Sunday, July 03, 2005
World Currency, or Why is Everyone Picking on China?
I was fortunate enough to be a fly on the wall at Bob Mundell’s World Money conference in his Tuscan villa last week.
Not a bad coup for a guy who professes no particular expertise in monetary theory--or even macroeconomics.
For those just tuning in, Mundell has been engaged in a decades-long debate, most famously with Milton Friedman, over the relative merits of fixed and floating exchange rates. Fixed exchange rates, of course, were the norm through most of history. Because most currencies were tied to gold (or less frequently, some other precious metal), conversion was relatively straightforward. After WW II, the Bretton Woods agreement tied the dollar to gold and everything else to the dollar. The stability of this system began to erode in the late 1960s, and came completey undone when Nixon pulled the U.S. off the gold standard. That move ushered in an era of floating exchange rates. Within that overall floating system, though, some countries have agreed to tie their currencies together. The most significant rate fixing obviously led to the Euro, but numerous small or developing countries have tied their currencies to a major one.
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Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Zero Tolerance for Anti-Semitism
A few days agoe Matt Yglesias got back on his “I can’t stand it when people say that Democrats have no ideas” kick. This time he focused on Security Ideas.
Somehow, a couple of bozos seemed to see this as a good opportunity to trash Israel. Despite my temptation to just ignore the garbage, I’ve come to appreciate just how dangerous it can be to leave this crap unchallenged in plain sight. I countered--and on request provided facts, numbers, and sources. They responsed in turn as the anti-Semitic always do. They ignored the numbers, announced that they didn’t trust the sources, decried Israel’s legitimacy, redefined words, and made up their own facts. The whole thing was pretty ugly.
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Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Unbearable Frustration and a Call for Empathy
Last Tuesday night, I attended an event hosted by a group called Peace X Peace. The speaker was an Iraqi “peace activist” (and I use the quotation marks only because I never quite know what the term means) named Naba Saleem Hamid.
Dr. Hamid is bright, well educated, fluent in English, unveiled (if not entirely secular), and quite articulate. As I understood it, she has never been an exile; she lived in Baghdad throughout at least most of the Baath period. She came to tell us The Truth about the situation in Iraq. She opened by expressing her dismay with the various government officials who questioned the Truth that she had come to share. She then spoke about the miseries of everyday life in Iraq, the discrepancies between her own experiences and those reported in the international press, and the animosity toward Americans that she saw growing.
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Monday, June 27, 2005
Some Initial Thoughts about MGM v. Grokster
Court Sides With the Entertainment Industry! Court Rules Against File-Sharing Networks! Or so the headlines scream. But is it true? As is so often the case with Supreme Court rulings, the answer is “yes and no.” It’s certainly true that the Court ruled against Grokster and Streamcast, the two file-sharing network companies involved in today’s lawsuit. And it’s equally true that the Court supported the entertainment industry’s attempts to put these networks out of business. At a deeper level, though, the Court did what it does best: it punted. It decided the case on the narrowest grounds possible and let all of the interesting issues linger—likely until Congress decides to enter the fray.
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Sunday, June 26, 2005
A Confession and a Clean Start
I haven’t really been blogging until today. I launched the site with some old essays. Then I spent a month trying to learn a little something about the blogosphere. I kept notes, posted elsewhere, and then backdated my entries throughout June. I figured that it would make an interesting record of how I learned to become a blogger. After all, I’m an essayist, not a diarist. The transformation to blogger wasn’t immediately obvious. And it may take me a while to backfill June. But from 6/27/05 on forward, I expect the timestampst to be real.
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Tech Central Station Archives, part 2: Political Philosopy
My attempts to reconstruct my first few Tech Central Station discussions continue to come up mostly blank--which suggests that I was less than brilliant and memorable. One interesting one, though, played off Nathan Smith’s interesting article about Hobbes, Locke, and the Bush Doctrine
Comments were strongly split. My input was favorable--and Nathan actually returned to thank me for useful input. Another reader offered a simple “bravo.” I titled my take “The People v. Westphalia”
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Tech Central Station Archives, part 1: Patent Reform
A couple of weeks ago, Steven Schwartz pointed me towards Tech Central Station. As far as I can tell, James K. Glassman put this site together as a hybrid, lying somewhere between a magazine and a blog. I’ve seen some high quality articles and participated in a few exchanges in the comments section, but comment traffic seems to be relatively light. In addition, it’s kind of tough to search for the conversations in which I’d participated. I don’t remember every place I chimed in, and now I can’t reclaim them easily.
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Finally--the Bush Presidency without Histrionics
I started another thread today on TPMCafe:
Anyone who followed the discussions about the Democrats lack of ides that Matt Yglesias kicked off a few days ago might want to check out The Economist’s cover story, ”George Bush’s Long Hot Summer.”
For one thing, it includes a line likely to reignite the discussion that Matt started, “Democrats lack both ideas and leadership.” More importantly, though, The Economist’s balanced, dispassionate view of the Bush prseidency (a view, incidentally, that led the magazine to endorse John Kerry for President), outlines a wonderful agenda for any Democrat willing to grab it:
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