Taxation Is A Good Thing Says Sweden's Conservative Finance Minister

Sweden's house of finance is in order, despite the recession and economic troubles in Europe and the world. Anders Borg, the conservative Minister of Finance, said in an interview for Swedish TV that Sweden needs the taxes it levies on the population ant that it is a good thing.
"It is my belief that it is basically a good thing that we collect tax revenues in Sweden. It is a good thing that we have our welfare system, social security, foreign aid, education and healthcare. In order to have that, we need taxes," Borg told SVT.

Worst Thing Since the New Coke - Flat-Packed Swedish Food at IKEA

I picked up Lisa at Newark Airport, and then we headed over to Ikea for a romantic dinner with a gorgeous view of the Turnpike (well, it was dark so all we could see through the panorama windows was the lights of cars, streetlights and incoming airplanes). We had stopped at Ikea in Elizabeth to pick up some Swedish food in the mini market, but we came away pretty disappointed. Ikea is doing the "New Coke" thing, phasing-out the good old Swedish brands and replacing them with Ikea-branded food. Flat-packed chocolate doesn't look as appetizing as the Marabou's we used to buy, and they had signs warning us that we better buy the Siljans knäckebröd now, because soon you will have to make do with Ikea branded bread. For ex-patriots like myself, a visit to Ikea is a visit to the old country, and it is nice to be able to buy Kalles kaviar, Västerbottensost and Lingonsaft, but that will soon be history.
Not only that. Ikea is now selling half-size packages of soft tunnbröd for the same price as the full sized bread I used to buy, and the substitute for the "Hönökaka" is not only square, but nouveau in size, or approximately one third of what it used to be.
I left Ikea sad and disappointed. Is it good business? Well, everytime I visit Ikea to pick up Swedish food, I usually spend a couple of hundred dollars in the store. Without the food, I won't bother to drive to Ikea anytime soon.

Krugman Honored With Prize and a Cool Video

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) honored Princeton's Nobel Laureate economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with a new prize for a distinguished economist and a video on its 25th anniversary.

A Crazy Idea That Makes Sense: Let the Uneducated Educate

I happened upon a TED video this morning. The email arrived; I browsed, clicked and couldn’t stop watching until it was over. Here was this Indian gentleman telling the story of how he left his elite school to found a university among the poorest of the poor. It’s a school where no one with a title or a Ph.D. is allowed to teach, and where no exam is given. And yet, it works. And the movement has spread to Afghanistan, Africa and other places, where poor grandmothers are now building schools and installing solar panels. It is a revolution of sorts.

Bunker Roy - the founder of the movement - realized that uneducated people sit on vast knowledge resources, an idea that Jared Diamond touched upon in the beginning of his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” (1997). There is knowledge and there is knowledge. I’m not convinced that barefoot universities would work in modern, middle class societies, but I do believe that we have a lot to learn from them. One of the main problems with modern education is that we separate and isolate learning from doing. Another is that we focus on a narrow band of knowledge. The British Studio School movement has taken on these issues, seemingly successful among children that the current school system has failed.

Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement

Listening to the Republican Debate

Listening to the Republican debate... what a bunch of losers - all thinking they are winners. Rick Perry is a bad joke. So is Bachmann. Herman Cain is a shrewd salesman - a male Sarah Palin of sorts - but his business is not power, but selling books and promoting his consulting business. Mitt Romney has that Mormon look and hedgefund mindset that gives his ego the necessary boost, but is not going to win enough evangelical votes to enter the White House. Ron Paul is a cranky old man with even older ideas, kind of like Ross Perot without the charts. The rest of the gang are not even worth mentioning. (Jon Huntsman - the only zane Republican candidate - decoded to not participate in this debate. Who can blame him?)

Just Finished Listeing to Sapolsky On Stress...

Robert Sapolsky is the author of the bestseller "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers". He is an excellent lecturer, and he has a magic story to tell.
 

How a Plan for Two States Led to Just One: Israel

Two articles - one in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and one in Haaretz - provides new insight into the process that led to the creation of only one state instead of two in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. The articles show how the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which was intended to be non-partisan and led by a Swede, Emil Sandström, was boycotted by the Palestinians and cleverly manipulated by the Jewish Agency and the intelligence network Haganah. The full story behind UNSCOP's recommendation to the create a Jewish state will soon be available in a new book by Elad Ben-Dror, a historian at Bar-Ilan University.

Ben-Dror has had access to recently declassified documents. He writes that UNSCOP were planning to create and train two militias - one Palestinian and one Jewish, but this didn't happen. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quotes from the book:

"The plan to establish a militia was the most surprising material I found at the UN," Ben-Dror says. "As part of the Partition Plan, both states were to create militias - a military force under government control and charged mainly with domestic policing duties."
But because the Palestinian leadership viewed Resolution 181 as a pro-Zionist plan and did everything possible to foil it, the UN focused only on establishing the Jewish militia.
"From quite an early stage, due to a lack of cooperation, the UN dropped half of the Partition Plan - the idea of establishing an Arab state," Ben-Dror explained.
"The idea was to implement at least part of the plan - that is, the Jews would create the Jewish state, on the assumption that eventually the UN Security Council would implement the creation of the Arab state," Ben-Dror continued. "As soon as the Partition Plan was adopted, UN Secretary General Trygve Lie and senior UN officials became identified with the idea of the Jewish state. The Arab assault was interpreted as an assault on the UN resolutions, and the UN trusted that the Jews would carry out the partition and not do anything beyond that."

A State is Born in Palestine (New York Times)
UN archives reveal plan to arm Jewish militia (Haaretz)

Democracy, Dictatorship and Economic Growth

It's a popular notion that dictatorships are more efficient than democracies, and that it is China's political system that explains it's fast growth since 1978. Professor Yasheng Huang from MIT Sloan School of Management challenges that notion, by a series of very interesting comparisons.

Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth?

If you found Yasheng's speech interesting, you may also want to listen to Joseph Nye's speech, which places China's economic and political power in a soft power perspective. 

The Tea Party as a Proto-Fascist Movement

I'm finally reading Hannah Arendt's fascinating book The Origins of Totalitarianism, which feels surprisingly fresh despite its age. Her treatment of the pan-slavic and pan-germanic movements makes you think of the Tea Party, and her discussion of the treatment of the stateless and their internment makes you cold inside. But if the similarities are that obvious, somebody must have written about it. I googled Hannah Arendt and the Tea Party and did get a few thousand hits.
Here is an example: Richard Cohen: Green with Tea Party envy (Washington Post)

And here is an excerpt from Arendt's book:

It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.

The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one's own or somebody else's party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country. Thus when the totalitarian movements invaded Parliament with their contempt for parliamentary government, they merely appeared inconsistent: actually, they succeeded in convincing the people at large that parliamentary majorities were spurious and did not necessarily correspond to the realities of the country, thereby undermining the self-respect and the confidence of governments which also believed in majority rule rather than in their constitutions.

It has frequently been pointed out that totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them. This is not just devilish cleverness on the part of the leaders or childish stupidity on the part of the masses. Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy . . . (The Origin of Totalitarianism)

Also, see Wikipedia's article about Hannah Arendt's book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism