Economics Roundtable

So why are people doing it? That is, unfortunately, the great conundrum of politics. Why do people do things which are so manifestly harmful in even the medium term? Faced with the rising price of food politicians are segmenting countries off from the world market, even from their own internal ...

It would be something of an error to mistake me for someone who is enamoured of the approach Jeffrey Sachs takes to solving the problems of the world. I'm just not aligned with his insistence that a few clever people telling others what to do is going to end every ...

A recent entrant for our department of bad ideas collection, the creation of a rice cartel (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/in
dustry_sectors/consumer_goods/article3864246.ece):
Protests erupted yesterday from rice-importing nations as Samak Sundaravej, Thailand's Prime Minister, proposed a cartel of South-East Asian rice exporters that would seek to gain more control over the price of grain. In the wake of mounting ...

Thomas Friedman (amiably referred to as Airmiles ) famously wrote a book claiming that the world is flat. Essentially, that the process of globalisation has flattened out all of the hills and valleys that impede economic integration. While it's a nice idea it is clearly nonsense: he concentrates far too ...

We're all used to the idea that trade brings benefits: as, indeed, any such voluntary exchange must for the participants to actually indulge in it. We're also up to date with the idea that if there are to be trade restrictions then tariffs are a a better idea than quantitative ...

There's a very puzzling, to me at least, insistence in the air that we should be self-sufficient: indeed, that everyone should be self-sufficient, provide their own needs from their own resources. We're told that we should have energy independence, that the UK (or the US, or indeed any other country, for ...

We normally think of the Precautionary Principle as affecting new technologies and preventing their adoption until every possible effect they might have has been studied from every possible angle. Annoying and damaging as the process itself is, that's not all there is to it (http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/henry_miller/
2008/04/when_more_means_worse.html) : In Europe, the so-called ...

Dani Rodrik (http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/200
8/04/adam-smith-the.html) follows up on a Greg Mankiw piece asking why inequality has risen in the United States in recent decades. The question is, if it's returns to education which are responsible, why is the rise in inequality so strongly concentrated in the incomes of the top 1%? ...

The Worthwhile Canadian Initiative (http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian
_initi/2008/04/canada-and-arge.html) has this quite startling graph on the relative performances of the Argentine and Canadian development experiences. Starting out from very much the same point, with foreign finance being used to develop resource based economies, the diverged ...

It is difficult for me at times to understand why we have all of these wonderful international organisations, stuffed to hte brimful as they are with technocrats and experts of every shade and stripe. For the logical point is that there are problems too complex for we mere mortals to ...