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Bono, U2 lead singer and co-founder of The ONE Campaign and Product (RED), is shown in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with Eusebia Chilipwele, a former nurse and grandmother who now volunteers full-time providing home-based care to adults and orphans living with HIV/AIDS. Does celebrity activism in Africa really contribute to a growing middle class? (Rapport Press/Newscom/File )
Middle class rising in Africa—any thanks to Bono?
Sir Bob Geldof and Lord Bono can take the day off from their quest to eliminate African poverty today. A new report by the African Development Bank (PDF) shows that the African middle class is growing at a unprecedented rate, with almost 35% of Africa's population now being considered middle-class – an increase of almost 10% over the last thirty years. Measurements of living conditions are up across the board: electricity consumption has almost tripled since 1985, as has the continent's petroleum consumption. Although certain states in Africa, such as Liberia, continue to suffer from abject poverty, things are on the whole looking up.
Have the efforts of Elton John, Sting, Paul McCartney and other celebs finally started to pay off? Well, probably not – the report is distinctly lacking in references to celebrity activism. Instead, it says that the growth of this middle-class is due to social-economic opportunities provided by the private sector. Indeed, economic growth and an embryonic entrepreneurial spirit has led to formerly unheard-of levels of prosperity for many Africans who, instead of subsisting beneath the poverty line, are increasingly buying fridges, cars and televisions.
Sir Bob might argue that these changes were initially brought about by the West's aid generosity. Apparently not, as the report again states that macroeconomic policy changes are to thank for this upturn. In contract, over the last fifty years Africa gained little from $500,000,000,000 worth of poorly-structured aid that only encouraged aid-dependency.
Overwhelmingly, Africa needs trade, not aid. Trade was one of the key factors in the economic prosperity of the western world, and it can do the same in Africa. The current situation, however, denies Africa vital trading opportunities. The CAP impoverishes Africa. By having huge barriers to Europe's agricultural produce market, and therefore denying Africa the ability to trade in what they have a comparative advantage in, the CAP is plainly a raw deal. (Not to mention the fact that the CAP also costs each UK household £398 annually (PDF).)
While serious challenges no doubt lay ahead for Africa, notably HIV and its potentially devastating demographic impact, the route to Africa's long-overdue development is free trade, not another evening of banal comedy sketches, regardless of their benevolent intent. The current situation benefits only a small number of over-subsidised farmers, to the detriment of everybody else.
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Britain's Prince Charles visits the Common Good City Farm, a small urban plot of land used to grow fruits and vegetables for the residents of North West Washington, May 3, 2011. Is his criticism of America's food system well-founded? (Jason Reed / Reuters )
Prince Charles touts sustainable farming. But the free market?
Yesterday, Prince Charles gave a speech in Washington on ‘sustainable farming’. Specifically, he criticised America’s taste for beef, and promoted organic food. But Charles’ comments betray a – perhaps unsurprising – lack of free market understanding and, if put into practice, would amount to an assault on the consumer.
Firstly, the Prince claimed that, “For every pound of beef produced in the industrial system, it takes two thousand gallons of water. That is a lot of water and there is plenty of evidence that the Earth cannot keep up with the demand”. However, it is a simple law of markets that the Earth can keep up with any level of demand, for any product. If demand exceeds supply at a given price, prices will rise, until supply and demand are re-equilibrated. Increasing water prices will mean that beef is more expensive, naturally regulating the American consumption that Charles is so worried about. Water goes to beef production because steak, burgers and so forth are highly valued; if we were to ration the amount of water used in making beef, it would go to some other good which is less valued. Since water rationing would also necessarily mean beef rationing, prices would increase nonetheless. The consumer, and in particular the less well-off consumer looking for cheap food, would be hit the hardest.
Prince Charles’ next target was the building on rural land. He criticised the US for allowing such activities, saying that, "Here in the United States I am told one acre is lost to development every minute of every day, which means that since 1982 an area the size of Indiana has been built over". But what does the transforming of rural land into built up areas show? It shows that the built up areas are valued more highly by the public; people are prepared to pay more for, say, hiring an office block for a year, than they are for the food which could be produced in that land in a year. By placing restrictions on building, the land will be used for something less valued by the public, and the supply of housing will be reduced; leading to an increase in prices. Again, we see consumers, and especially poor consumers in need of housing, taking the hit for such a change.
