131) Gastronomia diplomática, por Guilherme Leite Ribeiro

Os Bastidores da Diplomacia: o Bife de Zinco e outras histórias
Guilherme Luiz Leite Ribeiro
Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2007.


A decepção nos aguarda em todos os caminhos da vida, mas em profissão alguma os desapontamentos são tão amplamente superados por ricas oportunidades como na prática da diplomacia.
François de Callières (1645–1717), diplomata francês, homem de letras e secretário do gabinete de Luis XIV.

Durante seus 44 anos de carreira, o embaixador Guilherme Luiz Leite Ribeiro ouviu e leu muitas histórias divertidas de diplomatas brasileiros e estrangeiros. Ao se aposentar, em 2002, decidiu trazer ao público algumas delas, muitas ouvidas no modesto restaurante do velho Itamaraty, no Rio de Janeiro, chamado pelos diplomatas de “Bife de Zinco” devido ao seu telhado feito com este metal e porque contrastava com o elegante “Bife de Ouro” do Copacabana Palace. Surge então Os bastidores da diplomacia: o Bife de Zinco e outras histórias.
Seu estilo foge ao padrão sério e solene dos livros sobre diplomacia, procurando um caminho mais ameno, crítico e divertido. Ao mesmo tempo, o autor revela e desmistifica, muitas vezes com humor, algumas das muitas histórias dos bastidores da diplomacia, destacando as três principais funções do diplomata: informar, negociar e representar. Guilherme Luiz Leite Ribeiro comenta as provas do Instituto Rio Branco e os vestibulares, além dos momentos decisivos da carreira diplomática, como as promoções e remoções para servir no exterior que provocam incertezas e colocam os nervos à flor da pele. Relata ainda os sacrifícios para os diplomatas e sua família quando mudanças repentinas alteram e interrompem o curso de suas vidas e, principalmente, os estudos dos filhos.
Os bastidores da diplomacia: o Bife de Zinco e outras histórias é um livro esclarecedor, divertido e surpreendente. Aqui abrem-se as cortinas da vida diplomática, contam-se casos dessa carreira de solidão, de saudades, de exilados profissionais, de amizades e de amores que nascem e se desfazem com as mudanças. E de surpresas. Ninguém está livre de ser envolvido por uma revolução, de ser confundido como espião por uma multidão exaltada, de viver em condições insalubres nos chamados postos peculiares, de ser obrigado, por educação, a ingerir iguarias exóticas e elogiar-lhes o sabor, e de presenciar, como aconteceu com o autor, os terríveis momentos do 11 de Setembro em Nova York.

GUILHERME LUIZ BELFORD ROXO LEITE RIBEIRO nasceu em 1935, em Buenos Aires. Ingressou no Instituto Rio Branco em 1958 e serviu em Lisboa (1963-1966), cidade do México (1966-1967), Santiago (1969-1973 e 1991-1995), Roma (1973-1974), Milão (1995-1999) e Nova York (1976-1979, 1983-1988 e 1999-2002). Vive atualmente em Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro. Casado há 45 anos com Vera Lúcia, tem dois filhos, Cláudia e Guilherme, que os acompanharam em grande parte da vida diplomática.

130) Mein Kampf, de Hitler

Sobre Mein Kampf, de Hitler

Li o artigo atual de Ben Macintyre e a resenha publicada pelo Times (Londres) em 1933 sobre o livro Mein Kampf, de Hitler.
A matéria atual é impecável, a resenha de 1933 peca por algumas suposições ingenuas, entre as quais a de que o Hitler Chancellor seria mais responsável e mais "estadista", do que o Hitler golpista de 1923-24, quando ele redigiu essa peça rara da maldade absoluta que constitui o seu livro de ódio racial e de incitação ao morticínio e à guerra.
Concordo com muitos comentaristas (no link abaixo do The Times) em que o livro (ou excertos, já que ele é aborrecidamente longo) deveria ser republicado com anotações críticas, ou seja, por um lado desmentindo cabalmente, com base em dados da ciência, as asserções mentirosas de Hitler sobre o povo judeu, por outro lado demonstrando toda a mortandade que ele provocou na Europa, desde 1933 até 1945.
Tivemos muitos outros exemplos de genocídios e exterminações em massa, entre elas as conduzidas por Stalin, Mao Tsé-tung e Pol-Pot, entre outros, para nao falar de Idi Amin Dada, Saddam Hussein e outros ditadores sanguinários.
Temos hoje a mortandade absurda conduzida por terroristas do fundamentalismo islamico, que produz todos os dias dezenas ou centenas de mortos inocentes, a começar pelos próprios muçulmanos.
O livro ainda pode servir de inspiração para ingênuos e mentes doentias, mas ainda assim creio que uma edição crítica seria melhor do que sua circulação clandestina por militantes da causa abjeta sistematizada pelo mediocre escritor que era essa encarnação do mal absoluto que foi Hitler.
-------------
Paulo Roberto de Almeida


Publish and debunk this relic of history
Ben Macintyre
From The Times, July 27, 2007 (link)

Seventy-four years ago this week, The Times started serialising the worst book ever written. Adolf Hitler had dictated Mein Kampf in Landsburg Prison in 1924, while incarcerated for his attempted putsch against the German Government. The book would not be published in Britain until October 1933, but this newspaper obtained the rights to run exclusive extracts four months earlier.

