Berlin talks on Economics

Discontinuing the blog

2011-04-28T14:24:00.003+02:00

Since October 2009, this blog has created 81 posts and attracted more than 5000 visits. Despite running for almost two years, however, this blog has remained a modest project among friends and fellow students associated with HU Berlin. We have decided to discontinue BTE and move future blog posts to the Open Economics Working Group (OpenEcon WG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). As part

Saif and the Libyan democracy

2011-02-24T20:37:00.001+01:00

In recent days, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has appeared several times on Libyan TV, complementing the rather comic performances of his father: The anti-government protests were "imaginary". Contrast this with his PhD thesis on "The role of civil society in the democatisation of global governance institutions" written at the LSE four years ago, and you have a good example of irony.

Addendum: UK inequality over time

2011-02-19T23:35:00.007+01:00

Even though social mobility has nothing to do with economic inequality per se (in fact, increased social mobility can induce inequality), here is another addendum to yesterday's post I came up with Velichka today (click to enlarge): The left plot is from the official UK stats website, showing the evolution of the Gini over time. This plot is misleading in two ways. First, the header "Income

Social (Im)mobility in Britain

2011-02-18T21:15:00.008+01:00

Not before you settle down in England, do you realise the significance of social mobility: the struggle of many and the privilege of few. Two BBC documentaries investigate the issue of social mobility from two slightly different angles: First, Richard Bilton examines the paths individuals from more disadvantaged socio-economic background take in the realisation of their professional careers in “

Saints marching in 1590-2009

2011-02-15T15:26:00.000+01:00

Barro and his wife just published a paper on the "economics" of beatification and canonization. The Catholic Church has been making saints for centuries, typically in a two-stage process featuring beatification and canonization. We analyze determinants of rates of beatification and canonization (for non-martyrs) over time and across six world regions. The research uses a recently assembled data

Aid reloaded

2011-02-08T12:55:00.003+01:00

Few days ago, I sent my 14 MB dataset to Gregor (who did the major Flash programming for the Energy app) - after some number crunching, he came up with a pretty neat visualization in Processing.

The geopolitics of aid

2011-02-06T02:18:00.009+01:00

Currently working on the geopolitical determinants of aid allocation, I have been exploring the dyadic data on aid and political alliances the last few days - the plot I uploaded shows nothing new, but I still thought it might be entertaining to share this with you (I surely enjoyed this). So, what was the point of development aid again? Promotion of economic development and welfare? I wonder if

Yourtopia open for voting!

2011-01-31T21:44:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago, I announced the launch of Yourtopia.net - by now, over 500 users have created their own personal index of human development. And today, we're open for voting in the World Bank Apps for Development contest! If you have not done so, please vote for us here.

The End of Social Democracy?

2011-01-24T13:04:00.007+01:00

As a result of the strong right-wing winds blowing over Europe the past years, some scholars have touched on the subject of "the death of social democracy" - one tenet being that as social democracy has fulfilled it's mission (a welfare-state) it is now ready for dismantling.Sweden, being one of the countries where the social democratic hegemony has come to an end as the conservative

How the West was lost

2011-01-18T11:59:00.007+01:00

Last week, Dambisa Moyo has published yet another provocative book in which she conjures a rather dark future for the now developed countries. In "How the West Was Lost", she argues that the West has wasted its economic advantage, instead embarking on flawed economic policies and - simply - decadence. A review by Paul Collier, usually known for his overconfident interpretation of correlations,

Economics, history and causation

2011-01-17T09:10:00.001+01:00

To continue our debate about the (f)utility or empirical research, here is a great new paper that eloquently discusses many of the issues. A few teasers: "The writ of empiricism is now so broad that younger economists can scarcely imagine a time when rhetorical skill, rather than empirical falsification, decided issues and the simplest regression was a day’s work with pencil and paper" [...] "

