- “Aides expressed both expectation and reservation at the President’s still-unclear interest in the idea and had questions about the island’s military and research potential, the Journal reported. ”
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President Trump is interested in buying Greenland. (Why not?)
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.. - Via Marginal Revolution, why not indeed.
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.. - Especially because of opportunity costs.
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.. - Plus, there’s precedence, of course.
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.. - Lots of it!
Tag: canada
ROW: Links for 17th July, 2019
- “A politically divisive debate continues to rage over U.S. President Donald Trump’s push to add a citizenship or nationality question to the U.S. census.That same question has been part of Canada’s long-form census for over a century without a ripple, although it’s not part of the short-form questionnaire.”
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Via MR, an article that helps you learn that the citizenship question has been around for a while now.
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.. - “Not asking about citizenship seems to signify an attitude toward immigrants something like this: Get them in and across the border, their status may be mixed and their existence may be furtive, and let’s not talk too openly about what is going on, and later we will try to get all of them citizenship. Given the current disagreement between the two parties on immigration questions, that may well be the only way of getting more immigrants into the U.S., which I hold to be a desirable goal. But that is a dangerous choice of political turf, and it may not help the pro-immigration cause in the longer run.”
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And here’s why Tyler Cowen linked to the piece we added above in the first place.
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.. - “The Indian Rupee will now be accepted for transaction at all airports in Dubai, according to a leading newspaper in the United Arab Emirates.The acceptance of Indian currency is good news for tourists from that country as earlier they lost a sizeable amount due to exchange rates, sources said.”
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On the growing importance of India in the global scheme of things…
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.. - “By demanding that schools provide opportunities for young girls to play sports and mandating that universities provide equal scholarship funding for women, title IX created opportunity and incentive for girls to play sports. Suddenly, not only were energetic, athletic girls given the same opportunities to play as the boys were, but they also had the opportunity for their sporting talent to fund their educations through scholarships.”
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Policies, politics, Title IX and the recently concluded World Cup.
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.. - “Yan said the data shows that housing prices have “decoupled” from income, and are instead driven by access to capital – giving investors a clear advantage over average Canadians. “It’s not about supply or demand any more,” said Yan. “It’s: who are we building for?””
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Circling back to Canada, this time about housing and its excesses. This has a familiar ring to it…
Links for 11th March, 2019
- “Well, I hope the ongoing changes in policy towards the Chinese government, most of which I think are justified as a direct response to Chinese government actions, do not also lead to a general prejudice against ordinary Chinese people or all things Chinese.So far, we haven’t seen that, at least not much.For example, Trump, who’s been utterly shameless in provoking racial and ethnic tensions when it comes to African-Americans, Latinos, Mexicans, Africans — maybe I’m missing something, but I haven’t seen the same sort of thing on China yet.Trump seems to put China mostly into the trade/jobs economic section of his brain, rather than the “chaos/social upheaval/white nationalism” section of his brain. (And that’s one reason why, so far, lots of Democrats and independents have supported his policies, along with the Trumpists.)”
That second paragraph worries me a little bit, although I am unsure of my analysis. Economics and culture (very roughly, that’s how I think about the two concepts mentioned above) aren’t independent. The more I read about economics, the more I think each feeds upon the other, and that too, continuously. Such compartmentalization seems too simplistic. The rest of the interview is also worth reading – and as somebody who appreciates great questions, I loved the very last one. - “In March 1951, a frustrated Kodak threatened to sue the U.S. government for the “considerable amount of damage to our products resulting from the Nevada tests or from any further atomic energy tests…” Finally the company and the government came to an agreement. The AEC would provide Webb, by now the head of Kodak’s physics division, with schedules and maps of future tests so that Kodak could take the necessary precautions to protect its product. In return, the people of Kodak were to keep everything they knew about the government’s Nevada nuclear testing a secret.”
The world is stranger than you can know, and imagine. It is also scarily stupid in ways one simply couldn’t have contemplated. A sobering read about how Kodak discovered scary stuff about America’s nuclear bomb experiments – and was essentially asked to keep quiet about it. - “Perhaps because most of us are descendants of immigrants thrust into an artificial construct of a nation, or maybe because we live in a country that is constantly renewing and rebuilding, one of the few tangible things that connects us to the past and our cultural identity is food.”