The Times explained that it was publishing this vile, anti-Semitic rant on the grounds that “readers will find it illuminating as a psychological revelation [which] will show how Hitler came to hate the Jews”. Even so, the Editor of the day, George Dawson, was plainly holding his nose as he placed Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) in the public domain.

The accompanying editorial spoke of the author as a “fanatical anti-Semite” with “a few ideas, harshly created and stubbornly held”. It noted Hitler’s “revengeful fury” and the “cruel acts of savagery which have degraded Germany in the eyes of the world”. The editorial concluded: “The Hitler regime has actually been established by violence [and] legalised terrorism is still necessary to its maintenance.”

Few in 1933 could have foreseen the full scale of the horror that Hitler would shortly unleash, but there is a flicker of premonition in this newspaper’s palpable distaste. Dawson must also have wondered whether, in giving space to Hitler’s noxious ideas, he was also spreading and encouraging them. Was The Times justified in publishing Hitler’s tract? Or are there some words so ugly in import and so violent in intent, that they should be locked away? Is Hitler’s creed an ideological poison, liable to corrupt and contaminate anyone who is exposed to it? These questions have been asked about Mein Kampf ever since it first appeared, and it is an issue of fierce debate in Germany today, where Horst Möller, a leading German historian, has called for the book to be published openly for the first time since 1945.

The Bavarian state authorities own the copyright to Hitler’s writings, but maintain an effective ban by refusing all requests to print it. Officially, the book cannot be bought in Germany, Israel, Norway or Switzerland. It is illegal to own it in Austria and to sell it in the Netherlands. But the book is available for sale in the US and Britain, as well as through internet bookshops. About 3,000 copies are sold every year in the UK.

Mein Kampf is the central defining text of racial hatred, a lurid, paranoid diatribe founded on the lie of Aryan supremacy. It is not only evil but amazingly badly written, being repetitious, anti-factual, rambling and turgid, the testimony of a furious, self-pitying failure with a slender grasp on reality and none whatever on grammar. It was a huge bestseller: each newly married couple, graduating student, and soldier at the front was presented with a copy by the Third Reich; Hitler earned more than $1 million a year in royalties. It is wicked rubbish, at once stomach-turning and soporific; everyone should read it, once.

Holocaust survivors are understandably unhappy at the prospect of a book that caused such bloodshed becoming freely available once more in the country that gave birth to Nazism. Yet whatever sympathy one may feel for those who suffered, no book should be banned, however pernicious. Allowed to fester in the dark corners of neo-Nazism, Hitler’s ideas continue to hold a spurious glamour for the twisted few: held up to the light, they shrivel. In treating this disease, exposure to fresh air is always more effective than quarantine.

Some argued as much from the beginning. William L. Shirer, the American journalist and historian who covered the rise of the Third Reich, suggested that if Hitler’s ideas had been more widely disseminated and understood outside Germany in the 1930s, then the world might have taken action in time to stop him.

The Times was right to publish extracts from Mein Kampf in 1933; the publisher Hutchinson was brave and right to issue a cheap wartime edition in order that British people might better understand what we were fighting for, and against. And Mr Möller is surely right to argue that Germany has now left the spectre of Nazism so far behind, that it can trust itself to read Hitler’s creed without fear of reinfection.

Quite apart from the issue of free speech, there is the practical consideration that book-banning is virtually impossible in the internet age. The Nazis themselves tried, and failed, to ban and burn the “degenerate” books they feared, and in the process lent those works underground status. Today any neo-Nazi with half a brain (rather more than the usual complement), can download Mein Kampf and feel aggrieved and special for having to do so in secret.

The copyright of Mein Kampf in Germany will expire in 2015, and then German publishers will be free to publish it. How much better, then, to produce a cheap, scholarly, annotated version in German now, with a commentary comprehensively debunking it. That would be a mark of moral courage, a demonstration that Germany has come to terms with its past and can look on the evil of Nazism with confident disdain instead of a lingering fear.

Mein Kampf is a historical relic that has retained its power to horrify: it should be preserved and exhibited in the same way as Auschwitz, the killing fields of Cambodia and Holocaust museums everywhere. Germany has struggled to explore and understand its own history with an honesty that stands as a beacon to other traumatised nations, from South Africa to Iraq to Northern Ireland. Hitler’s apologia for mass murder is a painful but necessary part of that story. It should be published, and damned.


Read the 1933 Times Editorial on Mein Kampf neste link.

