring potential purchasers.
Other plaintiffs said the ban has prevented them from transferring their farm and ranchland as they wished and has interfered with their ability to compete in a national market.
In addition, the judge agreed with two of the plaintiffs who said the ban violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, because it says the person holding a majority of a farm must supply a majority of the day-to-day labor on the farm.
One was Shad Dahlgren of Lincoln, who was paralyzed as a teenager and uses a wheelchair. The other is Todd Ehler, an Elkhorn man who also is disabled.
Both said they are limited in their ability to own farms, since they cannot provide the day-to-day labor required under Initiative 300.

Governments do not know, and usually do not seek, the most efficient market structure. When they try to impose one, as in the Nebraska ban on corporate farming, their actions almost always end up reducing efficiency, and increasing prices for consumers.
For the full article, see:
Stoddard, Martha and Bill Hord. “Ruling Hits Corporate Fram Ban: Initiative 300 Unconstitutional, Judge Says.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunrise Edition, Friday, December 16, 2005): 1A & 2A.
(The online version is, I believe, the version printed in the evening edition of Thurs., Dec. 15, 2005, which I believe is the same, except for the headline.)

Ben Rogge on Bread, Capitalism and Free Choice


‘I believe that capitalism is the system that produces the wholesome bread, and socialism is the system that produces the moldy bread,’ Ben Rogge used to tell us. ‘But,’ he would continue, ‘even if I was wrong, and if it was the other way around, and it was capitalism that produced the moldy bread, and socialism that produced the wholesome bread, I would still choose capitalism. I would choose it because capitalism is the system of free choice.’
But most of us are not like Ben Rogge. Most of us are more like Deng Xiaoping, whose most famous saying is ‘It does not matter whether a cat is black, or white, as long as it catches mice.’ Contra Rogge, he cared only about which economic system produces the goods.
Personally, I believe Rogge was right. But I also believe that if capitalism is to survive, it will only be by continuing to convince the far more numerous Deng Xiaopings of the world.

Theory Uncomplemented by History, “Is Worse than no Theory at All”

I have been primarily a theorist all my life and feel quite uncomfortable in having to preach the historian’s faith. Yet I have arrived at the conclusion that theoretical equipment, if uncomplemented by a thorough grounding in the history of the economic process, is worse than no theory at all.

Excerpted from a letter from Schumpeter to Miss Edna Lonegan, dated February 16, 1942, stored in the Schumpeter archives at Harvard, and reprinted in:
Swedberg, Richard. Schumpeter: A Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 229-230.

Beware of the “Sparkling Error”

PixarFish.jpg
Schumpeter once wrote that “We all of us like a sparkling error better than a trivial truth.”
This image reminds me of the prudence of adopting a healthy scepticism toward the “sparkling error.”
I believe that the image from Finding Nemo is by computer graphics artist Randy Berrett. The source of the image is the online version of Joe Morgenstern. “MORGENSTERN ON MOVIES: Finding Pixar; A new exhibit examines a studio that can’t stop examining itself.” The Wall Street Journal (Sun., January 7, 2006): P11.
The “sparkling error” Schumpeter quote is from Schumpeter’s diary, and is quoted in: Swedberg, Richard. Schumpeter: A Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, aphorism 86, on page 205.

Ben Rogge on Consistency, Smith and Ricardo

Some would argue that consistency is not always a good thing. Ben Rogge’s favorite quote from Emerson was:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

Rogge used to mention this quote when he defended Adam Smith against the charge of inconsistency. He would say that Smith’s errors on one page would not keep him from writing an important (albeit inconsistent) truth on the next page. In this regard, he contrasted Smith with Ricardo. Ricardo was consistent, and since he was wrong at the start, he was consistently wrong throughout.
Source for the Emerson quote:
Bartlett, John. Familiar Quotations. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955, p. 501, column b. Bartlett gives the source as Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.”

