China has become the world’s second biggest economy according to data released on Monday August 16th. Japan’s economy fell behind China’s at market exchange rates in the second quarter (it has been number three in PPP terms for some time). These numbers are not strictly comparable: Japan’s data have been seasonally adjusted while those for China have not. Quibbles aside, Japan will surely be eclipsed soon, if it has not been already. Data compiled by Angus Maddison, an economist who died earlier this year, suggest that China and India were the biggest economies in the world for almost all of the past 2000 years. Why they fell so far behind may be more of a mystery than why they are currently flourishing.
From Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket, in Prospect
In our book The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and I demonstrated that, first, many problems which are more prevalent lower down the social ladder are worse in societies with bigger income differences, and second, that almost everyone would benefit from reduced inequality. To some, however, these seem impossible notions. Writing in the August 2010 edition of Prospect, Matthew Sinclair from the Taxpayers Alliance claimed our research was “simply untrue.”
WHEN a book with the title Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us arrived on my desk, I figured it could go one of two ways. One possibility could be that the zombies were Keynesians, discredited in the 1970s but back in favour today. But the cover illustration of trickle-down economics and efficient financial markets illustrates that the Chicago school is deemed to be the haven of the undead.
It is an entertaining and thought-provoking book by an Australian academic John Quiggin, which also works as a good summary for non-specialists of how the economics debate has developed (NB the book will not be published until October).
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Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.
If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.
I believe that misconceptions play a large role in shaping history, and the euro crisis is a case in point.
Let me start my analysis with the previous crisis, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. In the week following September 15, 2008, global financial markets actually broke down and by the end of the week they had to be put on artificial life support. The life support consisted of substituting sovereign credit—backed by the financial resources of the state—for the credit of financial institutions that had ceased to be acceptable to counterparties.
In the fall of 2007, after two Bear Stearns-owned hedge funds trading in subprime debt suddenly went bankrupt, I sat down with a friend of a friend who worked in finance to see if he could explain it to me. That conversation became the first in a series, which we began publishing at n+1. The conversations continued through the crisis and after, following the trajectory of one financier facing the hardest days he’d yet seen. This week HarperPerennial is publishing Diary of a Very Bad Year, the book that resulted from those conversations. We hope it’s a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the crisis. All this week on the site we’ll be featuring excerpts and outtakes from the book. —KG
You may have read last month that the Fourth Annual Global Studies Conference location had still not been finalized. We have good news - the venue and dates have been decided!
Please join us in Rio de Janeiro from 18-20 July, 2011 at the JW Marriott for the Fourth Global Studies Conference. With a special theme on Latin America and Globalization: Emerging Societies and Emancipation, the conference promises to be as engaging as the city you will be staying in.
We are just now finalizing the website details but please keep visiting us online here for updates and at our blog for other important news.
The first intellectual consequence of the economic crisis was to undermine neoliberalism—or the belief in the sufficiency of markets to secure human welfare—as the age’s default ideology.
The second was to prompt a hasty resurrection of Keynes. “We are all Keynesians again!” the ghost of Richard Nixon might have declared as Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, leaders of the nations most squarely behind the neoliberal push of the last thirty years, changed the Anglo-American tune and, this past winter, begged their European colleagues to stimulate the Continental economy with borrowed money. The crisis also made the economists Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini into the ?rst Keynesian superstars since John Kenneth Galbraith. Their recommendations, on their invaluable blogs, of still vaster countercyclical spending and the temporary nationalization of banks were not taken up by the Obama administration, but they did confer new respectability on the idea of close state involvement in the economy.
This is the beginning of the end for the EU unless it can find the capacity to start again on radically new bases
Within a single month, we have witnessed Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece announcing his country’s possible default, an expansive European rescue loan offered to him on the condition of devastating budget cuts, soon followed by the “downgraded rating” of the Portuguese and Spanish debts, a threat on the value and the very existence of the euro, the creation (under strong US pressure) of a European security fund worth €750bn, the Central European Bank’s decision (against its rules) to redeem sovereign debts, and the announcement of budget austerity measures in several member states.
By Tony Judt, in Institute for Public Knowledge, Transformations of the Public Sphere
One striking consequence of the disintegration of the public sector has been an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others. We are familiar with complaints about the ‘atomizing’ impact of the internet: if everyone selects gobbets of knowledge and information that interest them, but avoids exposure to anything else, we do indeed form global communities of elective affinity—while losing touch with the affinities of our neighbors.
In that case, what is it that binds us together? Students frequently tell me that they only know and care about a highly specialized subset of news items and public events. Some may read of environmental catastrophes and climate change. Others are taken up by national political debates but quite ignorant of foreign developments. In the past, thanks to the newspaper they browsed or the television reports they took in over dinner, they would at least have been ‘exposed’ to other matters. Today, such extraneous concerns are kept at bay.
