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Project Syndicate

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.

www.project-syndicate.org

Stories from Project Syndicate

Singer cartoon
Charity in Hard Times
If extreme poverty is allowed to increase, we will see new diseases and more migration
Peter Singer
Project Syndicate
17/04/2009
As I tour the U.S. promoting my new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, I am often asked if this isn’t the wrong time to call on affluent people to increase their effort to end poverty in other countries. I reply emphatically that it is not. There is no doubt that the world economy is in trouble. But if governments or individuals use this as an excuse to reduce assistance to the world’s poorest people, they would only multiply the seriousness of the problem for the world as a whole.

The financial crisis has been more damaging for the poor than it has been for the rich.

Joseph E. Stiglitz
Davos Man’s Depression
The perpetrators acted like victims and the IMF still insisted on tight money
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Project Syndicate
01/03/2009

For 15 years, I have been attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. Typically, the leaders gathered there share their optimism about how globalization, technology, and markets are transforming the world for the better. Even during the recession of 2001, those assembled in Davos believed that the downturn would be short-lived.

Peter Singer
Capitalism’s New Clothes
The risk is that the potential for change will be co-opted
Peter Singer
Project Syndicate
01/03/2009

Is the global financial crisis an opportunity to forge a new form of capitalism based on sound values?

So French President Nicholas Sarkozy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair appear to think. At a symposium in Paris last month entitled “New World, New Capitalism,” Sarkozy described capitalism based on financial speculation as “an immoral system” that has “perverted the logic of capitalism.” He argued that capitalism needs to find new moral values and to accept a stronger role for governments. Blair called for a new financial order based on “values other than the maximum short-term profit.”

10 Google
Big Brother Google?
The danger in digital technology lies in the concentration of information – and thus in a concentration of power
Esther Dyson
Project Syndicate
01/03/2009
“Google violates its ‘don’t be evil’ motto.” To Google’s credit, if you google that sentence, you can find reference to a debate on that claim that I took part in recently.

As it happens, I have a complex relationship with Google. I have fed at its trough many times – as a personal guest; as an advisory board member of Stop Badware, an NGO it sponsors; and as a speaker at its events. I also sit on the board of 23andMe, co-founded by the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Why Obama
The long campaign has revealed huge differences in the two U.S. candidates
Richard Holbrooke
Project Syndicate
28/02/2009

The winner of America’s presidential election will inherit a perfect storm of problems, both economic and international. He will face the most difficult opening-day agenda of any president since – and I say this in all seriousness – the man who saved the Union, Abraham Lincoln. But a more instructive precedent is 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt offered inspiring rhetoric and “bold experimentation” to a nation facing economic meltdown and a breakdown in public confidence.

For me, the choice is simple – and not only because I am, by temperament and history, a Democrat. The long and intense political campaign has revealed huge differences in the two candidates’ positions, style, and personal qualities. And the conclusion seems clear.

wall_street_4c.jpg
Bailout Blues
Wall Street may be saved, but what about the economy?
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Project Syndicate
18/02/2009

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the United States' financial system -- indeed, global finance -- is in a mess. And now, with the US House of Representatives having rejected the Bush administration's proposed $700 billion bailout plan, it is also obvious that there is no consensus on how to fix it.

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Russia Crosses the Line
Whatever Mistakes Georgia’s Government Has Made Cannot Justify Russia’s Actions
Richard Holbrooke
Ronald D. Asmus
Project Syndicate
18/02/2009

by Richard C. Holbrooke and Ronald D. Asmus

In weeks and years past, each of us argued that Russia was pursuing a policy of regime change toward Georgia and its pro-Western, democratically elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili. We predicted that, absent strong and unified Western diplomatic involvement, war was coming.

 

Joseph E. Stiglitz
The Triumphant Return of John Maynard Keynes
Even the conservative right now accepts that free markets are not self-correcting
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Project Syndicate
03/02/2009

We are all Keynesians now. Even the right in the United States has joined the Keynesian camp with unbridled enthusiasm and on a scale that at one time would have been truly unimaginable.

For those of us who claimed some connection to the Keynesian tradition, this is a moment of triumph, after having been left in the wilderness, almost shunned, for more than three decades. At one level, what is happening now is a triumph of reason and evidence over ideology and interests.

Peter Singer
Thirty Years of Test-Tube Babies
In spite of widespread fears, the outcome is not very different from natural conception
Peter Singer
Project Syndicate
02/02/2009
Louise Brown, the first person to be conceived outside a human body, turned 30 last year. The birth of a “test-tube baby,” as the headlines described in vitro fertilization was highly controversial at the time. Leon Kass, who subsequently served as chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, argued that the risk of producing an abnormal infant was too great for an attempt at IVF ever to be justified. Some religious leaders also condemned the use of modern scientific technology to replace sexual intercourse, even when it could not lead to conception.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Anti-Intellectual Threat
Extremists refusal to accept science could have dire consequences
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Project Syndicate
02/12/2008
In recent years, the United States has been more a source of global instability than a source of global problem-solving. Examples include the war in Iraq launched by the US on false premises, obstructionism on efforts to curb climate change, meager development assistance and the violation of international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions.
Today's Schedule, Mr President
Obama’s Global Challenge
A chance to break through the cynicism that has pervaded American politics
Peter Singer
Project Syndicate
02/12/2008

The astonishing story of Barack Obama’s election as president has already done much to restore America’s global image. In place of a president whose only qualification for the office was his father’s name, we now have one whose intelligence and vision overcame the formidable obstacle of being the exotically named son of an African Muslim. Who would have believed, after the last two elections, that the American public was capable of electing such a candidate?

Hannes Androsch
The New Contagion
In a world where capital is free to flow across international boundaries, the crisis in the US inevitably spreads to Europe and beyond
Hannes Androsch
Project Syndicate
02/11/2008

The most notable innovations of the past two decades have been financial. Like technological innovation, financial innovation is on a perpetual search for greater efficiency – in this case, reducing the cost of transferring funds from savers to investors.

Sadly, the financial revolution has been mostly profit-seeking rather than welfare-enhancing – based on eliminating, or at least reducing, two key elements of banking costs closely associated with prudential arrangements.

Sleepwalking In the Balkans
In two years time, Milorad Dodik has reversed much of the progress in Bosnia
Richard Holbrooke
Paddy Ashdown
Project Syndicate
02/11/2008

Almost exactly 13 years ago, American leadership brought an end to Bosnia’s three-and-a-half-year war through the Dayton peace agreement. Today that country is in real danger of collapse. As in 1995, resolve and transatlantic unity are needed if we are not to sleepwalk into another crisis.

Joseph E. Stiglitz
A Little Alpine Schadenfreude
At Davos, Few Still Believed Globalization, Technology and The Market Economy Would Solve the World's Problems
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Project Syndicate
02/03/2008

Not surprisingly, the atmosphere at this year's World Economic Forum was grim. Those who think that globalization, technology, and the market economy will solve the world's problems seemed subdued. Most chastened of all were the bankers. Against the backdrop of the sub-prime crisis, the disasters at many financial institutions, and the weakening of the stock market, these 'masters of the universe' seemed less omniscient than they did a short while ago. And it was not just the bankers who were in the Davos doghouse this year, but also their regulators -- the central bankers.

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