German Politics, Iraq, US Politics

America pissed off?

The last few days have witnessed histerical German media. Apparently, the US administration is not amused by the chancellor stating his disapproval for an invasion of Iraq as clearly as possible. A lot of analysts think that the US are right to be pissed off because they think that Schroeder is simply using the topic for his campaign (if so, it did certainly pay off), therefore creating unnecessary international tension and that he will later be forced to do anyway what he says he won’t before the election (should he be reelected).

Two things to that: One, the Iraq discussion certainly is a party political issue in the US as well. There is a lot of discussion going on. I don’t think it’s fair to denounce that in other countries, simply because they have upcoming general elections. In addition, if the discussion is owed to campaigning it should not be taken seriously anyway. But if the US government thinks that its foreign policy has to be treated at some level far above day to day politics, they should think again. Policies that are affecting everybody’s interests in the most crucial ways have to be discussed publicly. That’s crucial to a liberal democracy. Sometimes dissent is unavoidable.

Two, isn’t it great? So many Europeans lamenting about the US government not listening to its allies. And now that. I don’t think the issue has received the same kind of attention in the US – especially not during the week before 9/11/2002 – but who can say that they don’t listen to what we say if the chancellor can stir up so much attention once he says no? And he’s just the bad European of the day. Blair, the good European is having tea with W in Camp David this weekend. Honestly, isn’t it a bit like good cop, bad cop? Do the European foreign policy strategists think that treating the US from two angles is increasing its influence? I wonder…

But anyway – things probably aren’t as bad between the old and the new world as typical crisis hunting journalists on either would love them to be. The US government knows that Europe, including Germany, will support it, should it actually go in. Military support will probably be limited to showcase troops – simply because there isn’t anything useful Europe has that the US has not (maybe apart from this German ABC clearing unit already deployed in Kuwait). But Europe will probably pick up a large part of the tab by providing controlling and nation building resources after the initial intervention. Just as in Afghanistan. If we like it or not.

German Politics, media

Showtime

Today, 20:15, the second part of the long awaited duel between the chancellor and his challenger. On a tv screen near you. Enjoy if you don’t expect to learn anything.

US Politics, USA

1+1=2?

1 : Enlightening, isn’t it? Well, think of it that way: This week’s edition of “Die Zeit” features an interview with Samuel Huntington (reminder: “Clash of Civilisations”). Huntington basically states that a relatively young demographic structure is a necessary, albeit not sufficient condition for countries to be aggressive. Older people usually sit in comfortable chairs and don’t fight against each other.

He makes that point using the example of 19th century Europe’s demographic shifts and the subsequent wars in the first part of the 20th century. It’s a theory – and I can tink of the situations to which he probably refers, eg India vs Pakistan: Very young countries, and also countries with way too many guys without girls – a consequence of the abortion rate and infanticide of girls – looking for ways to prove themselves outside a relationship. That is certainly a useful resource for troublemakers of all kind – and probably what Huntington is thinking about. But…

+1 : Last week’s edition of “The Economist” was about the apparent “demographic miracle” happening in the US. As opposed to pretty much all other industrialised countries have the US succeeded in reversing the ageing trend and can boast an increasing birth rate. So…

=2 ?: Take Huntington and the US birthrates, put it together and you can come up with all sorts of ideas what the underlying reasons for the urgent need to fight yet another war actually are…

intellectual property rights

In a nutshell: The differences between property and intellectual property.

From Brad DeLong’s Semi Daily Journal –

David Weinberger said something very reasonable about intellectual property:

All contending parties agree, I believe, that (1) the goal is to build a marketplace that encourages innovation and (2) that the way to do that is to let the market reward innovation. Unfortunately, to spread the value of innovation, two things have to happen that are contradictory from the market point of view: First, someone has to have a great idea for which she is rewarded. Second, you want that idea to spread and be built upon as rapidly as possible and requiring that the creator be rewarded slows down the spread. Much butting of heads ensues…

To which David Winer replied as if Weinberger had said something really stupid:

For crying out loud David, it’s super simple. If I build a house I can live in it as long as I want. If I want to rent out rooms I can do that too, as long as I want.

