From this week’s Economist.
Mr Guriev suggests that the reason Russia has failed to modernise is that its ruling class can pocket rents from things as they are. Serious modernisation threatens them because it would require stronger institutions that would make this harder. This rent-seeking psychology is transmitted right down the bureaucratic chain, with each man taking a slice for himself.
As a rather compulsive note-taker, I go through a lot of pens. These Japanese pens – to me, as close to perfection as a disposable writing tool can get – came to me via eBay in the US. They’re one of the joys of globalization.
Finally, on writing here: this is my first post written with the iPhone WordPress app.
“Praia e vento”, beach and wind, says this flag-decorated surfboard, instead of “Ordem e progresso”.
I just thought it was another brilliant iconographic choice by this week’s Economist, even better than the cover image with the rocket-fueled Cristo Redentor.
By the way, here’s where you can buy this picture and others with the same model and surfboard!
Between 1913 and 1930, Carl Gustav Jung worked on the Red Book, also known as Liber Novus, a richly illustrated 205-page manuscript written in calligraphic text.
That is oddly comforting. To me it means that, even 500 years from now, there may still be a few lone souls printing books on paper.
(Picture: from the Rubin Museum of Art, whose exhibition marks the first public display of the book, and which has organized a stellar speaker program, “The Red Book Dialogues”, around the show).
Maybe every single generation goes thorough something like this (from I Love a Man in Uniform):
Of course, I was only a fraction of the rebel I used to be, having come to favor country music just as much as Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. Sometime in my early twenties, I had realized that punk rock might not be able to deliver on its messianic zeal. Even my idol, Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, had started sounding less like a mordant political wit than a cranky old man shouting, “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” In one of his later songs, he asked a question that echoed my own doubt: “Anarchy sounds great, but who would fix the sewers?”
I mourned the loss of my outlier faith as much as I welcomed the drift inward from the margins. The punk scene wasn’t hallowed ground or some infallible brain trust, it was just a bunch of strivers flailing around in search of answers, no better (though surely no worse) than anyone else. The far-flung dream of anarchy wore itself thin. Ideologically, I was fair game.
This week’s Economist has a very interesting piece on the political establishment in today’s United Kingdom. George Osborne, shadow chancellor, is 38. In his inner circle, advisers Rohan Silva and Rupert Harrison are 28 and 30; his chief of staff, Matthew Hancock, is 31; his speechwriter, Ameet Gill, 27. On the Labour side, Torsten Henricson-Bell, adviser to chancellor Alistair Darling, is 27. Gordon Brown’s speechwriter is said to be 29, and some of Mr. Brown’s policy unit members are reportedly “boyish”. And so on.
Greenness has its drawbacks, sure. Yet, as Bagehot remarks, “lack of personal experience does not disqualify someone from holding valid opinions, if curiosity and hard work compensate.” So, how about freshening up Italy’s gerontocracy? We don’t have enough fresh-faced UK-style policy wonks of our own: let’s just import them. They may perceive as “distant and hypothetical” some of the “grimly adult” “substance of politics — pensions, child-rearing and so on”; yet, they can hardly do worse at these topics than our septuagenarian leaders, can they?
This is Elizabeth Strout’s description of a turning point in the marriage of a middle-aged couple, Bonnie and Harmon.
But one night he turned to her in bed, and she pulled away. After a long moment she said quietly, “Harmon, I think I’m just done with that stuff.”
They lay there in the dark; what gripped him from his bowels on up was the horrible, blank knowledge that she meant this. Still, nobody can accept losses right away.
“Done?” he asked. She could have piled twenty bricks onto his stomach, that was the pain he felt.
“I’m sorry. But I’m just done. There’s no point in my pretending. That isn’t pretty for either of us.”
He asked if it was because he’d gotten fat. She said he hadn’t really gotten fat, please not to think that way.
But maybe I’ve been selfish, he said. What can I do to please you? (They had never really talked about things in this way — in the dark he blushed.)
She said, he couldn’t understand — it wasn’t him, it was her. She was just done.
Well, Google’s long-delayed Project 10^100 has finally come to the voting stage. And all of the 16 bundles of ideas that have made it to this stage are worthwhile endeavors.
But they’re also a missed opportunity. None of the ideas is about empowering girls and women. In fact, the word “women” is entirely missing from the page that describes the 16 finalists.
Yet, economists have proved again and again that getting girls into education, teaching women about their reproductive rights, financing women’s ventures, and setting up services that allow women to be productive in the workplace is the hidden lever to unlocking growth and prosperity. None of the 16 ideas up there on that page recognizes this. (Sure, many women will benefit if voters choose to fund better technologies to remove landmines, or more education for African students, or early warning systems to prevent mass atrocities – including war rapes. But there is no idea up there that says “let’s spend this money 100% on women”).
My proposal? Together with my friend Raffaele, I had submitted an idea about women’s leadership and role models. It went like this: The 1,000 member companies of the World Economic Forum would commit to having neither gender represented by more than 60% of Directors on their Board. Sure, it would primarily have impacted the West, and not so much of the developing world. But it was a very low-cost idea – all it takes is leadership, commitment and some monitoring systems – and it would have triggered a vast culture change in our business, political and civic organizations. Culture change will come anyway, you say? It doesn’t: we’ve stopped making any measurable progress at all – except for places with forcing devices, such as Norway. It didn’t fly: let me know if you find a better forum to promote it.
In the menatime, how are you voting on Project 10^100?
This week, the OECD report Education at a Glance 2009 earned a lot of well-deserved media attention (you can download it here). Of particular interest, as The Economist points out, the finding that, even as higher education becomes more widespread, it does not lose value:
“Every year we wonder if this will be the year that higher education starts to lose its value—and every year, there is no sign of it happening,” says Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s chief of education research.
Much has been made of the OECD’s measure of incremental lifetime earnings from tertiary education: across the countries surveyed, gross earnings benefits average out at $186,000 for men (in 2005 money, at purchasing power parity) and $134,000 for women. Even once you subtract the direct cost of the education and the opportunity cost in terms of wages not earned while studying, and make numerous other adjustments, the net present value of the benefits to the individual is still largely positive. National economies as well as the public coffers also come out ahead when their citizens get more education (a hot topic in times of shrinking education budgets).
You will have noticed that the OECD averages show that the individual or private gross benefit for men is 39% higher than for women. This is politely attributed to “the disparity in most countries between male and female earnings”. But how big is this disparity, education levels being equal – and what does it tell us about OECD countries?
You are welcome to look for yourself at the figures in Table A8.2 (as well as all the other tables helpfully provided), but I’ve run the numbers for you here:
Ratio of gross incremental male earnings to gross incremental female earnings from tertiary education, selected OECD countries
(100 %= men and women have the same incremental earnings from tertiary education)
In other words: it always pays off to get a degree. It pays off for everybody, men and women. In a country like Turkey or Spain, it pays off to the tune of about the same incremental earnings for men and women. In the OECD as a whole, it pays off for men about 1.4 times as much as for women. But in Italy, a university degree pays off 2.36 times as much for men as for women.
Where is our Minister for Equal Opportunity? and what does she have to say about the equality of opportunities shown in these numbers?