129) Papel do Estado no Progresso Tecnologico

Espen Moe, _Governance, Growth and Global Leadership: The Role of the State in Technological Progress, 1750-2000_. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. ix + 308 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-7546-5743-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Peter T. Leeson, Department of Economics, George Mason University.

There is no shortage of research examining the sources of prosperity. In _Governance, Growth and Global Leadership_, political scientist Espen Moe of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology contributes to this research, but does so by way of analyzing a more specific, and thus more manageable, contributor to wealth creation: technology.

Moe argues that three key factors explain why some countries have achieved this progress, emerging as global leaders of industry, while other have not: human capital, government's ability to resist catering to vested interests, and "political consensus and social cohesion."

Through these factors Moe aims to marry "Schumpeterian growth theory" -- the idea of a simultaneously creative and destructive growth process -- with Mancur Olson's theory of special interest groups to create a general framework that sheds light on the history of technological change.

The marriage is a fruitful, if familiar, one. In order for technology to advance and economies to grow, governments must permit innovations and individuals must have the human capital to apply them. The problem is that older, well-established producers have incentives to block such invention since it often destroys the market positions they enjoy. If old industrial leaders are able to capture the state, government will raise barriers to change, privileging the status quo and thwarting technological progress.

Governments that can resist the pressure to cater to such interests facilitate the process of creative destruction and with it economic growth. Those that cannot resist the pressure stifle this process and encourage economic stagnation. "Political consensus and social cohesion" enter the picture by creating the conditions of broad-based support among political leaders and the populace for economic policy that allows new producers to compete openly with old ones, or by adding to the pressure that vested interests apply to government to preserve existing arrangements.

The core framework here is not "new;" but great originality in the context of the voluminous literature that examines economic growth and development is difficult to achieve. More importantly, theoretical innovation is not Moe's goal. The application of this framework to the history of technological progress is both novel and interesting and serves the author's primary purpose, which is an empirical one.

To make his argument Moe considers nine case studies of technological progress or stagnation between 1750 and 2000. His case studies are presented in the context of five substantive chapters. Each of these is devoted to a different industry, presented chronologically in terms of its economic significance.

Chapter 2 contrasts England and France's experience with the cotton textile industry during the First Industrial Revolution. Chapter 3 again considers England and France, but in the context of the iron industry in first half of the nineteenth century. In chapter 4 Moe compares German and British technological success in the chemical industry between the second part of the nineteenth century and World War I. Unlike the previous chapters, chapter 5 examines only one country -- the U.S. -- and the rise of the automobile industry in the interwar period. The sixth and final substantive chapter contrasts American and Japanese progress in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry from the Cold War era until the turn of the new century.

These case studies persuasively point to the important (primarily negative) role of government in facilitating technological progress, namely through resisting pressure from industrial stakeholders to undermine Schumpeterian entrepreneurs or privilege the status quo. Likewise, they effectively highlight how "political consensus and social cohesion" reduced or applied this pressure, enabling or preventing technological advance. Overall, the evidence Moe musters does a nice job of illustrating the utility of his proposed Schumpeter-Olson marriage in the context of the history of technological progress and growth.

I have only one noteworthy complaint. In light of the importance that both vested interests and human capital play in Moe's framework, it would have been useful if his analysis focused more on how government can and has used "human capital building" to cater to vested interests and block Schumpeterian growth. Although, as chapter 6 discusses for example, state-led research and development has figured prominently in ICT development in a number of countries, we cannot, prima facie, take this human capital building as a positive force contributing to technological and developmental progress.

Like all other government activities, state-sponsored research and development, education, and so on, are subject to traditional public choice concerns and may be used by political actors to cater to vested interests or nefariously guide the process of technological change in other ways. In short, technological "progress" encouraged by government may not reflect _economic_ progress in that it may constitute an inefficient use of resources.

A technology that could not support itself without state-subsidized R&D, for example, but because of this R&D "makes it" and eventually comes into wide use is not necessarily a "win" from the standpoint of economic development. For one thing, we never enjoy the alternative, potentially superior technological innovations that would have come along if R&D resources had been allocated according to market forces instead of political criteria.

This objection notwithstanding, _Governance, Growth and Global Leadership_ tells a compelling story of technological progress since 1750. Economic historians, particularly those with a strong interest in economic growth and development, will enjoy it.

Peter T. Leeson is the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University. His recent research explores the law, economics, and organization of pirates (http://www.peterleeson.com) and has been covered in the _New Yorker_ and the _Financial Times_.

Copyright (c) 2007 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2229). Published by EH.Net (July 2007). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

128) Um Premio Nobel chines, grande romancista...

...e, como tal, considerado inimigo do regime.
Por que será que as ditaduras nunca gostam dos escritores e dos artistas?
Por que intelectuais sempre são perseguidos em regimes autoritários?