The peculiar thing about this David Winer position–this “Mine! I thought of it! Mine! It’s my intellectual property forever! All Mine!” position–is that Winer could not hold it had he looked up and around at the intellectual property house he happens to live in. If he did so, he would notice that he has–without getting their permission or approval–used a huge amount of intellectual property thought up by other people, and has neither compensated them nor acquired from them a license to do so.

To pick just one thing at random, there is the case of Ez-Eki-Baal and his cousin Ish-Baal, residents of Tyre in 1160 B.C. They first thought up the idea of using a stylized picture of an ox to represent the phoneme “A” (and the idea of using a bunch of other stylized pictures of other things to represent other phonemes). This invention of the “alpha-bet,” as I have been told it is called, is in the estimation of some a very important piece of intellectual property. Some commentators have even claimed that most of us use it during most of our waking hours.

But have Ish-Baal, Ez-Eki-Baal, or their heirs received one red cent in the past century in return for other people’s appropriation and use of their intellectual property? No. Does David Winer have a valid license authorizing him to use the alphabet–to move into the intellectual property house built by Ish-Baal and Ez-Eki-Baal and trash the place? No. Has David Winer made any effort at all to identify and compensate those to whom–on his own theories about the moral obligations imposed on those who make use of intellectual property–he owes a fortune? No.

So does he believe his own theories? It’s hard to know at what level he does. It’s genuinely hard to know what to do with people who argue that all the intellectual property they make is “Mine! All Mine! All Mine Forever!” and yet classify all the intellectual property they use as the common and free inheritance of all humanity. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” kind of argument…

Allgemein

I like Britain.

Seriously, I do. Some very good friends of mine are from the island and I lived in their capital and volunteered in the mother of Parliaments.

Nontheless, I have to quote this article from the Observer. It’s an old one, but given the Anglo-German tradition of (in these days) humorous bashing, there was no way to avoid it. The article is called “Why the Germans are right about us” and deals with a story the German magazine Stern had published about the abysmal public services in the UK.

In the end, it’s all a matter of productivity differences – there’s an absolute and relative difference in output per hour per worker relative to the US/JP/GER/FR. Thus not all – although quite a lot – can be explained by Tory government-induced lack of money for public goods. I might post more on the details after I read the 128 pages of Nick Crafts latest essay (pdf) on the relative British economic performance from 1870-1999.

Iraq, US Politics

Iraq. Or not Iraq. Is that really the question?

Brink Lindsey of the conservative US Cato Institute has made an important point in the introduction to his blogentry justifying the looming US invasion of Iraq.

He says that only very few of us have access to classified information. Quite true. But this point begs another important question. Does that really matter?

If the services have information available proving the US governments claim that Saddam is building nuclear WMD and ready to use them against Israel, the US or Europe – and that this justifies to go in and get him – why wouldn’t they publish it in order to make that point once and for all?

I can see only two reasons for the lack of such information. The first one is obvious. They don’t have any proof for their claim. The second is a bit trickier. I hope I am not going too far down the line of conspiracy theory here – but if the alleged current Iraqi threat is a consequence of secret western aid of the 1980s (and possibly later…) then weapon experts could likely point that out with the obvious political ramifications.

In that case, it is quite clear that access to this classified information could provide an improved basis to make an informed decision about attacking Iraq.

However, hoping that we won’t have to attribute another war to the secret services secret policy games around the globe, I would still bet on the first alternative. Classified information is probably unlikely to be really helpful in this context.

There is a case for ousting Saddam – but to make it, you can rely on published information on petrol economics, ethnic conflicts, and the survival struggle of all those weak autocratic regimes in the Middle East. Maybe I’ll try to put something together later on.