“How Great Thou Art”

(p. 1A) SAGO, W.Va.–Twelve coal miners who were trapped underground for more than 41 hours after an explosion were found alive late Tuesday night, triggering a joyous celebration among relatives here.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” gasped Anna McCloy, a 25-year-old mother of two whose husband, Randal, 26, was among the missing.
“They’re alive. I can’t believe it. They’re alive.”
Around her, townspeople were singing the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

The elusive miracle was credited to God. Later, when the real tragedy was learned, the same people who credited God with the miracle, inconsistently blamed human beings for the tragedy.
Good luck finding the article quoted above–as far as I can tell, the Omaha World-Herald has deleted this article from their online archive. The Omaha World-Herald credits the source of the article as having been The Washington Post. The citation to the hard copy of the Omaha World-Herald version is:
“A Miracle: 12 Miners Found Alive.” Omaha World-Herald (sunrise edition, Weds., Jan. 4, 2006): 1A & 2A.

Schumpeter: “let us begin”

David Rockefeller remembers Schumpeter’s arrival to teach a graduate level class:

(p. 79) Arriving in class with an air of being in a great hurry, he would throw his overcoat on a chair, whip his handkerchief’ from his pocket, flip it out toward the room, then fold it and carefully mop his brow and the top of his balding head before saying, in his heavy German accent, “Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin.”

Rockefeller, David. Memoirs. New York: Random House, 2002.

Ethiopian Comparative Advantage Squandered through Graft and Corruption: More on Why Africa is Poor

   The source for the image of the book is: http://nasw.org/users/markp/grounds.html

 

One theory of how countries acquire a comparative advantage in a commodity ties the comparative advantage to some natural resource, climate or other "endowment" advantage the country has. This partially ‘explains’ some comparative advantages, but leaves many others unexplained (like why Japan has a comparative advantage in cars).

But even on the endowment theory’s own terms, it would seem that an initial comparative advantage can be squandered. Consider Ethiopia, which is the country in which coffee beans were first discovered, many centuries ago.

(p. 153) . . . Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, now exported a negligible amount of the bean, largely due to graft and corruption extending from King Menelik down to the country’s customs agents, . . .

(King Menelek II ruled Ethiopia from 1889 until his death in 1911.)

 

The quotation is from:

Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

 

Economic Growth Achieved by Entrepreneurs Taking Prudent Risks

(p. 489) Nor should anyone feel guilty about taking prudent risks.This is a fundamental truth that I learned from Joseph Schumpeter, who believed that without entrepreneurs willing to bring new products and ideas to the market and investors ready to finance them, it would be impossible to achieve real economic growth.The alternative, as we have learned to our sorrow in the twentieth century, is government control of the factors of production with results that can be seen in the devastated landscapes and abandoned factories of Russia and Eastern Europe, and the scarred lives of billions of human beings throughout Asia. South America, and Africa.

Rockefeller, David. Memoirs. New York: Random House, 2002.

Freedom in Pulsating, Vibrant Hong Kong


Source of book image: http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/stmartins/Search/SearchBookDisplayLarge.asp?BookKey=3008997
Here is an excerpt from a review of a posthumously published memoir, by a well-known British author, recounting three years of childhood in the Hong Kong of the early 1950s:

(p. B12) He has written an extraordinarily happy book, filled with hilarious set-pieces and pulsating with Hong Kong’s vibrant street life. Unlike monochrome Britain, with its dull diet and pinched economy, Hong Kong offered color, variety and adventure.
. . .
Most of Mr. Booth’s encounters were curious rather than dramatic, like the incident of the plink-plonk man, a street musician with a monkey outfitted like a mandarin from the Ming dynasty. One day, as Martin watched, the monkey managed to bite through his leather leash. In a flash, he was up a tree, where, ignoring his master’s pleading and cursing, he carefully disrobed and flung his costume to the street below. Then, in one magnificent act of repudiation, he sent a perfectly aimed stream of urine down on the man’s upturned face, to the delight of the crowd that had gathered. Where in England could you see that?

WILLIAM GRIMES. “Books of The Times: Hong Kong Is Fantasy Land for a Young Adventurer.” The New York Times (Weds., December 21, 2005): B12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Information on the book reviewed:
Martin Booth. Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood. St. Martin’s Press, 2005. (342 pages. $25.95.)