A Montanha da Alma
Gao Xingjian
Alfaguara, 554 págs., R$ 49,90

Xingjian: "A Montanha da Alma" é acerto de contas "com a nostalgia do país natal"
por: Luíza Mendes Furia
Valor Econômico, Caderno EU&Fim de Semana, /07/2007

O lirismo e as descrições cheias de cores e tons permeiam "A Montanha da Alma", romance considerado o mais importante da carreira do chinês Gao Xingjian, Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 2000, que agora chega ao Brasil.
O livro, que mistura várias técnicas narrativas, foi escrito entre 1982 e 1989, depois de uma longa viagem que Xingjian fez pelo interior de seu vasto país - de variadas culturas, etnias e paisagens - e na qual entrou em contato com suas tradições e também com sua decadência.
Nascido em 1940 em Jiangxi, no sudeste da China, o autor passou pela "reeducação" imposta pela Revolução Cultural nos anos 1960 e pela abertura na década de 1970, quando os artistas ganharam uma tímida liberdade de expressão. Também pintor, tradutor, crítico literário formado em língua francesa no Instituto de Letras Estrangeiras de Pequim, e dramaturgo, Xingjian acabou, porém, por ter problemas com o governo nos anos 1980 por causa de suas populares peças teatrais, que contestavam o regime.
Em 1987, exilou-se na França, onde vive até hoje, sendo considerado pelo governo chinês um dissidente exilado. Apesar de ser o único chinês detentor do Nobel de Literatura, sua obra foi banida da China. Para Xingjian, "A Montanha da Alma" foi um acerto de contas "com a nostalgia do país natal".
"Obra única na paisagem literária contemporânea", segundo Noël Dutrait, seu tradutor francês, professor de língua e literatura chinesa na Universidade de Provence, o livro é entre outras coisas, viagem interior, confissão autobiográfica, evocação da paisagem e das florestas ainda virgens da China e apresenta dilaceramentos amorosos, faz uma reflexão sobre a arte do romance e evoca a "realidade kafkiana contemporânea"

127) Livro sobre diplomacia, aspectos teoricos e praticos

La diplomacia: Aspectos teóricos y prácticos de su ejercicio profesional
Ismael Moreno Pino
Mexico: Fondo de Cultira Económica, 2001
ISBN: 9681652347

Los avances tecnológicos vertiginosos, en particular en el terreno de las comunicaciones, y la implosión del orbe socialista no son ajenos a los cambios sorprendentes que se operan en las relaciones internacionales. En un mundo distendido de los rigores de la guerra fría, donde la expansión de las políticas neoliberales ha modificado los esquemas geopolíticos en una nueva usanza político-económica y social globalizada, la diplomacia o, de acuerdo con sus definiciones, "el arte, ciencia o práctica de conducir negociaciones entre los países" debe aprender a desempeñar un nuevo papel.
Para los países del Tercer Mundo las transacciones exteriores constituyen una de sus prioridades de supervivencia y significan un constante riesgo para su soberanía y autodeterminación frente a las avanzadas y arremetidas del Primer Mundo; de ahí la búsqueda de un modelo de diplomacia democrática capaz de crear terrenos propicios para el entendimiento pacífico.
La experiencia diplomática y pedagógica de Ismael Moreno Pino, embajador eminente y en su momento decano del servicio exterior mexicano, tiene en esta obra la oportunidad de mostrarse en su dimensión real. Auténtico tratado de diplomacia que habrá de fecundar a las nuevas generaciones de miembros del servicio exterior, 'La diplomacia' ordena este especial saber desde su etimología hasta la explicación pormenorizada de la normatividad legal propia de la disciplina, pasando por un extenso panorama histórico que fundamenta y legitima las relaciones con el extranjero.
La diplomacia mexicana ha gozado hasta tiempos recientes de una excelente reputación en los escenarios internacionales. Que este crédito se mantenga está implícito en la obra.

126) O elefante e o dragao: um livro sobre a India e a China

The Boom Beyond Our Borders
Can China and India maintain their sizzling growth rates?
BY MATTHEW REES
The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, July 18, 2007
BOOKSHELF
The Elephant and the Dragon
Robyn Meredith

Anyone interested in the marvel of modern-day China and India routinely encounters a host of "gee whiz" factoids that illustrate each country's high-octane growth. Shanghai, for example, had 15 skyscrapers in 1978; by last year it had about 3,800, more than Los Angeles and Chicago combined. India, meanwhile, is home to three of the world's 10 biggest information-technology firms, and IBM employs 53,000 people there--an increase since 1992 of . . .53,000.

Yet it's just as easy to uncover bad news. Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China. And even if the country survives an environmental catastrophe, say the pessimists, it will be hit by an economic one: 70% of its publicly traded companies are worthless, according to a high-ranking Chinese government official (speaking earlier this year). It has also been estimated that the banking system is carrying close to $1 trillion in bad loans. China's premier, Wen Jiabo, has even admitted that the economy is "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unstable."