So far you might check the rest of Lindsey’s opinon on www.brinklindsey.com.

German Politics, oddly enough

User’s guide to buying votes in Germany

Ebay is definitely faster than political scientists.

The latter still have to finally decide whether voting is rational. Actually, from a strict rational choice perspective, it isn’t. The infinitesimal decision making power of any individual vote cast in general elections does not justify the amount of resources committed to the act of voting.

But still, people DO vote, for whichever reason. And not only do a lot of people vote, some of them also attribute a much higher value to the infinitesimal influence of an individual vote than most of us would anticipate as this story, published by Spiegel Online, about people trying to sell their right to vote on ebay.de confers.

Needless to say, it’s illegal to do so, which is why you will no longer find the auctions mentioned in the article on ebay. As soon as they’re notified about such auctions, the auctions will be blocked.

But despite the illegality of such auctions, I wonder whether they could not become a prime research laboratory concerning questions like the one mentioned above? I would really like to know how much people would be willing to pay for the assurance of someone they have only had e-contact with to vote for their preferred party in the seclusion of the voting booth – in a month.

Why should the sellers even think about honouring their commitment if there is no way for the buyers to check the results? It’s plain moral hazard. Which mechanisms would sellers develop to credibly bind themselves to an uncontrollable as well as unenforcable agreement? Why did they have to block these auctions? This is the stuff prime economists get their Nobel prices for.

oddly enough

E-Begging. Find your favorite beggar – online

The weirdest things happen on the internet. Here‘s another story (link in German) which lives up to that standard.

Karyn is living in NYC. She is working for a tv-station. And while she is not the minor celebrity in the major city impersonated by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex And The City, Carrie Bradshaw and Karyn do have something in common: both have a strange relationship with expensive designer shoes. And both spent way too much money on them. But that’s where the similarity ends.

In fiction, there’s always a divorced friend who hands out $30.000 engagement rings. In reality, you end up with a huge credit card debt – which is precisely what happened to Karyn. So, lacking the diamond ring, she opened an account with PayPal and designed a webpage to make people donate money to help her pay off the debt she incurred due to obsessive shopping. Check it out.

Now weird things attract everyone’s attention. Just remember the freak shows of earlier, less pc, days. So the word is spreading and that attention is translating into money for Karyn. She claims to have already been given $3000.

I find that stunning, to say the least. But while I am intruiged by her chuzpe to put up such a site, I wonder whether speeding up the process of repaying her designed debt is really money well spent. And there are more people who think that way. As n-tv.de reports, two of them have even created a website dedicated to keeping people from giving money to Karyn – www.dontsavekaryn.com.

These two guys also ask for money on their page – but not to pay off any debt – just to, literally, burn it. In case they can raise enough to buy a pair of designer shoes, they will buy one and then burn it.

As strange as both projects appear to be, maybe it is more useful to think of them as well crafted services: Karyn offers a glimps on begging 2.0 (with the added value of non invasive, client controlled cyber-contact, online debt count-down, etc.) and her adversaries market a service for all those who are appalled by someone who is asking for money for lack of self-control.

In the end, both parties demonstrate significant entrepreneurial spirit. But anyway – I won’t give a penny to either of them.

almost a diary

Moneymaker

Last year I volunteered in the staff of a British MP. Just after 9-11, over a pint, he wondered how Bin Laden had funded all his activities, apart from his inheritance of about 200m USD and the western (CIA/ISI) support for the Mudjahedin during the 1980s. Given the abysmal state of the Afghan economy and the non-exitent administrative skills of the Taliban, Bin Laden’s hand-outs had apparently become the most important source of income for the Afghan leadership, so he evidently had all the freedom to build Al Quaeda. Now the Times of London has found out about another source of funding, the State of Saudi Arabia. The summary of the article goes as follows:

Saudis paid Bin Laden 200m
Senior members of royal family paid Bin Laden not to attack targets in Saudi Arabia, and money was used to fund training camps in Afghanistan.