Ah, no, you misunderstand, Madam. I’m not implying that _he’d_ agree with the Man of Steel. I’m saying that in this particular instance, _I_ do. I suspect that most people do, really. Very few folks I know actually lose sleep over the plight of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance. Mostly it seems to be table-talk which has minimal effect on their consumption or free-time. Poor Pete Singer…

Bernard Guerrero

(And I am not saying this merely to keep Scott from hanging Pinochet round my neck.)

“Or perhaps we should talk about AIDS victims in Africa dying because the failure to enforce American and European patents on anti-viral medications would get what trade they have cut off? They’re buried all over the place”

Irrelevant. There is no moral equivalence between killing citizens you don’t like and letting far-away people you don’t care about much one way or the other die. The former is murder, the latter is merely callous. I am under no imperative to sacrifice resources (which is what allowing the infringement of patent rights of companies that pay taxes to my government and employ my neighbors amounts to) in order to help a series of ciphers.

However, if it helps, I’ll toss you a bone. Stalin was, in terms of what people actually care about, correct. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

Bernard Guerrero

Scott, you almost seem to be describing a different planet from the one I grew up in. Having grown up in New Jersey in the 80s and early 90s (and having worked as a Teamster while in college), I saw no real decline or disruption in telephone service, loads of folks making a nice living as truckers and a huge increase in the flexibility and services offered by banks (no doubt largely due to the ubiqitous ATM, but that wouldn’t be here in the same numbers in a strongly regulated labor environment.)

As to bankrupt airlines, good riddance to bad rubbish. Uneconomic capital-sinks prior to the advent of non-hub&spoke carriers like SouthWest.

I simply can’t agree with anything you’re saying here.

Bernard Guerrero

And I’m not an ideologue. So I can agree that there may be circumstances, and that circumstances alter cases. However in general I go with free trade. I think countries like India were the big losers of the old protectionism.

“And, I think that the problems posed by multinationals able to shop for the least restrictive regulatory scheme and the risks of capital flight are real.”

I think this calls for a post on the future of MNC’s in the not too distant future. For now I’ll just mention: remember everything that lives was born to die.

“I eat Dutch cheese, listen to French music, work on an American computer and used to drive a Korean car.”

Well let’s just move all that a whole lot to the east and even more to the South and you’ll be doing just fine.

There is a growing focus on understanding the successful grand projects of the past, in part because it is often a mystery why things that worked once often don’t work twice. I see a lot of books bringing new focuses to the industrial revolution and the development of the US and Japanese economies rather than focusing solely on why is the path to development that seems so obvious to people is failing elsewhere.

As for computational linguistics - I’m having some normalisation issues myself, especially in *$#%ing German, where they capitalise every frigging noun! But, I do have this incredibly cool algorithm for terminology extraction using algorithmic information theory and a perceptron. It has some drawbacks, but it is *so* fast. I have a more generalised version of the algorithm in mind that has some impact on theories of language acquistion, but it involves doing some new math that I haven’t time to get into.

I can’t talk about the specifics of commercial research on Pedantry, but there will be a post going up this weekend (I hope) on contact lingustics in the Congo Basin.

I note with some embarassment that I meant to say “a bunch of people living on the west end of the Eurasian continent.” This may explain some of the confusion. That goes beyond a typo - since I must have read that sentence at least three times and seen the word “west” every time. That was a brain fart.

Edward - well, I’m not per se against free trade. But, I do think that trade barriers have aided in the development of some previously underdeveloped states. And, I think that the problems posed by multinationals able to shop for the least restrictive regulatory scheme and the risks of capital flight are real. I also have some real problems with the trade agendas being advanced by the US and the EU. But, all that is more a call for an effective international economic governance than an opposition to free trade on principle. I eat Dutch cheese, listen to French music, work on an American computer and used to drive a Korean car. I don’t see any special reason to make those things hard to have.

I just haven’t got any enthusiasm for localist alternatives to globalisation.

I suppose I might give you a bad name by agreeing with you, but what I’ve proposed - which strikes me as policies well within the ideological reach of any European liberal party - is radical leftism in the US. So, my “street cred”, such as it is, is pretty intact. :^)

As for structural reforms in the labour market - I’m sort of saying that if the state is able to offer decent income support outside the market, I am less bothered when competition with the developing world lowers wages. If moving jobs overseas really does raise profits and increases productivity - which is something of a dogma for the free-market evangelists - then taxable income ought to increase enough to compensate for the losses. If moving jobs to India makes some people richer and some people poorer, it only makes sense if we can tax the people getting richer and give the money to the ones getting poorer.

I can’t find a decent reason to not want good jobs to go to India. Indians certainly appreciate them. But I do think that this shouldn’t be leaving people worse off in the US and UK. The same logic ultimately applies to the immigrant worker. If Mexicans are willing to move to California to pick strawberries at minimum wages, because it really is good money for them, then this ought to be producing profits for somebody who ought, in turn, to be compensating the people losing agricultural jobs because of it. That seems to me to be in line with your post here.

Sorry to come back on this side issue, but I think it is worth emphasising that one of the virtues of blogging is that this doesn’t necessarily have to happen.

I would say that the great thing about blogging is that it provides the possibility of having a cross section of reasoned views expressed without leaving blood on the pavement.

Definitely a contribution to a healthy civil society and to civic discourse: and normally Fistful comments are a model in this regard.