A Second Hand Conjecture

Megan McArdle looks at why health care costs so much. Plus an anecdote on why they will continue to grow.

(we keep costs low here at ASHC by outsourcing our health care blogging to Megan)

No Comments »

(photo: Ian Murchison | website)

The nationalization of Fannie & Freddie is often presented as a crisis of faith for the political right, due to its manifest incompatibility with the advertised belief in the “free market.” However, Sunder Katwala at NextLeft cleverly recognizes that it also presents a challenge to orthodoxy on the left, given that the insisted purpose of the nationalization isn’t government ownership, but to rescue businesses for a stable return to the private sector.

(more…)

No Comments »

I would call this ignorance, but it is worse than that. The Times reporters just believe corporations are such a honey pot they didn’t even stop to think. They just wrote.

No Comments »

Russia suddenly has an investor confidence problem. Can’t imagine why.

No Comments »

Not long ago we called it “coopetition” theory. A hideous word I thought. But now there’s an even uglier word for the same phenomenon: frenemies.

1 Comment »

Colombian flower farms (photo: Mike Freedman-Schnapp)

Colombia’s flower farm workers have for some time been benefiting mightily from industrial support communities, which practice heavy nongovernmental social investment in workforce collectives. Many of the workers in these communities outside Bogota and Medellin are essentially resettled refugees from the war in the countryside. The community support in the form of daycare, retraining, and counseling have rescued many workers lives.

But they’re in trouble, as the Colombia Free Trade Agreement with the US –which congress is holding up on grounds of Colombian worker rights– can have profound implications if unsigned. The effects:

“If tariff exemptions are canceled on account of not signing the Free Trade Agreement, we would immediately be leveraged between six and seven percent to enter the U.S. market,” said flower consultant Felipe Arango.

“We’d disappear.”
(Reuters)

But there is an alternative view on that. As Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown might put it, Colombian flower workers need to understand that in order to avoid “shortchanging” them, their jobs and communities have to be destroyed:

“For the sake of both of our nations, the United States should not sign a trade deal with Columbia that shortchanges workers, that rewards polluters, and that gives businesses the same power as sovereign governments. And we should absolutely not sign a trade deal that forgives treachery toward labor leaders,”
(Teamsters)

I can only recoil from that argument, given the suffering it would induce as policy, and echo Fausta:

The USA needs to show its support of this progress, and must approve the free trade agreement with Colombia. As Ambassador Shapiro said, it’s good for Colombia, good for the US, and good for our national security.
(Fausta’s Blog)

2 Comments »

Hilarious story. If you put the password in the page, it’s not exactly hacking for someone to enter your “secure” site. To add to the hilarity, they’ve left the insecure login method in place and merely changed the password (view source here). Sigh. To make matters worse for them they’ve hit the home page of Digg just now thanks to Mr. Baby Man…oh man. They’re about to lose their heads at the “breaches” of “security” that will now flow.

I’d also add that if you learn that a prospective customer has contacted your clients and your immediate reaction is shock and horror…you’re doing something horribly wrong in business.

1 Comment »

There’s editorial sensationalism, and then there’s Keith Olbermann. Consider Mr. Olbermann on Bush recently: “If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it! There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend. You’re a fascist! Get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it! What else is this but fascism?” Plutocracy, would perhaps be a better term for what he’s after. Or to be both frank and cynical about it, he just described government of almost every kind. Fascism worthy of the name would propose the seamless mutuality of nationalism and socialism, in the service of dictatorship. Collusion between big business and the state is generally incidental. And wherever it occurs, the role for business is entirely subordinate not reciprocal, as Keith would have you believe. Power is not for sharing under fascism. For too many people unfortunately, the word has taken on a entirely personal definition, meaning “that of which I disapprove.”

No Comments »

Fiorana is a new company that is manufacturing blue jeans specially made to accommodate a certain widely admired latina asset. According president Mike Braden, “The Latina body is different in waist and hip structure. When wearing Anglo cut jeans, there is always a fit problem around the waist area.” Laura Martinez is skeptical about the high price ($100 a pair) and the broader ethnic generalization. I guess I was surprised there was such a thing as a “Anglo jeans, ” but if so, I couldn’t be tortured into condemning their tight fit on latina women.

3 Comments »

Gas flaring in the Niger Delta (photo: Ellie)

John Ghazvinian is a journalist and historian of considerable insight into African affairs. He also happens to have written one of the best recent books on the emergent international struggle for African petroleum: Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (the paperback edition is due out in April). Whilst being an enormously valuable investigation of a very serious issue, it is also a page-turning and literate adventure into exotic and dangerous places. Indeed, one that’s practically impossible to put down once you’ve picked it up.

As John writes therein, since 1990 the oil industry has invested $20 billion in oil exploration and production in Africa, with $50 billion more planned before 2010. Over the next five years Chevron alone is devoting $20 billion in investment for Africa. Taken collectively, this exercise represents the largest commercial investment in African history. But such a spectacular windfall for some of the world’s most impoverished countries can be a poisoned chalice, where the brutal economic forces of the so-called “resource curse” hollow out states, eviscerate agricultural economies and break traditional cultures.

Populous and promising Nigeria for example, is one of the oldest and most well established oil producing countries in Africa. But with the expansion of Nigeria’s oil extraction industry, she has seen only the systematic erosion of her economic and civil society. As well as witnessing the transformation of her oil bearing region in the Niger Delta (one of the richest in the world), into a vast social wasteland of extreme poverty, rapacious crime and guerrilla warfare. As John notes, “Nigeria” is now a shorthand expression in Africa for what everyone with oil desperately wants to avoid.

John took some time out of his morning yesterday to sit down with me for a telephone interview. We were able to discuss a variety of subjects related to issues raised in his book. Including among other things, US oil supply diversification, the political consequences of offshore exploration in the Gulf of Guinea, the resource curse and rentier states, instability and post-nationalist militancy in the Niger Delta, oil field subculture, the labor problem, Chinese energy strategy in Africa and the difficulty of talking about Africa “without lapsing into sanctimoniousness” (as John puts it in the preface of his book). As I did, I believe you’ll find this to be a rather rewarding and unconventional discussion.

(more…)

9 Comments »

Click to enlarge

I thought the map Lance posted from the other day (originally from Strange Maps), which expressed the GDP of foreign countries as US states, based on their approximate equivalent GSP, was a pretty interesting visualization. However, I got to thinking what the same exercise might produce if the big boys were projected onto US geography. If you take the top five national economies in the world minus the US (Japan, PRC, Germany, UK), they easily fit into four macro GSP regions in the contiguous United States. I threw together the quick little map above from the data.

Incredibly, once you’ve applied the big four to the map, you will find that you still have around 800 billion dollars left to play with (including Alaska and Hawaii, which are not depicted). Underneath each country I included (in parentheses) how much additional money in US dollars you would have to add to the economies of each economic superpower to make them genuinely equal the collective GSP of each US region.

No Comments »

Someone is trying to teach Julia Allison about leveraged buyouts. There’s a whole new world for the lady to conquer. Did you know that Julia has the distinction of having the best socialite sobriquet ever devised? “A notorious figure with a notorious figure.” The Man approves.

No Comments »

Hyundai is contemplating pulling its Superbowl advertising, citing sudden concerns about US economic indicators. Traditionally ad budgets are the first to go when firms start believing they’re entering a recession. Not the most encouraging news of the day.

No Comments »