Special report: ‘Myths of British ancestry’ by Stephen Oppenheimer | Prospect Magazine October 2006 issue 127
Never heard of this stuff. Wow.

Business Week published this while I was bicycling across Switzerland. But it’s not like anything reported in the article has changed in three or four weeks.
Bucharest rivals Bangalore for availability of exceptionally gifted programmers at rock-bottom prices

Is Romania really ready for the EU? asks Cristian Lupsa in the New Republic.

The OECD estimates the current potential capacity growth rate of the Italian economy at 1.25% a year. Actually I suspect even this very low number is over-optimistic. Growth since 2002 has been as follows: 2003 - 0.1%: 2004 - 0.9%: 2005 - 0.1%. To be sure forecast growth for this year is somewhat higher, [...]

I recently berated Greg Mankiw (and the top ten world economists he pretends top cite) for the folly of suggesting that fertility rates don’t matter to economists. Well today Mankiw seems to be having (an implicit) rethink. Dependency ratios, it seems, do matter.
Now since dependency ratios are really a function of three factors - fertility, [...]

One of the other books that I picked up while in Helsinki was Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, by Piers Vitebsky. (US paperback coming in December.) He’s an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, and the reindeer people are his research specialty. The book, however, is an engrossing synthesis aimed at [...]

Terrific appreciation of Dmitri Shostakovich in the weekend FT (not this last weekend, of course, I’m a little behind on my reading) on the centenary of his birth:
The Fifth Symphony was a compromise that didn’t compromise. It was a squared circle. It was genius with a welcome mat. It made the Soviet state pigs feel [...]

Our recent posts on governments in Stockholm and Schwerin are as good a reason as any to highlight Northern Shores, by Alan Palmer. (It’s published in the US as The Baltic.) I had intended to write a premature evaluation, but then I finished the book, which I picked up during a business trip to Helsinki, [...]

The next anniiverssary guest post is by the funny and clever Michael Manske.
Border disputes between Slovenia and Croatia flare up with the regularity of teenage zits, and they’re about as equally exciting. The latest one to pop was in the swampy little Slovenian hamlet of Hotiza last week, when Croatian police arrested some Slovenian [...]

The Belgian court of Justice has ordered Google News to remove all feeds of Belgian newspapers and journalists. This news was broken by Chilling Effects:
…to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and “cache” [...]