We can’t give people so much security with their income that it affects their willingness to work… We can have equality in access to education and health but not in equality of income… We can’t have a situation where it is not work that gives access to goods.
Unexceptional stuff. Except it comes from a top official at Cuba’s economics ministry, speaking to the FT .
Is even Cuban communism being watered down?
I read so many books last year as part of my research for
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them that I have taken it easy this
year, and taken more time to enjoy novels such as Salman Rushdie’s
Shalimar The Clown and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.
Among the non-fiction books I read, five of the best were:
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist
Tim has a knack for
making economics - which is basically, he says, about who gets what and
why – interesting and relevant, and he uses the so-called dismal
science to explain how the world around us really works. UK | US (I don’t make a penny from these Amazon links)
Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics
Levitt
is a brilliant economist, and Freakonomics is full of original
insights. But it is also, unfortunately, full of puff and padding; the article from the New York Times magazine on which it is based is much better. UK | US
Anna Lee Saxenian, The New Argonauts
Forget the brain
drain: today’s highly skilled migrants - the new Argonauts – circulate
between the US and developing countries, creating new technology
businesses and spreading prosperity along the way. UK | US
Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus
Ferguson explains the
importance - and limits – of money in shaping history since 1700.
Thought-provoking, although it inevitably fails to achieve its grand
ambitions. UK | US
Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence
A Nobel laureate in
economics, Sen’s interests have always ranged more widely. Here, he
explains how reductionist and simplistic concepts of identity can lead
to violence - an issue that is at the heart of the debates over
multiculturalism, Islamic fundamentalism, the so-called "clash of
civilisations" and much else besides. UK | US
The most over-rated book of the year:
Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat
No, it isn’t. "A Brief
History of the Twenty-First Century"? Pff. More like "A long-winded
ego-trip by a journalist who talks to lots of VIPs but grasps very
little." UK | US
It might seem odd that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to a
banker, but Muhammad Yunus, who set up the Grameen Bank, is no ordinary financier.
An admission and an apology: I have been spending my spare time watching the World Cup instead of writing my blog. After Ghana beat the Czech Republic, who were ranked second in the world by FIFA, I thought about trying to link my two passions by writing about the beneficial impact of globalisation on football: a European sport has become a global one – and now the rest of the world is beating Europe at its own game. But then the African challenge petered out, and as we stand on the brink of the semi-finals, only one – and perhaps none – of the final four will be from outside Europe.
It’s
up to Lamy
Prospects for the Doha round look grim. Over five years in, and
the World Trade Organisation’s 149 members still seem as far apart as they were
during the 2003 Cancún debacle. Only the massaging down of expectations by WTO
boss Pascal Lamy ahead of the Hong Kong summit
last December rescued it from disaster. Now another deadline looms: 30th April,
by when an outline deal must be reached if a final agreement is to be struck by
the end of the year, ahead of the expiry of Bush’s fast-track authority in
2007.
Every year PR consultancy Mercer Human Resource Consulting scores an easy hit in the world’s newspapers with its fanciful ranking of the quality of life in cities around the world. While the Guardian focuses on the fact that Glasgow and Birmingham are ranked as highly as Los Angeles and Tsukuba (hands up, honestly, if you had heard of it), the FT notes that top-placed Zurich is only fractionally ahead of Geneva.