Letters Remain

Category: politics

  • Healthy Food Boosts School Results

    In 2004 UK TV chef Jamie Oliver ran an experiment at a school in Greenwich, London for an upcoming show of his, Jamie’s School Dinners. By various means Oliver attempted to improve the eating habits of the school’s students and, by-and-large, succeeded. Tracking his progress–and that of the children–were two Oxford economists, Michele Belot and Jonathan James.…

  • Poor Cyclists Key to Safe Roads

    Are poor cyclists and a laissez-faire attitude to enforcing road laws on them the key to safer roads? Are those that cycle on the wrong side of the road, pedal on the pavement and rush along one-way streets the wrong way one of the main reasons why the Netherlands has some of the safest roads in…

  • CCTV Prevalence in Britain

    For many years the British public has often been told that the United Kingdom has 4.2 million CCTV cameras—that’s one for every fourteen residents—as widely quoted by politicians, various media, and even the police. This statistic is rarely questioned, but thanks to a recent episode of the excellent More or Less (UK-only?) suggesting that this…

  • The Health Care Debate To Date

    For the health care debate that has been raging in America of late, I have subscribed to the same philosophy as Ben Casnocha: I’ve decided I’m just going to read it about once it’s resolved. You can’t keep up with everything. Rather than lightly follow along and skim articles and pretend to be informed, I’m…

  • Common Misconceptions About Iran(ians)

    Ten common misconceptions people of the West have about Iran and its inhabitants, as compiled by Juan Cole, president of the Global American Institute, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and author of Engaging the Muslim World: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the US. Iran is…

  • The Association of the Dead

    An old (but still current) news story from India never gained much attention outside of the country, but seems worth sharing. For over thirty years, corruption and bribery have allowed people to declare others ‘dead’ – without formal evidence – thus allowing the claimant to take ownership of the deceased’s farming land. The newly ‘dead’…

  • My GeoPolitical Memberships

    My choice of home means I am implicitly a member of numerous geopolitical groups, including those shown here.

  • Absolute and Relative Poverty

    I’ve already mentioned the World Bank’s startling definition of extreme poverty: $1.25, adjusted for PPP. This is what is known as absolute poverty and it is seldom used by politicians—who prefer to look at poverty in relative terms. Relative poverty is slightly more involved, and the BBC weighs in with the internationally accepted definition of relative…

  • The Point of Economists

    Following Queen Elizabeth’s question to the economists—Why did no one see the crisis coming?—the Financial Times goes one further asking, What is the point of economists? If the economics profession could not warn the public about the credit crunch and the recession, what is the profession’s raison d’etre? Did this reflect, as some claim, that…

  • Exporting Poor Work Environments

    After a long time of successfully managing to avoid the blog, I eventually clicked this past week when I was sent Fake Steve Jobs’ reaction to the news that an employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s Chinese ‘manufacturing partners’, committed suicide shortly after reporting a missing iPhone v4 prototype. We can’t make these products in…