What happened to Jeffrey Sachs?

Economist Jeffrey Sachs is professor of Health Policy and Management and Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. He used to be one of your standard establishment types. As recently as 2006, he wrote a book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time that I read in which he promoted the neoliberal ideology of the policies that developing countries should adopt. He was a major player on the international scene, a widely sought-after and quoted advisor to governments, the World Bank, the IMF, and the like. [Read more…]

A pope and a rabbi write a book …

So that is not the set up for a joke but just a way of introducing the idea that in 2010, current pope Francis (then cardinal Mario Bergoglio) co-authored with rabbi Abraham Skorka, an Argentine biophysicist and rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires, a book titled On Heaven and Earth. In the absence of a significant public record, this book has become a valuable source of information for people trying to figure out the pope’s views on the major issues confronting the Catholic church and the world. This book will become available in English in the US on April 30. [Read more…]

TV review: Veep

The HBO comedy series Veep is pretty funny. The first season of eight episodes is out on Netflix and I watched it over two weekends. The backstory is that Selina Meyer is a US senator who tried and failed to get her party’s nomination for the presidency, then accepted the role of running mate and became vice-president. She finds that in the world of Washington politics, she now has far less clout than when she was a senator, reduced to making human interest appearances at kindergartens and yoghurt stores and the like. She has all the trappings of power (massive security detail and six limousine motorcades wherever she goes) but not the reality and the show deals with her frustration and insecurity at being deliberately excluded from the really important decision-making processes. [Read more…]

Bizarre story out of Cleveland

Although everything I know about it is based on information that I read in the media and have no special insight, I feel obliged to comment on the latest bizarre case that has emerged in Cleveland, since I live here.

Three unrelated women separately disappeared in 2002, 2003, and 2004 when they were aged 19, 16, and 14 respectively. (You can read profiles of the three women here.) There were intense searches for the two younger women, less so for the oldest who some thought had run away on her own. When the searches failed, hope that they were alive also faded. [Read more…]

How big banks fix benchmark rates

The rules against insider trading are meant to ensure that ‘the market’ is democratic and that everyone has access to the same information on which to base investment decisions, and to prevent individuals from taking advantage of knowledge that might give them more accurate knowledge of the true value of something than the public at large. As a result, we are constantly reassured how ‘the market’ has a self-correcting mechanism that results in the publicly stated value of financial products reflecting their true value. [Read more…]

Religious rioting in Bangladesh

The Indian subcontinent is going through turbulent times as religious extremists try to demand that religious dogma drive each country’s legal system and social mores. Pakistan has been subjected to vicioius blasphemy laws. India has seen the rise of Hindu nationalists and Hindu-Muslim clashes, Sri Lanka has seen militant Buddhists, led by monks, attack ethnic and religious minorities, most recently the Muslims. [Read more…]

The perils of bravado

US presidents love to look tough. But why don’t they ever realize that it is always a mistake to publicly draw lines in the sand? It makes you look strong at that moment but boxes you in later, because political reality is always more complicated and requires flexibility and nuance in dealing with it. In the case of Syria, president Obama made the mistake nine months ago in a press conference of declaring that if the Syrian government used chemical weapons, they would be crossing a ‘red line’, leaving unsaid what he would do in response. [Read more…]

Burying those whom society despises

[UPDATE on May 9, 2013: He has finally been buried in an undisclosed location, bringing this shameful chapter to a close.]

In an odd sequel to the Boston bombing, the family of Tamerlan Tsarnaev wants him to be buried according to Muslim custom but it turns out that cemeteries are refusing to allow the body to be buried in their plots. The funeral director Peter Stefan has tried four cemeteries in three different states and has been rejected by all of them. His family wants him to be buried in Massachusetts, where he lived the last decade. [Read more…]