Cassandras don't lack for alarming material about India, either: Close to 40% of the population is illiterate and 60% remains dependent on agriculture--much of it at the subsistence level--while an antiquated infrastructure stifles the country's ability to grow. "Whatever you can rightly say about India," the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has written, "the opposite is also true." Ditto for China.

In "The Elephant and the Dragon," Robyn Meredith, a Hong Kong-based correspondent for Forbes magazine, neatly navigates between the boom and the gloom. Her account of India and China today is accessible to the general reader but also brimming with enough data and first-person reporting to get the attention of even those jaded by the recent breathless coverage of Bangalore and Beijing.

As Ms. Meredith shows, comprehensive, market-oriented reforms--China's began in 1978, India's in 1991--have sparked a new dynamism and remarkable economic growth. In the 1990s alone, more than 200 million people escaped poverty in the two countries, lifting the per-capita standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations. "We got more done for the poor by pursuing the competition agenda for a few years," says one of India's former finance ministers, "than we got done by pursuing a poverty agenda for decades."

In "The Elephant and the Dragon," we see the average citizen enjoying unprecedented opportunities but also the effort of businesses to capitalize on them. "I look at apartments at night," says a general manager from Philips, a Dutch company that manufactures light bulbs (among much else). He measures China's economic progress by its growing illumination. He observes, for instance, that China's rural homes have an average of three light bulbs now but had none before the economy opened up. Helping a nation of 1.3 billion people to "see the light" is, for Philips, big business.

Elsewhere, Ms. Meredith shows us the different steps taken by a Hong Kong company to produce linen sweaters--buying flax from France, having it shipped to Tianjin, on China's eastern seaboard, then trucked to a city 255 miles away where it is cleaned, straightened and ironed, and then trucked again, more than 1,100 miles, for dyeing and knitting. The finished product then travels two hours, by truck, to Hong Kong, where it is transferred to a plane, for distribution in the U.S. Thus the metamorphosis in modern China's business rhetoric: Assembly lines are out; supply chains are in.

Ms. Meredith reminds us of just how far both countries have traveled in the past half-century or so. In China, 30 million to 40 million people starved to death from 1959 to 1962 because of Mao's collectivizing farm policies, and nearly all of the country's universities were shuttered for more than a decade during the Cultural Revolution. In India, the post-independence experience with socialism and central planning subjected the economy to what became known, derisively, as "the Hindu rate of growth." Cumbersome, inefficient, patronage-laden enterprises sustained poverty rather than alleviating it. Over time, the irresistible logic of capitalism coincided with a juggernaut of globalizing technology to overturn the old paradigm and usher in reform.

Ms. Meredith acknowledges that, as a result of such changes, the U.S. has lost jobs to China- and India-based outsourcing and "offshoring," but she notes that American consumers have gained all the more, with a range of products and services at lower prices. She also claims that the much-lamented U.S. trade deficit with China is overstated: Much of it is derived from the practice of Western companies assembling goods in China and then exporting them to the U.S. The money we pay for such products, although counted in the trade deficit, is actually headed to non-Chinese firms and stockholders.

Can China and India maintain their sizzling growth rates? Ms. Meredith does not dwell on the question as much as one might hope. But it's clear that both countries need to liberalize their rules governing banks and financial markets. Burdensome regulations interfere with lending--India's banks, for example, must channel about one-third of their loans to agriculture and household businesses. The effect is to send capital into unprofitable enterprises.

Both countries also need a more basic deregulation of everyday commerce. According to the World Bank's Doing Business report--which measures the effect of government regulations--entrepreneurs in India and China suffer from high taxes and intrusive bureaucrats. They also have trouble enforcing contracts and getting licenses to operate. For all the progress, in short, the elephant and the dragon still have a long way to go.

Mr. Rees is a senior director at The White House Writers Group, a Washington-based consulting firm. You can buy "The Elephant and the Dragon" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

125) A economia não-convencional de Steven Landsburg

Possible Side Effects
By DAVID LEONHARDT
The New York Times, July 8, 2007

MORE SEX IS SAFER SEX: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.
By Steven E. Landsburg.
275 pp. Free Press. $26.

Before there was "Freakonomics," before there was "The Tipping Point" or "Blink," Steven E. Landsburg wrote a regular column for Slate magazine called Everyday Economics. The column started in the summer of 1996 with an article headlined "More Sex Is Safer Sex," in which Landsburg argued that H.I.V. would spread less quickly if relatively chaste people each took on a few more sexual partners. At a given bar on a given night, he wrote, these disease-free singles would then make the pool of sexually active adults safer. The article was based largely on an academic paper by another economist, Michael Kremer, theorizing that the spread of AIDS could be slowed in England if everybody with fewer than about 2.25 partners got around a bit more.