Introducing Yourtopia.net

2011-01-13T14:40:00.004+01:00

A coding sprint involving lots of Club Mate, pizza.de and confusion about Python, MongoDB and Flask/Genshi (how cliché) later, I can finally announce that we got a (sort-of) running version of Yourtopia, an improved version of EUtopia up and running. We even made the deadline for the World Bank Apps for Development competition: With help of OKFN (and particularly Rufus and Friedrich) we now have

Philip Parker's Economic Growth Database

2011-01-11T22:43:00.003+01:00

Sorry, but I had to share this. Still amazed by the amount of the data lying around - can there be a Google to standardize and feed them into an Uberdataset? CKAN might be a nice option..... From DevEconData, a great newsfeed for the newest datasets.... Philip M. Parker's Economic Growth Databases This is a great source of control variables for any cross-country empirical analysis. Temperature

The decline effect and the scientific method

2010-12-29T15:19:00.001+01:00

Two weeks ago, the New Yorker has published an interesting article about confirmation bias, publication bias and significance chasing. In case you have not read this, here is the link. Even if most of the discussion is confined to natural science, the methodological concerns also apply to empirical social science.

EUtopia launch

2010-12-25T15:43:00.002+01:00

Hi everybody, I have just launched a project on the measurement of social progress with Dirk Heine from the Common Future Think Tank. I hope you all participate - the success of the project hinges on a large sample size, so it would be great if you could spread the word! You can also join our project on FB: http://apps.facebook.com/eutopia The problem: GDP per capita is a flawed and incomplete

The Dictionary of Economics Essay Writing Competition

2010-12-17T13:55:00.000+01:00

Palgrave has announced an essay writing competition open until the 31st of December: The Question: ‘How can international environmental agreements be enforced?’ http://www.palgrave.com/economics/dofe/ If you have followed the climate change debates in the last years, it's pretty evident that this is THE QUESTION. Invariably carbon trading and off-setting have become more popular than carbon

UK Braindrain?

2010-12-10T15:50:00.004+01:00

Dear all,I am sure no-one has missed the passing of the sharp increase in tuition fees in the UK. If so, here is a short re-cap ,with some interesting pictures of the royalties...My question is, how will this affect the demographics of the UK student-body?Considering the fact that the price of education is virtually nonexistent in nearby countries (accessible by 5 euro Ryanair tickets), will

Secrets

2010-12-03T04:40:00.003+01:00

I just find the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon to be amazing and I can't believe that something like this has happened and wanted to hear your opinions on some of the shocking information that were released. Here is an article from The Economist that sums up some of the major ones. I had also seen a really good interview of the founder on YouTube a few weeks ago but I failed to find it again, but I

The new inequality-adjusted HDI

2010-11-09T12:49:00.007+01:00

Since it's creation in 1990, the HDI has been often critiqued for its inability to capture dimensions of economic and social inequality. The 2010 report, marking the 20th anniversary of the Human Development Report and published last week, has now responded to the demands by including an inequality-adjusted HDItabulation. As a quick briefing, I'd like to 1) discuss how inequality enters the index

The Healthy Upperclass

2010-11-05T22:27:00.001+01:00

Is being healthy a conscious decision? Does it result primarily from individual irrationality and insufficient incentives to be healthy? If you answer a definite "yes" to both questions, then you might think there is some logic in Esther Dyson's hail of the business enterprise of connecting health to social status. And why not indeed, social status might motivate people to stay healthy. If I can

Thoughts?