Ten dishes you might want to try in Singapore, with a little bit of history thrown in. I am sad to report that I haven’t tasted all of them yet. - “Many local African churches have reached out to Chinese workers, including incorporating Mandarin into services. A number of Chinese, in turn, have welcomed the sense of community and belonging that these Christian churches offer. And a small but growing number of ethnically Chinese missionaries from Taiwan and other countries are specifically targeting Chinese nationals in Africa, preaching to them with a freedom they’d never be allowed in the People’s Republic.”
If the rest of the world is worried about Africa being unduly influenced by neocolonial China… China, it turns out, is worried about being influenced by evangelical Christianity from Africa. - “If you missed reports of the shenanigans at Canada’s McMaster University last week, then the following article by academic Kevin Carrico is well worth a read. Universities are letting a minority of Chinese students behave in ways that are utterly unacceptable. One speculates that they do this because many universities depend heavily on Chinese students for fee income, because they and their academics fear the Chinese Communist Party, and because university administrations tend to be pretty weak-kneed.”
I had linked a while back to events in Canada, at a university. Joe Studwell, author of the fantastic How Asia Works, links to an article that provides perspective on this issue.
Links for 27th February, 2019
- “The time for masking such equity-type investments as loans has passed. Real estate in India is facing a glut, with $110 billion worth of unsold homes across the top eight markets, including Mumbai. That’s almost four years of sales, according to property analytics firm Liases Foras. Back in 2009, when apartment inventory was equal to about one year of sales, only 25 percent of construction funding came from shadow financiers. Banks controlled 75 percent.The tables have now turned: Housing-finance firms and other nonbank lenders, more adventurous than conventional banks, account for 55 percent of advances to builders. Lenders pocketing 2 percent to 3 percent of the loan value as upfront fees in exchange for not collecting on the principal for years has allowed a buildup of poor-quality debt. Moratoriums have delayed builder bankruptcies, and prevented timely detection of the problem.”
This is a problem just waiting to become a full blown crisis in India – not the real estate sector per se, but the financing of the real estate sector in India. Read this article to find out how and why it has become as big a problem as it has. - “Like all great work, it was the foundation for other huge contributions – work by other great economists such as Oliver Hart, Bengt Holmstrom, Paul Milgrom and many others can easily be traced to this paper. The paper’s starting point – that coordination within firms is not accomplished ‘by fiat’ (Demsetz famously remarks “This is delusion”), and that one should instead examine how incentive structures within firms create efficiencies relative to other forms of organisation – became the starting point for nearly the entire field of the economics of organisation ever since.”
I have linked to this piece earlier, I think in January. But since I am currently teaching a course in Industrial Organization at Gokhale Institute, I found myself reading this piece all over again. Demsetz really was a giant in this field – and his analysis of why firms exist, and how they coordinate and incentivize activity within the firm is truly illuminating. - “So, the UN forecasting model inputs three things: fertility rates, migration rates, and death rates. It doesn’t take into account the expansion of education for females or the speed of urbanization (which are in some ways linked). The UN says they’re already baked into the numbers. But when I went and interviewed [the demographer] Wolfgang Lutz in Vienna, which was one of the first things we did, he walked me through his projections, and I walked out of the room gobsmacked. All he was doing was adding one new variable to the forecast: the level of improvement in female education. And he comes up with a much lower number for global population in 2100, somewhere between 8 billion and 9 billion.”
Population “crises” are over-rated in any case (people are a resource!) – but even the forecasts for how many people there will be on the planet in the next thirty to eighty years are likely to be wrong. The world is changing right in front of our eyes. The problem of the (near) future isn’t one of too many people – it’s one of too few. - “Instead, the signatories objected to the election of a student union president of Tibetan descent, who “was found to hold the political belief that Tibet should be free”.”
Based on what you have read above, which country are we talking about? Not only might the answer surprise you, but it will also help you think about geopolitics, international finance and the benefits of diversification. - “Most developed countries of today addressed many of their basic plumbing challenges largely through public production. China is clearly an example of the latter. It appears to have perfected the use of industrial policy to co-ordinate private enterprise even into some of the most difficult areas for private engagement. This is the case of industrial policy to both address a critical plumbing issue as well as catalysing a market. And this is what makes its achievement exceptional.”
Law, innovation, state led industrial policy and judicial pendency, all in one lovely article by Gulzar Natarajan. Gokhale Institute recently released a report on judicial pendency in India – China has an interesting way of tackling this problem.
EconForEverybody 