Monthly Archive for May, 2011

2011 Conference on Global Studies Dinner – Reserve Your Tickets Now

Published on May 31, 2011 in Conference and News. 0 Comments

Announcing the 2011 Conference on Global Studies Dinner – Tuesday, 19 July – 7:00pm

“On the edge of Copacabana, the refinement of the Mediterranean.”

Seated right on Copacabana Beach, Don Camillo Restaurant offers a warm atmosphere, an extensive wine list, and traditional Italian cuisine ranging from traditional pastas to fresh seafood.  Enjoy a relaxing evening of great conversation, delicious food and wine, and a beautiful view of Copacabana.

Don Camillo is located in walking distance of the JW Marriott, and walking directions will be provided at the conference.

Registration is required for this event.  To register, or for more information, please visit the conference website

Announcing Conference on Global Studies Tour – Rio at Night

Published on May 31, 2011 in Conference and News. 0 Comments

Announcing the 2011 International Conference on Global Studies Tour – Rio at Night – Monday, 18 July, 6:30pm – 10:30pm

See some of the most famous sights of Rio in a guided bus tour, specifically designed for Common Ground delegates!

A chartered bus (or mini-bus) and a licensed tour-guide will meet us at the lobby of the JW Marriott and escort us to Urca, a historical neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro.

From Urca, we will take a cable car up Sugarloaf Mountain to take in wonderful views of Rio beaches and landscapes.  The 360 degree view from the cable cars creates unparalleled sight-seeing opportunities.

After the Cable Car ride, our chartered bus (or mini-bus) and tour guide will escort us through various neighborhoods of Rio, including the South Zone and Historical Rio, and finally drop us back off in front of the JW Marriott.

A not-to-be-missed tour and Rio experience!

US $75 – Price includes chartered transportation, knowledgeable tour guide, and cable-car fare.

Registration is required for this event.  For more information or to sign up, please visit the conference website

Is Growth Incomplete without Social Progress?

Published on May 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Ejaz Ghani, Project Syndicate

WASHINGTON, DC – The geography of poverty and social deprivation has changed dramatically over the last two decades. More than 70% of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries. This pattern, likely to continue into the next decade, raises important questions. Have poverty reduction and human development kept up with income growth? Is growth incomplete without social progress and gender-inclusiveness?

Consider South Asia, where the poverty rate fell from 60% in 1981 to 40% in 2005 – not fast enough, given population growth, to reduce the total number of poor people. In fact, the number of poor people (defined as those living on less than $1.25 per capita per day at 2005 purchasing power parity) in South Asia increased from 549 million in 1981 to 595 million in 2005, and from 420 million to 455 million in India, where almost three-quarters of the region’s poor reside.

In other words, while South Asia’s economies have not underperformed on poverty reduction, merely matching global trends may not be enough for the region with the world’s largest concentration of poor people.

To Read More…

Photo Courtesy of Project-Syndicate.org

It Is a G-Zero, Not a G-20, World

Published on May 27, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Nouriel Roubini, NPQ

New York—We live in a world where, formally, global economic and political governance is supposed to take place at the G-20 level. Economic, financial and security issues are transnational and require international cooperation, where both advanced economies and systemically important emerging markets are at the table. Indeed the G-7, the club of advanced economies, became obsolete and a broader group also representing the most important emerging markets became necessary; this led to the birth of the G-20.

But in practice there is no global leadership and there is severe disarray and disagreements among the G-20 members not only about monetary and fiscal policy, exchange rates and global imbalances but also about global climate change, trade, financial stability, the international monetary system, energy and food security and global security. We are thus in a world where major powers see these issues as zero-sum games rather than positive-sum games. Thus, this is effectively a G-Zero world rather than a G-20 world.

Historically, the G-7 group of advanced economies was effectively a G-1, as the United States was the stable hegemonic power providing leadership for advanced economies and providing to the world economy a variety of global public goods: security, free trade, financial stability, market-oriented policies. In the 19th century the stable hegemon was the United Kingdom, with the British Empire imposing the global public goods of free trade, free capital mobility, the gold standard and the British pound as the major global reserve currency.

To Read More…

Countervailing Powers: On John Kenneth Galbraith

Published on May 24, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Kim Phillips-Fein, The Nation

In a 1930 essay titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes ridiculed economists for having a high opinion of themselves and their work. As the Great Depression engulfed the world, Keynes looked back at historic rates of economic growth, arguing that the real problem people would face in the future was not poverty but the moral quandary of how to live in a society of such abundance and wealth that work would cease to be necessary. The “economic problem,” as he put it, was technical, unimportant in the larger scheme of things. “If economists,” he wrote, “could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!” John Kenneth Galbraith—the Harvard-based economist whose books shaped the public conversation on economic matters for a generation in mid-twentieth-century America—would have agreed.