This research was one of the early examples of the economics profession's imperialist movement. For the last decade or so, economists have been increasingly poking their fingers into other disciplines, including epidemiology, psychology, sociology, oenology and even football strategy. These economists usually justify their expansionism on two grounds: They say they're better with numbers than most other researchers and have a richer understanding of how people respond to incentives.
Arrogant as this sounds, there is some truth to it. Besides, the public seems hungry for the kind of real-world social science economists are practicing. "Freakonomics," by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, has spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, while Malcolm Gladwell, the author of "The Tipping Point" and "Blink," has become perhaps the nation's most popular nonfiction writer by artfully explaining the science behind everyday human interactions.
Landsburg, a professor at the University of Rochester, has now come out with his own entry in the field, "More Sex Is Safer Sex," based largely on his Slate columns. The opening chapter is an expanded version of the first column. From there, he jumps into a series of counterintuitive arguments based on his own observations or on research by other economists.
"Here's an odd fact," Landsburg writes. "Throughout the industrialized world, unemployment and home ownership go hand in hand." Unemployment is low in Switzerland, where renting is the norm, and high in Spain, where most people own their homes. The pattern also holds within different regions of individual countries, and it persists over time. As home ownership rises, so does joblessness. Landsburg considers a couple of harmless explanations -- coincidence, bad statistics -- but also some causal ones. For instance, people who own their homes may be less willing than renters to move after they lose a job, making it more difficult to find new work. Another possibility is that countries or states with a lot of regulations, like rent control and strict labor laws, may be simultaneously encouraging home buying and discouraging hiring. "It's not easy to sort out causes from effects," he says. But "it's not always impossible either."
In a similar vein, he cites the familiar statistic that tall people earn more than short people, but adds a twist. According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, tall men who were short in high school earn no more than short men. Landsburg theorizes that tall adolescents develop more self-esteem, which makes them more likely to join teams, clubs and other high school activities. All else being equal, the Penn researchers found, people who participated in extracurricular activities made more money than those who did not.
At his best, Landsburg helps us see the world in new ways and confront some of our assumptions. In one chapter, he argues that you should give all your charitable donations to the single cause you deem most worthy. If you think the most important thing you can do is help a starving child by giving $100 to CARE, you should give all your donations to CARE. Your first $100 is not going to cure hunger, and the next $100 you could give -- money that might now be going to another cause -- will help just as many children. When I started reading the chapter, I was rolling my eyes. When I finished it, I couldn't decide how I felt.
Still, I suspect this book will command a much smaller audience than some of the economics-tinged best sellers, mostly because it is short on the nuance that comes from real human stories. Landsburg's characters tend toward the hypothetical -- Benny the Burglar and Manny the Mugger; Jane the A student and Mary the B student; Albert and Alvin, two imperfect altruists -- and his arguments, as he puts it at one point, can sound like "idle Sunday dorm-room chitchat."
This problem plagues many of the new economic imperialists: like the overly chaste singles who are supposedly contributing to the H.I.V. epidemic, they don't get out enough. They are asking good questions about epidemiology and psychology, but they are not spending much time with epidemiologists and psychologists, let alone with the people who are the subjects of their academic research. As a result, they arrive at conclusions that can be clever but lack wisdom, as the economist David Colander points out in his recent book, "The Making of an Economist, Redux."
Citing the doctrine that good incentives lead to good outcomes, Landsburg, for example, argues that commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration should be paid with the stock of pharmaceutical companies (to prevent them from being "overly cautious" about approving new drugs). Furthermore, he says the president of the United States should be paid with a "diversified land portfolio," since the price of land is the best measure of how many people "want to live here and plan their futures here." He also suggests that the postwar looting of museums isn't really a problem and, of course, that more sex equals safer sex. Perhaps the better conclusion is that fewer ideas would make for better ideas.

David Leonhardt writes a weekly economics column for The New York Times.

124) Dois livros sobre Tocqueville e a Democracia na America

Even God Quotes Tocqueville
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
The Times Magazine, July 8, 2007

Americans generally quote Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" as a way of patting themselves on the back. Tocqueville's first volume, published at the end of
1834 after a nine-month tour of the New World, was the first great study of American institutions and political culture. It declared the American Revolution the triumph of "a mature and considered taste for liberty, not a vague and indefinite instinct for independence."

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: A Life.
By Hugh Brogan.
Illustrated. 724 pp. Yale University Press. $35.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy's Guide.
By Joseph Epstein.
208 pp. Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $21.95.

