What I’m Reading
Some links that have caught my fancy lately:
- A very funny speech by Kevin Rudd at the Woodford folk festival
- Some cautionary tales about microcredit
- Can pork-barrelling be kosher? (A neat idea, but I wasn’t persuaded)
- My friend Dan Andrews cautions about the impact of cutting UK housing benefits will have on economic growth
- Which places in the US have the highest rate of UFO sightings per capita?
- Christopher Joye takes issue with an AFR piece of mine on inequality, and sparks responses from Matt Cowgill and Club Troppo
- A new paper on top incomes and economic growth (darn those journal publication lags)
- Don Fullerton on distributional effects of environmental policies
- Does stronger party allegiance move voters away from the centre?
- Jonathan Pryke on foreign aid effectiveness
- And lastly, thanks to Steve Blume for alerting me to an interesting Center for American Progress Report that probably influenced Obama’s State of the Union address (but seems to forget Paul Krugman’s warnings about the sloppy thinking inherent in ‘international competitiveness’)
Hey Andrew,
Any chance of introducing the stuff you did on the minimum wage and how a regulated labor market hurts the poor?
I’m sure that would get a resounding ovation in the ALP. Lol
Thanks for these links – always interesting. The article about microcredit was disturbing. I’ve been making microcredit loans to people in developing countries for several years via http://www.kiva.org, based on an assumption that small business loans help the poor to become self-reliant, while charity/aid might simply encourage them to become dependent on handouts. It is hard to know whether to persevere with the microlending, given the amount of negative press the practice has receive lately.
Anyway, thanks for your blog and keep up the good work!
I read the article on microcredit with great interest. I found it a little short of real detail in the criticisms attributed to politicians. I work for AusAUD in a developing country and I watch how the local politicians get their share of the monetary action, no matter what the source.
I cannot help but wonder if some complainants in this story are not disturbed by microcredit organisations undercutting their influence and perhaps showing up the lack of programs devised to help their own citizens. (I have in mind here the devastating floods in Pakistan and the total ineffectiveness of the government in that crisis.) And I wonder if banks and traditional sources of money and lending in these countries are not put out by being cut out of the market and taking their complaints to the politicians as the big end of town likes to do in all countries.
I have written to Andrew on this topic as I find criticism towards aid and development programs is constant and often not balanced. There are a lot of good programs around but they get little support. Don’t give up yet Karin.