2010-10-18T06:32:00.004+02:00

I was with a study group last week preparing for a midterm and we started to talk about how with all these different economic theories on the ideal economy,("we should be self sufficient," "we should settle until the natural resources are depleted and then move," "we need to utilize trade and an open economy," etc.), and as these are based on mathematical models, is it realistic to say that in

Rättviseförmedlingen - Corporation of Justice

2010-09-16T18:29:00.004+02:00

One post-party morning, Lina Thomsgård had had it. If it were true, as she was repeatedly told, that the reason there were no women in the panel of TV-debates, holding professorships and so forth, was that there were no qualified female applicants for these positions, she had the perfect solution.What was to become one of the most celebrated initiatives in Swedish media so-far in 2010, started as

Paul the Octopus

2010-07-11T13:25:00.006+02:00

It's been a while since the last blog post. With the last post dated on 7th June, the World Cup held between 11th June to 11th July and this post just on the final day, one could easily infer that we have just been busy watching the football matches. But as the mantra goes, correlation does not imply causation and there is not much we can get from the apparent relationship. Another related case

Hungarian rhapsody

2010-06-07T19:26:00.006+02:00

Hungary, once the most promising of transition economies, has done it again. That is, made international headlines for it's poor economic practices. The New York Times, in a recent article , reports new economic worries in the small Eastern European economy.The last government, spokesman for the new ruling party FIDESZ (elected in April this year) Peter Szijjarto says, were lying about economic

The End of Oil

2010-06-06T20:33:00.001+02:00

It was about 10 years ago that I first started to think about energy resources and the potential oil crisis. We had this UNESCO project for associated schools and I volunteered to organize some activities..."..the looming energy crisis", "...an oil-dependent system"... etc. - I clearly remember the information materials, which were warning about prospective disasters and explaining sustainable

Democracy and Trade

2010-06-03T23:51:00.001+02:00

Yesterday in Sean's class we discussed democracy and the liberalization of trade based on the empirical paper of Milner and Kubota, who aimed to prove that the increased move to democracy is related to decreased trade barriers and the liberalization of trade. Unsurprisingly their time series cross-section analysis leads to the conclusion that democracies trade more. This point raises some

Irwin's Fallacious Arguments about Trade and the Environment

2010-05-26T19:16:00.001+02:00

The argumentation of Irwin’s wholehearted free trade defense(Irwin, 2002) is familiar to students of international economics and has become a standard theory where any counterarguments, which would put free trade in question are essentially of non-economic nature. His style is characterized by a rather one-sided observations based on economic efficiency criteria. The only intention is to prove

Class size and student performance: Relying on naive regressions

2010-05-20T21:11:00.018+02:00

Last month, bold headlines dominated the German media: "Learning outcomes do not depend on class size" (SPIEGEL), "Size does not matter" (SZ) or "Learning success does not depend on class size" (Focus), leading newspapers titled. Reading the articles, the reader is re-assured that the findings are scientific, based on a study headed by Prof Bos from the Technical University of Dortmund - and

The Locker Problem - Efficiency and Morals

2010-05-18T17:08:00.001+02:00

Nowadays if one would tries to find a free locker in the basement locker room of the Grimm Zentrum library of the Humboldt-Universität at some point in the late afternoon, one may face a problem. There is a shortage of free lockers with keys on them - in fact about one third of the lockers are open with missing keys. The library says 450 keys are missing at the moment. Since no deposit is

Economists can be human (and political), too

2010-05-18T12:28:00.003+02:00

This is already more than a month old, but you nevertheless might find it interesting: You might still remember the arrest of some high ranked Turkish military officials beginning this year (based on allegations of having planned a coup d'etat). A friend pointed me to a more political article published by Dani Rodrik. Incidentally, Rodrik happens to be the son-in-law of the imprisoned and retired

Correlation of the day: The big story

2010-05-11T19:55:00.004+02:00

This is the massive big story of development. While the cross-sectional/pooled strong association between life expectancy and GDP per capita is well known, this selective plot (from De la Croix, 2008 from UC Louvain) shows that the correlation within a country can be near perfect. De la Croix (2008) argues that the improvement in mortality preceded and was a precondition of the subsequent

More on data

2010-05-10T16:41:00.000+02:00

For those who missed it: The World Bank has released a large chunk of its licensed data in its Open Access Initiative. This is something quite exciting as more than 2000 cross-national variables have been made available in a big bang just about three weeks ago. Datasets are now available for download in XLS (some larger than 50 MB) - quite an exciting thing for a chiffrephile (the release