But there is another way to read Tocqueville. If Volume 1 laid out what Americans had made of democracy, Volume 2, published six years later, laid out what democracy had made of Americans. This was a bleaker subject. Self-rule had its paradoxes, Tocqueville showed. Equality could come at the price of intellectual independence. And if one man was just as worthy of a political voice as the next, why should any individual involve himself in politics at all? Hugh Brogan, a historian at the University of Essex in England, shares the preoccupations of this second Tocqueville, without sharing his conclusions. In an erudite and combative new biography, he presents many of Tocqueville's misgivings about democracy as specious and reactionary.
Tocqueville was an unlikely student of democracy, and an even less likely voyager to the American wilderness. A sickly blueblood, he grew up listening to his mother sing royalist songs in his father's chateau. He was a cousin by marriage of the writer René de Chateaubriand and the great-grandson of the eloquent Chrétien de Malesherbes, who defended Louis XVI at trial and died under the guillotine for it. Others in Tocqueville's family met the same fate, and virtually all of them were either jailed or exiled.
As Brogan keenly notes, there was a paradox in Tocqueville's position. He felt born to rule; until the last decade of his life his political ambitions were stronger than his literary ones. Yet despite his sympathies for royalism, he benefited from its passing. The postrevolutionary order empowered a new class of well-read "notables," to which Tocqueville belonged. Intellectually, the July Revolution of 1830 liberated Tocqueville -- a young judge who was neither an enthusiast for the newly installed house of Orléans nor (yet) a republican. With his friend Gustave de Beaumont, he obtained a leave to study American prisons -- a pretext, Tocqueville admitted, for investigating larger questions.
The success of "Democracy" paved the way for a political career. Tocqueville was elected as a deputy for his family's district in Normandy. He would be a formidable orator during the revolution of 1848, a drafter of the constitution of France's second republic and, for five months, foreign minister. He left politics after the coup of Louis Napoleon in 1851.
Brogan's expertise pays constant rewards to the reader. His knowledge of 19th-century French politics is comprehensive and his attention to context punctilious. Nor does he beat around the bush: Tocqueville's cousin and confidant Louis de Kergorlay is "a young idiot" and the legitimist insurrectionist the Duchesse de Berry "one of the silliest princesses in all European history." And although this book is rigorously chronological, it detours into mini-essays on pivotal topics -- Tocqueville's relationship with his invalid mother; Foucault's reading of Tocqueville's ideas of incarceration; and so forth. It is never dreary. Tocqueville's life is always a pulsing intellectual and political drama.
But it is a drama in which Brogan is mostly at odds with his subject. Tocqueville's goal as a deputy during the 1848 revolution was to protect both liberty and order. In Brogan's view, he did a poor job of distinguishing between the two. Brogan blames conservative property owners for the excesses of the socialist revolutionaries. "The notables," he writes, "Tocqueville among them, projected their own violent hatred and panic onto the urban workers, and in doing so created the very monster which they feared." Brogan faults Tocqueville for "impudence," "blindly prejudiced" views, an "obsessive cult of property" and a "ruthless hostility" to lower-class Parisians. That Tocqueville now considered himself a republican meant little. "Whatever he called himself," Brogan writes, "the nobles knew that he was one of them."
Brogan credits Tocqueville with a deepening respect for the French people in the decade before his death in 1859. Those are the years when he wrote his posthumously published memoir of the revolution of 1848 (Brogan's favorite among his works) and his unfinished history, "The Old Regime and the Revolution." Although Brogan sees the history as a "medley of fiction and wishful thinking," he is deeply impressed with Tocqueville's pioneering use of local archives, which allowed him to lay out the continuity between prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary France.
Brogan sees Tocqueville as a purveyor, rather than a generator, of insights. With an insistence that verges on hostility, he repeats that Tocqueville, despite a "craving" to seem original, was not. Some of Brogan's misgivings have been shared even by readers well-disposed toward Tocqueville: He didn't always define his terms with precision. He missed the significance of the Industrial Revolution. He had a weak grasp of how political parties worked, and of the role of the American presidency.
But Brogan adds further complaints, dismissing Tocqueville's theory of the tyranny of the majority as his "most serious mistake." Tocqueville's aphorism on American conformism in the first volume of "Democracy" ("I know no country where in general there prevails less independence of mind and true freedom of debate") is, Brogan writes, "absurd, as a comparison of the polemics of the age of Jackson with the ice age of Metternich or with the press laws of Louis Philippe quickly makes clear." Brogan has even less use for the second volume of "Democracy," where this paradox-seeking tone predominates. He views it as a book marked by the longing for "good old aristocratic times," written for purposes of self-justification and "shaped as much by personal neurosis as by logic and observation."
So how do we explain the praise that Brogan heaps on "Democracy," which he calls a "masterpiece and a classic," after spending almost 30 pages pillorying its second volume? The answer lies in Brogan's view of Tocqueville's work as a whole. "A man like Tocqueville," Brogan says, "enlarges our sense of human possibility and of the meaning of human lives in everything he writes. He does this through his intellectual and artistic gifts, and through his passionate sincerity. So the accuracy of his conclusions is of limited importance."
It is hard to agree. For Tocqueville, democracy sets society moving in an egalitarian, not a libertarian, direction. To be preoccupied with equality under such circumstances is to be preoccupied with a foregone conclusion. It is the "passion for liberty," by contrast, that is most in danger of dying out, and most in need of defenders. This is Tocqueville's core belief. Brogan disagrees with it diametrically. He believes equality is more vulnerable than liberty, and perhaps as precious. Out of this disagreement comes an impressive, fascinating but somewhat odd book, in which Brogan praises Tocqueville as a thinker and writer while hammering away at much of what he thought and wrote.
Joseph Epstein's brief "Alexis de Tocqueville" leans on the work of earlier historians, including Brogan. It takes seriously Tocqueville's worry about trade-offs between liberty and equality. In an unpretentious, even wiseacre style ("God himself may have quoted Tocqueville"), Epstein piles up Tocquevillean aperçus ("Nations are like men in that they prefer a fuss made on their behalf to real services rendered"), ranks Tocqueville's predictions for accuracy (he "nailed" the way democracies have trouble ending wars, but overestimated the long-term constitutional importance of state governments) and gives a serviceable rundown of how he has been received by English-language readers from John Stuart Mill to Sean Wilentz. It is a brisk and admirably accessible account of how Tocqueville gave a name to certain misgivings about democracy that are with us still.