Lastly, Charles argued for subsidies to organic farming. But all subsidies do is force people to pay towards the production of a good they don’t want. Organic food is expensive because it inefficiently uses resources. If people are prepared to pay for its possible health benefits – fine. But by subsidising organic food, all we’re doing is encouraging resource inefficiency to make food people don’t want. The land, labour and capital which would have been used to produce a large amount of non-organic food would then be used to make a small amount of organic food. Supply falls, prices goes up, and who loses out? The consumer.
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
This August 2010 photo shows St. Constantine (Aghios Constantinos), a small seaside church on the northern coast of the Greek island of Milos. There is a growing gap in the European Union between strong economies, like Germany's, and week ones, like Greece's. (Marc Levy / AP / File )
State privatizations could save the euro
Despite the prodigious efforts to bolster the Euro, it remains in desperate trouble as the gap between the strongest members – Germany – and the weakest members – Greece, Ireland and Portugal – continues to widen. Importantly, the Euro currency system precludes the normal adjustment mechanism of devaluation. Current bond yields tell their own story. Germany’s 2016 bond is yielding 2.6%, whilst Greece’s 2014 bond is yielding over 20%. The figures for Ireland and Portugal are roughly half of those of Greece.
The weakest Euro members are rightly under immense pressure to cut public spending. But is it too late and will serious civil disturbance break out? Normally, any organisation whose debt soars will sell off surplus assets. A really radical – even by the standards of the ASI – and totally theoretical proposal would be for Greece to sell off islands such as Crete, Rhodes and Santorini.
Of course, this is a non-starter. But selling off large chunks of Government-owned assets including property – the equivalent of the planned private sale of Scotland’s Ailsa Craig – is not. Indeed, Greece is seeking to raise €50 billion of privatisation proceeds by 2015. Whether this figure can be achieved is doubtful, but we shall see. Ireland, too, should follow suit. An obvious privatisation target would be ESB, the dominant state-owned electricity business. Portugal also has many public sector assets that are suitable for sale.
These three EU member states – and others whose finances are little better – should focus on selling state-owned assets. Inventories should be drawn up with the proviso that assets remain in the public sector only if there is a compelling case not to sell them. The Euro currency system is essentially flawed but it continues to stagger on with the ever-increasing demands on taxpayer support. Although a radical privatization policy will boost the finances of individual member states, it still may not save the Euro.
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
British author JK Rowling poses with a copy of her book "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland, July 15, 2005. Each new book sells enough in its first day to keep the author "in style," writes guest blogger Jock Coats. If there were no intellectual property laws, would Rowling still have written the Harry Potter series? (Mike Finn-Kelcey / Reuters / File )
Intellectual property: an unnecessary evil
Intellectual property rights – better thought of as intellectual monopoly rights – are an unnecessary evil. They are unnecessary because all their stated, utilitarian aims can be achieved by other means. They are an evil because granting artificial rights to non-property restricts everyone else’s property rights. They are more likely to be used to stifle the creativity, innovation, and emulation that underpins technological and cultural advance; and they concentrate wealth and power in the hands of privileged non-creators more interested in milking selected others’ efforts.
Dignifying them with the phrase “intellectual property” is a contemporary conceit to conceal crude market interference through state granted privilege with the flimsiest gossamer of respectability. The primary origins of patents lie in maintaining the state’s coffers, and of copyright in state censorship of ideas.
Property rights arise from a desire to prevent conflict over scare resources. Ideas, patterns, recipes and processes are non-scarce. Intellectual monopoly laws impose different time periods and restrictions. From time to time legislators arbitrarily decide to protect previously unprotected categories of invention. Even legislators then don’t regard them as genuine property, ownable in perpetuity by the first owner and their heirs until they chose to dispose of it.
However, many claim that, without intellectual monopoly, those with innovative and creative minds would not use those faculties, insufficiently rewarded for their creativity. This is by no means self-evident. If...
- Dickens could make money from Americans without copyright
- Musicians could feed themselves before Edison
- Plant breeding could bloom before the US Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970
- Software got written before the 1981 SCOTUS decision in Diamond vs Diehr
- Most of the 2009 Billboard Top 40 music earners made most of their income from live performances, not recordings
- Harry Potter novels sold enough in their first twenty-four hours to keep J K Rowling in style
...why do we think they need state protection now? The plain truth is that because of the grip of the small number of media giants who control the production, marketing and distribution of their favoured artists, many more undiscovered artists subsist on live gigs in local venues. And because of the modish patent trolls who have no intention of ever exploiting their patents, many innovators never even know someone else “owns” an idea until the writ arrives end up broken.