Tell me about your first book, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin.
This book is believed by many to be the greatest Chinese novel ever written. For me it is like a bible for everything to do with Chinese culture. Cao belonged to the Han Chinese clan and the book is a huge family novel written in the 18th century. The family’s fortunes were tied up with the Kangxi dynasty and the book is all about the relationship between the family members and all the different classes.
It really is a wonderful book which has been translated by Penguin since 1970 and reprinted again and again. But many Westerners don’t know about this book, which is a shame because it is such a powerful book which I really love.
Why is it so important to you?
Well, it is such a good guide to our culture. In the book more than 100 people, buildings, poems, paintings and dreams are described in great detail. So you really find out the lifestyles of the people living there. I have read this book again and again ever since my childhood.
Suicide bombing is one of the most passionately debated topics in academia, the government, and the intelligence community. The secondary literature on this subject has convincingly demonstrated that suicide bombing is sui generis in its historical contingency (rather than in its essence), that al-Qaeda’s practice of suicide bombing takes place in a globalized landscape which is at once moral and political, and that even the most murderous terrorists appropriate and objectify modern notions of humanity in describing their actions.
Translated from the Spanish by David Noriega. Read the original here.
According to Andy Warhol’s maxim, in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. This utopia of visibility makes sense in a society of the spectacle. Mexican political culture promises happiness in the opposite way: what is important is not what is seen, but what is hidden. A life of accomplishment doesn’t culminate in celebrity; it is achieved in secret. The Mexican utopia has consisted of enjoying your fifteen minutes of impunity.
Managers across Japan were stunned last month when a factory belonging to Ogihara, a Japanese diemaker, was sold to BYD, a Chinese carmaker that boasts Warren Buffett as an investor. In a sign of the sensitivity of the matter, the Japanese firm tried to keep the transaction quiet, never issuing a press release and refusing all interview requests.
Japan has a long history of resisting foreigners who seek to buy their way into the country. But most recent squabbles have at least been with firms from America, a political ally. Deals involving firms from the Chinese mainland are touchier because of the two countries’ uneasy relations. This has kept the number of Sino-Japanese mergers and acquisitions low, even as China surpassed America in 2007 to become Japan’s largest trading partner.
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As a student during the 1980s, I gave the “European Union” section in the library a wide berth. The pall of soporific technocracy that hung over it made the adjacent shelves of books on law and political science enticing by comparison. A lot more has been written on the EU since then, most of it perpetuating that same “mortal dullness,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Perry Anderson. Dullness, on the other hand, is one charge no one has ever levied at Anderson, whose new book, The New Old World, is as insightful, combative and invigorating as its illustrious predecessors. Given Anderson’s long and intimate engagement with Europe, both as an editor of the New Left Review and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books for the past two decades, one looks forward to what one gets–a bracing assault from somewhere on the left on the conventional Europieties, and new perspectives on the evolution, and likely future trajectory, of one of the most important political and cultural experiments of our time.
Colin Marshall talks to B.R. Myers, author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters”, in 3 Quarks Daily
Brian Reynolds Myers is contributing editor to the Atlantic and professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. In his new book, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters, he examines North Korean propaganda meant for both internal and external consumption and through it constructs the closed country’s view of itself, its relationship to other countries and the Kim dynasty that has controlled it for 60 years.
Westerner to get the impression that everything a North Korean citizen might see or read or hear, every piece of culture they might encounter — paintings, stories, sitcoms — is, in some way, propaganda. How true is that notion?
I think it is true. Of course, the information cordon that used to isolate the country from the outside world has deteriorated steadily since the mid-1990s, when North Koreans began to leave the country to look for food. You have a lot of people who are smuggling into the country things like South Korean DVDs or Chinese TV sets — even cellphones, which can be used to call people outside the country. Average citizens now have some access to unorthodox sources of culture and information, but for the average North Korean on a daily basis, everything they encounter really is propaganda.
IN 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”.
The number of applications from prospective international students to American graduate schools has increased for the fifth consecutive year. In a report released last week, the Council of Graduate Schools says the 7% growth in 2010 is the largest since a 9% gain three years ago.
In what the council calls an “initial snapshot of graduate applications” taken in the American autumn, those from China were up 19% following a 14% increase in 2009. Similarly, applications from prospective graduate students from the Middle East and Turkey also rose by double-digits for the fifth consecutive year, by 18%.
The council represents more than 500 institutions of higher education in the US and Canada engaged in graduate education, research and the preparation of candidates for advanced degrees.
Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack’s worldview contained elements of the tea party’s anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with “the Left” (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America’s poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:
“I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual” . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
From The Economist
by Omar Sarwar, in 3 Quarks Daily
By Mark Mazower, in The Nation
Colin Marshall talks to B.R. Myers, author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters”, in 3 Quarks Daily
From The Economist