Today, given the rise of mathematical methods and computer modeling, economics is if anything even more labyrinthine, esoteric and inaccessible to the layman than it was in the days of Keynes and Galbraith. It is also more intellectually and politically ascendant than it was in the 1930s. Its methods now dominate much of the social sciences, having made inroads in law and political science. Its central theme of the superiority of free markets is the gospel of political life. This makes the publication of the Library of America edition of four of Galbraith’s best-known books—American Capitalism; The Great Crash, 1929; The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State—a cause for celebration. (The volume is edited by Galbraith’s son James, also an economist.) Galbraith delighted in puncturing the self-importance of his profession. He was a satirist of economics almost as much as a practitioner of it. He took generally accepted ideas about the economy and turned them upside down. Instead of atomistic individuals and firms, he saw behemoth corporations; instead of the free market, a quasi-planned economy. Other economists believed that consumers were rational, calculating actors, whose demands and tastes were deserving of the utmost deference. Galbraith saw people who were easily manipulated by savvy corporations and slick advertising campaigns, who had no real idea of what they wanted, or why. In many ways, our economic world is quite different from the one Galbraith described at mid-century. But at a time when free-market orthodoxy seems more baroque, smug and dominant than ever, despite the recession caused by the collapse of the real estate bubble, his gleeful skewering of the “conventional wisdom” (a phrase he famously coined) remains a welcome corrective.

To Read More…

Will The US Have A “Debt Crisis”?

Published on May 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Simon Johnson, Project Syndicate

WASHINGTON, DC – John Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, is leading the Republican Party’s charge on fiscal policy, arguing that his side needs to see “trillions of dollars” in spending cuts in order for Congress to approve an increase in the US government’s debt ceiling. But framing the issue this way creates a major problem for Boehner: it will directly, completely, and quickly antagonize one of the Republicans’ most important constituencies – the US corporate sector.

Focusing on the debt ceiling creates a political trap for Boehner and the Republicans. It is true that the US Treasury’s ability to borrow will reach its legally authorized limit in early August. It is also true that whenever Republicans rattle their sabers about the debt ceiling, and threaten not to raise it, the bond market yawns and there is no significant impact on yields.

If the Republicans’ threats were credible, any news that increased the likelihood of a problem with the debt ceiling would send Treasury bond prices down and yields up. This is not happening, because bond traders cannot imagine that the Republicans would be able – or even willing – to follow through.

To Read More…

What Four Miles of Yemeni Protesters Looks and Sounds Like

Published on May 18, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Uri Friedman, The Atlantic Wire

On the same day that Ali Abdullah Saleh defiantly pledged to “defend” his country “by all means” and warned protesters to “stop playing with fire,” Reuters reports that armored vehicles, troops, and military academy students with batons fanned out across the capital, Sanaa, as a “sea of protesters” gathered in a main street for four miles straight, chanting “we are steadfast, you leader of the corrupt” and “peaceful, peaceful, no to civil war.” The anti-government demonstrators displayed the bodies of 13 protesters killed during bloody clashes with security forces on Wednesday at the speaker’s platform. What does a “sea of protesters” look and sound like? NPR’s Andy Carvin has come across video of the event, and it’s breathtaking–unlike any other protest footage we’ve seen so far:

To See the Video…

Dear China: Help Us Fix Pakistan

Published on May 10, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Patrick C. Doherty, Foreign Policy

The war of words is officially on. The killing of Osama bin Laden has shone a harsh light on the fraught U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

In Washington, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are angrily questioning how it’s possible that Pakistan didn’t know about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden as he hid for years under their noses in Abbottabad, a military garrison town. In Islamabad, Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani lashed out at the United States, calling it “disingenuous” to believe that Pakistan could have been “in cahoots” with al Qaeda. Whatever the case, the U.S. strategic calculus in South Asia is now in flux. What is Washington’s best opportunity to use this watershed moment to restore stability to Pakistan? Partner with China.

Unfortunately, the debate on Capitol Hill has quickly fallen into two polarized and short-sighted camps. In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings last week, both Democrats and Republicans used bin Laden’s death to justify an accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking member on the committee, argued, “It’s exceedingly difficult to conclude that our vast expenditures in Afghanistan represent a rational [strategy].” Other lawmakers have called for renewed pressure on Islamabad to take direct action against anti-U.S. militant bases in Pakistan, such as the Quetta Shura and the Haqqani network.

To Read More…

Photo Courtesy of the Express Tribune

Mapping the Mixed Emotions following Osama bin Laden’s Death

Published on May 4, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Information Aesthetics

The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point? [nytimes.com] provides an overview of the wide and varied mix of emotions following Osama bin Laden’s recent death.

Gathered from about 10,510 unique comments, the dotplot diagram contrasts the responses with negative (left) versus positive (right) emotions, against whether they consider the death significant (top) or insignificant (bottom) in terms of being a turning point in the current war on terror. Squares with darker shades represent multiple comments on the same emotion versus significance location. Although its seems the commenters were allowed to plot their comments themselves (?), some interesting patterns can be observed, both in terms of outliers are a straightforward correlation between the positive emotions and the expectation that a significant turning point is reached.

To Read More…