19th century libertarians ranked Intellectual Monopoly as state created privilege that impoverishes the majority. We should heed them: they are still destructive, unnecessary, statist and evil.
Further reading:
Stephan Kinsella’s “Against Intellectual Property” at the Mises Institute (and an audiobook version of it by me)
Stephan’s thinktank, the “Centre for the Study of Innovative Freedom” (C4SIF)
“Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin and David Levine and the supporting website “Against Monopoly: Defending the Right to Innovate”
…and if you are minded to do a bit more study on Intellectual Property from a libertarian perspective, though Stephan Kinsella’s Mises Academy course “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory and Economics” is coming to the end of its current run, you might keep an eye out for it running again.
April 26th is "World Intellectual Property Day". Jock Coats blogs at OxFr33.
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
People gather for the Lollapalooza music festival in Santiago, Chile, Saturday April 2, 2011. Chile has a model pension system, writes guest blogger Eamonn Butler. (Roberto Candia / AP / File )
Chile's pensions system: a model for the world
I'm at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Buenos Aires, where I have been learning about the issues facing the future of freedom in South America. One interesting case is that of Chile, whose military government of the 1980s, perhaps surprisingly, introduced a series of free-market liberal reforms. One of these was to change Chile's hopeless chain-letter pension system – that is, one like ours – into a system based on personal savings accounts.
Overall, the system has been a fantastic success. It gave people choice in how they saved, and incentives to do so. Personal savings in Chile are up from just a few hundred million dollars to tens of trillions of dollars today.
But no system is perfect. Self-employed people were not required to join the system, so many such people saved nothing or little. Young workers often did not bother to contribute, reckoning that retirement was a long way off. Low-paid, temporary workers had patchy saving records. The government guaranteed a minimum pension for those who contributed long-term – which, like the pension credit in the UK, gave many workers no incentive to save much at all. Some retired people drew down their pension benefits too rapidly, and ran out of money.
In 2008, Chile introduced a number of reforms to try to get round these problems. There were new supplements for people with little or nothing saved in their accounts. Wealthier people, and some self-employed persons, are now obliged to participate. Younger workers were given subsidy incentives to join. New rules were introduced to make sure that pensioners did not exhaust their accounts before they died. And there were new requirements on people to buy survivors' and disability insurance.
Will this work? My worry is that two-thirds of all pensioners will now receive some government pension support – which must reduce the incentive to save. Public benefits will comprise half the retirement income of the poorest households. The new survivors' and disability insurance will impose a new financial burden on families, which will eat into their savings. The public benefits will cost a noticeable fraction of the government budget – and paying for them will impose an effective tax, and quite a hefty one, on private pensions.
Chile's pension system was a commonsense breakthrough that many other countries have copied. As a pioneering system, it is not surprising that it threw up some problems to solve. But the solutions, I believe, should have been more in the direction of extending market principles rather than extending government interventions. It will be interesting to see what happens – and it will provide a lesson for us all.
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
A woman with her children pass next of eggs died red under an old Greek Easter tradition in central meet market of Athens, on Wednesday, April 20, 2011. Nearly a year after Greece was rescued from bankruptcy by an international bailout, the country's businesses are reeling from stringent austerity measures imposed as a means to pull the economy out of its debt hole. (Petros Giannakouris / AP )
Can defaulting be good for an economy?
Greece was bailed out, then Ireland was bailed out, and now Portugal has been bailed out. All of these countries were made to agree fairly stringent deficit and debt reduction packages. All three face years of fiscal tightness, reduced services and living standards, and low economic growth. It is by no means certain that the populations of these democracies will tolerate this for the length of time it will require to put their affairs to rights.
There is an alternative. It is to let these countries default, offering a percentage of the debts' face value as settlement. There would be turmoil. Some bondholders, including European banks, would lose substantial sums. But at the end of it confidence would return and economies start to grow again without that burden of debt.
The decision was made to protect small depositors, bondholders and to some extent bank shareholders, at the expense of taxpayers. It was an unwise decision, both morally and from the point of view of efficiency. One could argue that small depositors were not a party to the causes of the crisis, and should not be made to bear its burdens. Bondholders and shareholders, however, should have known better.