The ultimate dataset to life, universe and everything

2010-05-09T19:46:00.001+02:00

Pippa Noris has the ultimate dataset to life, universe and everything. The 40 MB (!) dataset contains basically ALL data EVER used to run cross-country regressions (Polity IV, Freedom House, PWT, Maddison, Fractionalization, Legal Origin, WB etc. pp.). It contains over 600 variables for 191 countries from 1971 to 2007. If you have ever done some data mining and got terribly pissed off with

Critique of Economic Liberalism

2010-04-28T16:50:00.001+02:00

Here is the summary of Robert Gilpin's critique on economic liberalism... I've put this together for the IPE seminar of professor Kreile. Gilpin names one of the foremost critiques of economic liberalism to be the simplified and unrealistic assumptions, which allow economists to construct their models and conduct scientific analysis. For the market to be regarded as the most efficient mechanism

Brazil de-forestates, China re-forestates

2010-04-21T19:25:00.000+02:00

It seems that there is quite a divergence in the forest removal and plantation policies. China for example has gained 401490 sq. km of forest area over the period 1990-2005, while Brazil has lost roughly the same amount: 423290 sq. km (WDI data). Relatively it means a net loss of 8% for Brazil and a gain of 25% for China. Our peer student bloggers from the China economics blog however point to

Updated Barro-Lee dataset online

2010-04-19T14:33:00.001+02:00

The Barro-Lee (1994) dataset has been a standard dataset for macroeconomic cross-country analyses. After the update 10 years ago (Barro and Lee, 2000), the dataset has been once more extended and now comprises 8 more countries, covering 1950-2010. The updated working paper also includes an empirical exercise, where the effect of education on growth is re-estimated using an IV strategy (lagging

Development Aid: a fundamental critique

2010-04-18T21:58:00.002+02:00

This is a short paper that I recently wrote for one of my classes in Berkeley and that I would like to share with you. Professor Norgaard (UC Berkeley) elaborated upon the development of the “Western World[1]” to a society driven by economic growth. This progress started through the emphasis on technical solutions, to facilitate the spiritual or moral life, e.g. if one could solve the problem

Redistribution in India

2010-04-16T11:47:00.000+02:00

Capitalism has survived the crisis. Indeed so in India, where big financial players reinforced the belief in their own power and the working class suffered the worst consequences. For the lack of basic heath and welfare, India lags behind other developing countries. The need to reconcile economic growth with the need of redistributing social risk made Sunil Khilnani call for the establishment of

Bang for the buck or boost of the burden?

2010-04-01T03:00:00.005+02:00

In the wake of the 2009 American fiscal stimulus package, notably little attention has been directed towards the heated ongoing academic debate on the efficiency of fiscal stimuli. The bill, formally referred to as The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), consists of various tax cuts and spending measures, adding up to 787 billion dollar or the equivalent of 5% of US GDP which makes it

Book Week#13: An ode to stats

2010-04-01T02:58:00.021+02:00

Statistics always intrigued me: Back then at school, it was the nocturnal (alcohol soaked) discussion about synchronicity, butterfly effect and fractals. Later, it was playing around with encryption and RNGs. At university, it culminated in completely brainless exercises such as solving OLS regressions by hand. For me, statistics is the attempt to find patterns in seemingly meaningless data, to

"Zombie Equilibrium"

2010-03-30T04:56:00.010+02:00

Two weeks ago, there was a guest lecture on "financial globalization" in one of my classes. The lecture was critical of how the U.S. handled some of its foreign bank policies (an example given in the lecture was on how the U.S. used regulations that it helped make to benefit themselves, like the "separate entity principal." During Argentina's financial crisis, when U.S. banks in Argentina

