My pro-government rant

When I give talks celebrating individual creativity as a driver for development, there is always one or more questioners afterwards who asks nervously, “don’t you see ANY role for government?” The answer is: OF COURSE. Government provides public goods. You could argue that one good that has such large external benefits that it’s at least partly a public good is Education. Public education is a major contributor to American economic development.

These thoughts are prompted by cheering along West Virginia University’s epic victory over U. Kentucky last night in the NCAA basketball tournament. A government sponsored and funded university, West Virginia U played an important role in my family. It educated  both my grandparents and my parents (and, wandering off message, they each MET and married there, so I owe WVU thanks for existing at all). WVU allowed a poor fatherless boy a chance to get a Ph.D. in biology and realize the American dream (my father).

So here’s a chance to praise the Government for its role in development, and yes, development’s not ONLY about private individual dynamism.

Is it OK to make ethnic slurs about some groups of white people?

For tonight's NCAA basketball showdown between U of Kentucky and West Virginia U, I bet the Kentuckians Dennis Whittle and April Harding some West Virginia maple syrup against Dennis' bet of a country ham and April's bet of a Derby pie. Of course, some of  you are thinking why didn't you bet {insert insulting Appalachian stereotype here}?

Both Kentucky and West Virginia suffer from frequent ethnic jokes involving some combination of:

• incest
• feuds
• moonshine
• reference to movie Deliverance (which actually takes place in Georgia)

Which makes me wonder, why is still OK to make ethnic slurs against some groups of people as long as they are white? Perhaps it reflects this furious pent up demand by white people for  ethnic slurs, cruelly thwarted by the civil rights movement (also known as "political correctness" if you  were not a big fan of the civil rights movement).  I've had people tell me insulting jokes about West Virginians even AFTER they know I was born in West Virginia.

Of course,  ethnic slurs are pretty universal around the world. Latin American soccer games are famous for having fans taunt the visiting team with ethnic slurs.

Debating Sachs: the Next Generation

I am reluctant these days to post any criticisms of Jeff Sachs, since I know many people are tired of this never-ending back and forth. But I make an exception when my own daughter asks me to take him on. I want to protect her privacy and not involve her directly in what is at times a nasty debate, so let me just says she is a college junior who has studied and thought a lot about the environment. I have listened to her and learned a lot from her, but anything I say here is my own opinion and I don't want to or claim to represent her opinion.

Sachs' opinion column that provoked her was in the March 2010 issue of Scientific American. Sachs is impatient with the political process in the US on Climate Change and invokes the neutral technocratic solution:

Let’s hear more from the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, Nobel laureate energy secretary Steven Chu, the National Academy of Sciences and other authorities. The public will learn to appreciate that the scientific community is working urgently, rigorously and ingeniously to better understand the complex climate system, for our shared safety and well-being.

Except, just as in Sachs' approach to ending global poverty, there is no such thing as a neutral technocratic solution. Sachs' solution sounds instead patronizing and top-down.  Any such solution has winners and losers, and the politically powerless poor at the bottom are more likely to be among the losers  ( What about the poor in West Virginia who see their streams polluted and their mountaintops removed to get "clean coal"?)

More generally, and closer to my usual debate with Sachs: Why should the solution to global warming be decided by rich country technocrats? Is this an environmental version of the White Man's Burden, that rich country environmentalists patronizingly impose their solutions on the rest of the world?