The main argument in favour of default is that it will be effective in putting a line under the crisis. Instead of limping along for years with lacklustre economies struggling to meet debt repayments, the over-indebted countries can get it over with and turn the page.
It looks very much as if the bailout option has been taken to protect the euro and European banks, but it would not be the end of the world if a few countries that should never have been in the single currency have to leave it. And if a few European banks had to restructure, recapitalize or be taken over, this, too, could be survived. Allowing the euro to lose momentum might be a setback to European political union, but this would be no bad thing.
The bailout strategy might keep things going for a while, with more patches to counter the recurring crises. Or we could take the hit now, accept the consequences of folly, and start to rebuild on firmer foundations. It looks increasingly like the better option, especially if there's a bigger storm on the way…
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
A woman rides a tricycle carrying her child in front of apartment blocks in Beijing, April 18, 2011. China's economy is playing catch up, writes guest blogger Tim Worstall. (Jason Lee / Reuters )
The richer we get, the more markets we need
There's an idea out there I regard as pernicious. Roughly stated, it's that the economy is now so complex that we've got to guide it. Plan it, let the Wise Men in Whitehall decide where investment should go, get them to pick winners to the benefit of us all. Brink Lindsey has a paper out which argues against this case. Worth reading in full but here's the nub of the argument.
We can regard economic growth as coming in two forms. There's catch up growth, such as what China is doing now and Japan did 50 years ago. What to do is largely known, for there are the examples of the richer, more advanced, economies that can be followed. To an extent it's as simple as pulling people out of low productivity agriculture and into high productivity industry, raising the education levels and increasing participation in the formal economy. But the important point is, in Lindsey's view, that it is at least feasible for a government to work this out and to manage the process. Clearly not all do for not all have followed this path but it is at least possible that some will.
However, once a place has got rich the problem changes. Catch up growth is no longer possible, for there's no one to catch up with. The economy has arrived at the technological frontier so there's no one to copy. Any further growth is going to come from innovation, new ways of doing things, rather than mobilising extant resources to simply do more. At which point governments can't do that planning and directing thing.
For, as Hayek pointed out, the only information system we've got to calculate what the economy should do next in such a situation is that very economy. It simply isn't possible for a central planner to decide whether capital should be allocated to gluten free bread, discounts on golfing holidays, weird metals extraction, wedding photography or software for computer based gambling (to mention only a few businesses extant among the readers of my blog). It is only that great calculating engine of the entire economy, with that interplay of supply and demand determining prices, which can possibly give us the information necessary to direct where to go next. For none of us know what's going to be the next big thing, all we can do is experiment and find out, the experiment being the means by which we find out.
All of which means that it's the very complexity of the modern economy, it's pushing up against the technological frontier, which means that planning, the State direction of industry, cannot work and that we need to be ever more free market in our approach if we are to continue to grow.
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
In this March 11, 2011 photo, Patrick Henry middle school sixth grader Bailey Bowers, 12, loads her plate up with fresh vegetables in the school's cafeteria in Sioux Falls, S.D. A school cafeteria is a classic example of the economic "nudge" concept, but is it a good illustration? (Jay Pickthorn / AP / File )
Should government 'nudge' people to do the right thing?
I'm in Nassau (it's a hard life) at the Association of Private Enterprise Education meeting, where I've been catching up on some of the latest thinking on free-market and libertarian economic issues. This morning I got some interesting insights on the 'nudge' approach – constructing choices so that we all do the 'right' thing, such as saving more for our retirement or donating our organs to medicine – from a string of specialists including one with the engaging name of Adam C Smith.
Smith points out that the 'nudge' idea implies the existence of a policymaker who is doing the nudging. And as we know from Hayek, not to mention Buchanan, Tullock and Niskanen, policymakers are less than perfect. Indeed, economists figure that they have even more behavioural shortcomings than the rest of us. That's partly because the information they have, and on which they construct our choices for us, is less complete, and more out of date, than the information we have ourselves.
Another contributor, Dan Houser, contrasts a 'nudge' with a 'shove'. The latter, you feel. The former, you don't. The whole idea is that you are being manipulated without your knowledge. That, says Houser, is a very non-transparent policy. And non-transparency invites politicians and officials to promote their own, hidden agendas. It might even invite corruption. It certainly makes it difficult for the public or the media to check and control 'nudge' policies when they are, by design, unseen.