Poverty and terrorism

2010-03-29T19:14:00.010+02:00

The Moscovite metro bombing in Park Kultury and Lubjanka this morning has once again sparked fears about terrorism. As initial suspicions were directed towards North Caucasus, it also highlights the seemingly obvious relationship between poverty and violence (keep in mind that lack of political rights is also a capability deprivation). Hands on and nerdy as we are at BTE, we point to the AER

Opening the black box of land institutions

2010-03-28T20:10:00.007+02:00

Since Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001), the role of historical path dependencies and long-run persistence has been reaffirmed by a wide variety of papers (Legal origin: Glaeser and Shleifer, 2001; Slave trade: Nunn, 2007; Colonial Land Tenure Systems: Banerjee and Iyer, 2004 etc.pp.). In line with Banerjee and Iyer (2004), the recent working paper by Libecap, Lueck and O'Grady (2010)

World Trade Debate

2010-03-28T17:35:00.001+02:00

The World Trade Report 2010 will be published in July, 2010 and will concentrate on the topic of trade in natural resources. On the WTO-Website there is a research and analysis forum where the input themes are discussed. Image from www.wto.org You can take part in giving some feedback the recently submitted articles like "The relationship between international trade and energy", "Oil price

Russian scientist exposes Monsanto GM soy

2010-03-28T00:42:00.003+01:00

In December last year I wrote here indignantly about the hypocritical biotechnology firms and their preposterous claim on being able to conjure drought-resistant crops. Updating on some scientific evidence on "safety" issues: Dr. Irina Ermakova of the Russian Academy of Sciences recently released a study reporting higher mortality rates and lower body weight among young rats whose mothers were

Europe 2020

2010-03-26T20:56:00.003+01:00

The Bulgarian prime minister Borisov was quite happy when the EU and the ECB decided to support Greece. (the tanned guy on the left in the background). This is due to the fact that 30% of the banking sector in Bulgaria belongs to Greece. Today the EU leaders also agreed to cooperate more on economic policy with the Europe 2020 plan. Three quantitative targets were set: increasing employment,

Poverty reduction in Africa

2010-03-17T16:46:00.002+01:00

A recent paper by Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (NBER, Feb 2009) suggests that Africa might be well on its way to reach the first Millenium Development Goal in halving poverty (1 USD PPP per day) by 2015. This time series is from one of the many figures in the rather descriptive paper: By disaggregating the data, the authors show that most of the African countries did see a steady decline in

Space for Undergrad research and writing!

2010-03-16T20:22:00.006+01:00

Distributed over five continents in 200 University libraries, the Michigan Journal of Business offers undergrads of Economics and Business sciences an unique opportunity to present their work.Published biannually , the journal keeps deadlines for submissions updated on their website. Regardless if wanting to publish most recent findings on Rentenversicherung or not, the journal offers a great

UK Health Report 2009

2010-03-15T21:31:00.001+01:00

Today, the UK Department of Health has released the Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer 2009. Surprisingly, the health related report stresses the relationship between climate change and health. This is a rather noteworthy emphasis, as the national report emphasizes both the negative impact on the developing world AND the need to reduce the carbon footprint of the UK public health sector.

Right to a City, São Paulo

2010-03-10T22:29:00.003+01:00

The big cities with high rates of inequality seem to experience similar problems. The "Haves" demand to be separated by the "Have-Nots" for reasons of security and status. Gated communities flourish in different countries, irrespective of income levels and geographical locations (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and China as well well as the US, South Africa, Canada and the UK). The Green Political

Guantanamo and the "Game" of Torture

2010-03-07T13:40:00.005+01:00

Recently the former prison guard Brandon Neely traveled to the UK to meet Tipton Three and apologize for their unjust detainment and torture in the Guantanamo detainment camp (See BBC report). Tipton Three (Ruhal Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal) are British citizens of Pakistani origin, who while spending their holidays in Pakistan, made a trip to Afghanistan in 2001 to do some sight-seeing

German fantasies

2010-03-05T11:27:00.007+01:00

Germans like Greece: They enjoy eating souvlaki with tzatziki at their local Greek restaurant, spending their vacation at the beaches of Crete and showing off their elite education by reciting Ancient Greek ballads. But that's how far European solidarity goes when it comes to money. Now is the chance for the Germans to project both their angst and fantasies onto the Greek. In response to today's

Development without development

2010-03-04T11:41:00.012+01:00

For some strange reason, I always felt rather uncomfortable with the more recent development discourse: Microfinance, schooling, deworming, cash transfers - while all these surgical (Streichelzoo) interventions received much attention both in the theoretical and practical development community, they seemed to neglect a main feature of development per se: Industrial production. A recent talk (

Green hypocrisy: Still kicking the ladder

2010-03-03T14:55:00.008+01:00

Under the guise of benevolent greenie-speak, governments of developed countries are once again pushing for old-school protectionist industrial policies as they see their technological advance crumbling vis-a-vis the emerging countries. While developed countries engage in esotheric greenie-speak despite being the largest per capita polluters, emerging countries have embarked on an impressive

End of Nomadism?

2010-03-01T16:00:00.000+01:00

(Complementary to the Land Reform post) The Cambridge-based "Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia" (ECCIA) project aimed to evaluate the different institutions and their influence on the pastoral economy in Russia, China and Mongolia. The summary of results was given by Sneath in the Science Journal and the book of Humphrey and Sneath with all details was published soon after

Polar Land Reform?

2010-02-26T17:36:00.004+01:00

An interesting issue about land reform is the difference between communal and individual property rights. In recent decades, most instances of land reform and land titling projects in the developing world have been driven by the belief that communal property rights do not provide the right incentive structure for the efficient use of land. And yet, recent work in economics and political science

The German Welfare State

2010-02-26T17:20:00.002+01:00

Hi All,I was poking around some German news sites and ran across this little piece on the Welfare System in Germany. It's from Deutsche Welle, admittedly not the most serious news program in the world, but still sparks the question of whether the current social regime in Germany is sustainable. I find myself about to ask, "Well what is the obligation of the productive to support the unproductive?

The beauty of stats

2010-02-24T02:51:00.006+01:00

Slightly out of topic, but for those who did not come across this during stats class (like me), the German tank problem is (in my humble opinion) a great example of the power of making few simple (distributional) assumptions (another great strategy is the low tech mark and recapture estimation) . Not sure if this is a nerdy thing to post, but I find this fantastic. Sorry folks but I had to share

Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain

2010-02-22T11:32:00.003+01:00

The consequences of the "climategate" are still unfolding: Phil Jones stepped back, Chinese weather stations are under attack, IPCC corrected its wrong estimate on glacier melting and only recently, a 2009 study on sea level rises was withdrawn. Still, big shot and notorious big pusher Sachs writes in a recent comment: "We must not be distracted from science's urgent message: we are fuelling

The Tragedy of Noise

2010-02-22T03:54:00.002+01:00

It is about time to talk about incommensurability... This graph is the all too well known externality graph (classic example is Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, 1995). In this case h constitutes a negative external effect for individual 2 (created by individual 1), who would experience negative net effect of h for all h>0. The competitive equilibrium would be h*, where individual 1 would

Macrowars

2010-02-09T07:07:00.005+01:00

With estimations of Keynesian multipliers ranging from 0 to 4, interest rates at zero and completely polarized policy suggestions, it is quite hard to make sense out of the Macromess of today. A large proportion of scholars (read Chicagoschool Cochrane et cetera) seem completely convinced that further fiscal stimulus is going to aggrevate Americas current recession, whereas others (read Kurgman)

Uncertainty about EMU's Future

2010-02-08T06:35:00.008+01:00

Thanks Siri for inviting me to contribute here, I just have an article I wanted to share. When under budget constraints, the US states can rely on the Fed for help, but despite sharing one currency, wealthier European nations like Germany and France are doing little to help the weaker economics of the EMU, now labeled the "PIIGS." And as the article states, getting involved with the IMF is not