The classic illustration of the 'nudge' idea is of course the school cafeteria, where kids choose more healthy food if you put the less healthy stuff at the end or at the back. But that example illustrates another problem: how do you know what people's real preferences are if you are constantly manipulating their choices? Our ambition should be to understand our own human nature, not to obscure it, because if we obscure it we cannot deal sensibly with it.
And the school cafeteria illustration is fatally flawed anyway. Most of us think that it is quite right to constrain and channel the choices of children – that is how children learn behaviour that is beneficial to themselves and their fellow creatures. But I'm not sure what right a self-interested government has to treat us just as if we were children. Do you?
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
A one kilo gold bar is displayed in a shop in Dubai's gold souk in this April 11, 2006 file photo. Since the end of the gold standard, inflation has devalued people's savings, writes guest blogger Sam Bowman. (Tamara Abdul Hadi / Reuters / File )
Theft by inflation
The chart here shows the pound's purchasing value in real terms (taking January 1974 as a baseline). It comes from Dominic Frisby's latest article for MoneyWeek, where he asks whether the gold standard might make a comeback. The main drawback of gold, he says, is the inconvenience associated with transfering and storing it, but this might not be such an issue in the era of digital money:
And the chances of my going to Tesco's some time in the not-too-distant future and doing my weekly shop with a gold sovereign are, at best, remote.
But that doesn't mean gold won't be used again as a medium of exchange. Digital gold currencies – where ownership of gold safely stored in vaults is transferred digitally, just as ordinary fiat-money transactions take place today – are already starting to be used across the net. In theory at least, digital gold has the potential to become as good a form of exchange as any other digital currency.
I'd prefer free currency competition, but if a gold standard is more politically feasible, then great. My one reservation is the impact of the gold standard on trade in a world where most countries use fiat currency – I don't really know what the implications would be, but Churchill's half-hearted return to the gold standard seems to have had pretty awful consequences in the 1920s. If any supporters of the gold standard would care to address these concerns in the comments, I'd be grateful.
In any case, the chart above sums up the theft-by-inflation that has reigned since the end of the gold standard. It's even more insidious than taxation, because very few people realize how much inflation devalues their savings. I recommend the whole piece.
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
A person signs a check in this photo illustration. If a government could only sign checks that it could pay for without borrowing, it would stop debt from piling up. (Photo illustration/AGB Photo/ZUMA Press/Newscom)
Governments shouldn't borrow. Period.
If you run a think-tank you are well used to getting densely-typed or hand-written letters, in which the author proclaims some ingeniously simply idea that will solve all the country's (and probably the world's) economic and political problems. They often come with diagrams, and yes, the use of green ink is surprisingly common among this genre.
Obviously I don't want to be thought part of the green-ink brigade, but maybe there is indeed one pretty simple idea that would solve – well, not all, but a fair number of our problems. It struck me as I was writing my new guide to Milton Friedman, who very much supported it – the simple rule that governments should not be allowed to borrow, nor run up long-term debts for future generations.
For a very long time, it has seemed perfectly natural that governments could and should borrow – to finance expensive wars or infrastructure projects, for example. Keynesian economists saw the occasional deficit as an important way of managing the economy. But once you give politicians the power to borrow, a huge moral hazard arises. It becomes just too tempting, and too easy, to borrow for the purposes of current consumption, rather than future benefit. More expensive schools, rising healthcare standards, more generous pensions, more police, social workers and officials, even bailing out the banks – all can be packaged as an 'investment' in the future. But in fact the principal beneficiaries are we today, who enjoy all these improvements. The losers are the next generation who find themselves bearing the cost.
Gordon Brown, when UK Chancellor, announced the intention to balance the government's budget 'over the economic cycle' and to borrow 'only to invest'. Unfortunately, as I say, much of his 'investment' was in fact simple spending, paid for by borrowing. And since it is not easy to define a 'cycle', we found him moving the goalposts when the books didn't balance. Nor did the rules survive their first major text, the financial crisis.
If governments had to balance their books, the pressure to overspend would be greatly reduced, and more minds would be concentrated on thinking about what government was really there to do, and about the nasty business of how to pay for it without passing the bill on to our children. And the rule should be a definite one – say, that the books have to balance at the end of every five-year period, not over some vague 'cycle'. OK, it may not save the world, exactly; but it would produce much more responsible and honest government.
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The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
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