Solow on Hotelling

2010-02-06T00:26:00.001+01:00

When Harold Hotelling died on December 26th 1973, Robert Solow gave the Robert T. Ely Lecture as a tribute to him. "The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics" is a fascinating time document of resource economics concern. The 1973 Oil Crisis, which resulted from OAPEC's embargo had resulted in quadrupling of the oil prices, disrupting of the world energy market and collapse of the

The Book of Inequalities

2010-01-16T15:47:00.000+01:00

If one wants to examine some extremes, maybe get some motivation about own's research, one could have a look at Bob Sutcliffe's "100 Ways of Seeing an Unequal World" (Zed Books Ltd., 2001). The book summarizes key world statistics in a variety of different topics e.g. income inequality, distribution of land, foreign investment, migration, discrimination and different kinds of bias, as well as the

Economists- the "querulous bunch"

2009-12-22T18:04:00.002+01:00

Just read this interesting article on the need to communicate the "already existing consensus" amongst economist regarding the necessity of action against climate change in media, rather than devoting attention to various methological quarrels. It seems like climate economist might need to trade some accuracy for eloquence?

Palm Oil, A Non-sustainable Solution

2009-12-15T07:54:00.002+01:00

The need to reform the energy system has brought up a controversy about the climate and sustainability footprint of bio-energy. The pledge of the European Commission to have 10% biofuels in transport by 2020 (current proportion amounts to 5%) will require significant increase in the imports of palm oil. We sat down with Philipp Dera and discussed his recently published book "Biodiesel" - a growth

Common Future

2009-12-10T13:06:00.002+01:00

Friends from Common Future have just released the first volume of their South-North Journal. The open journal covers a broad range of issues that approach climate change from a political, economic and often discoursive perspective and is definitely worthwhile having a look at. When it all started, I never thought they'd get it done on time for Copenhagen. Congratulations! Common Future is an open

Eyes on Copenhagen

2009-12-09T16:36:00.002+01:00

For those who wondered what's going on at Copenhagen: Follow the Conference through its webcast.

Avoiding another Climategate: For a democratization of science

2009-12-08T00:51:00.009+01:00

The leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Essex have led to highly controversial debates on the monopolization of data and scientific research. This "Climategate" has not only culminated in Phil Jones stepping back from his position as the director of CRU, but has given skeptics of global warming (I use "skeptics" as a euphemism) arguments that undermine the efforts at

The drought deception of GM-technology

2009-12-04T21:10:00.005+01:00

Climate change together with growing world population and change in land use put a serious threat on the availability of water resources. Affected by temperature and changes in precipitation, many regions will experience disproportionate changes in water supply. Taken from the IPCC Synthesis Report 2007, the graphic above shows "Large-scale relative changes in annual runoff (water

Making piracy a community activity

2009-12-02T19:20:00.002+01:00

Wouldn't that be an interesting thesis on informal institutions and black markets? Cases where formal institutions are substituted by "unwritten rules" seem very compelling to me, particularly given state failures.From the FinancialPost:Heavily armed pirates from the lawless Horn of Africa nation have terrorized shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and strategic Gulf of Aden, which links Europe to

Third Industrial Revolution

2009-11-29T15:12:00.004+01:00

The concept of a Third Industrial Revolution, i.e. the idea that we are entering a period in history, in which we need to restructure the oil-dependent energy system and counter the consequences of climate change was put forward by the American economist, “professional protester” and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends Jeremy Rifkin. Rifkin puts reminds that when new energy

Taming the spirits

2009-11-12T13:44:00.005+01:00

G. Akerlof's and F. Shiller's (the prior perhaps mainly known to econ students as mr. lemon markets), recently published book carrying the intriguing title "Animal Spirits:How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism" is going to be presented in Berlin by Shiller on November 13th.Animal spirits is, according to economic canon, what drives humans to make bold

US Unemployment Tops 10%

2009-11-12T05:49:00.002+01:00