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is at work on a book about immigration, Islam and Europe.

123) Skidelsky's Keynes, in one volume

Uma crítica devastadora, contra apenas um aspecto da minumental biografia de John Maynard Keynes por Lord Robert Skidelsky.

Review
John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman
Robert Skidelsky
Paperback: 1056 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
(August 30, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143036157

Editorial Reviews
The Times Literary Supplement
[Skidelsky] places Keynes where he belongs, at the heart of twentieth- century British history.
The definitive study of the most important economist of his time.
(Foreign Affairs)

This book is Skidelsky's one volume abridged version of his previous three volume biography (1983, 1992, 2000) on J M Keynes. Skidelsky successfully weaves all of the different aspects and strands (personal, familial, historical, social, political, economic) of Keynes's life into a beautifully constructed historical tapestry that will keep the reader's attention from the first page to the last. All of the different talents Keynes possessed and displayed during his lifetime come alive on the pages of this book. Skidelsky is the master of his material as long as he concentrates on the vast nontechnical aspects of the life of his subject. Skidelsky has clearly mastered the historical and chronological events and interrelationships that occurred during Keynes's life. Unfortunately, Skidelsky does not have the necessary formal training in mathematics, logic, statistics or probability in order to properly understand or assess any of those parts of Keynes's scholarship that involves the use of formal logical and mathematical methods or analysis. These technical deficiencies in Skidelsky's academic training are the main defect, not only in this book but in the entire corpus of Skidelsky's writings on Keynes going back over 30 years.
I will concentrate on Skidelsky's error filled statements concerning Keynes's A Treatise on Probability (1921; TP) and the logical theory of probability. On p. 95, Skidelsky conflates the principle of indifference (poi) with the principle of insufficient reason. They are not the same. Keynes's poi requires a balance or symmetry of the relevant, available evidence or factors involved before equiprobabilities are assigned. The poi can't be applied if there is no relevant evidence. Advocates of the principle of insufficient reason, on the other hand, argue that equiprobabilities can be applied in states where no relevant evidence exists. Keynes always rejected this kind of reasoning. Skidelsky bases his assessment of Keynes's logical theory of probability on the error filled work of A. Carabelli and R. O'Donnell. Carabelli and O'Donnell base their assessments of the TP on four sources:1) Keynes's introductory guide to the measurement of probability in chapter III of the TP; 2) F. Ramsey's 1922 book review of the TP in The Cambridge Magazine; 3) F. Ramsey's 1926 book review of the TP in his article, "Truth and Probability", published in 1931 in a book of articles; and 4) Keynes's 4 page eulogy and very brief review of the book in 1931. In chapter III, Keynes had already made it clear to the alert reader, who had a mind of his/her own (and would not ape the preposterous , nonsensical claims made by F. Ramsey that by nonnumerical and nonmeasurable Keynes meant that numbers could not be used in general to estimate probabilities, i. e. , that Keynesian probabilities were like a surveyor assigning nonnumerical heights to a mountain hidden in the mist) that the vast majority of Keynesian probabilities used in common discourse were/are interval estimates. John Maynard Keynes is the originator and founder of the interval estimate approach to probability. Keynes spells it out in a number of places in the TP:"... we judge that the probability of the actual argument lies between these two (numbers; reviewers note). Since our standards, therefore, are referred to numerical measures in many cases where actual measurement is impossible, and since the probability lies BETWEEN (Keynes's emphasis) two numerical measures... " (1921, p. 32). After warning the reader not to reach any conclusions based on chapter III alone until after Part II of the TP was reached (p. 37) , Keynes gives his definition of nonnumerical in chapter 15 of Part II on p. 160 of the TP. On pp. 161-163 and pp. 186-194 (ch. 17) , Keynes presents his approximation approach. It has nothing to do with ordinal rankings (see Skidelsky's queer claims on pp. 284-285, for instance). An upper bound and a lower bound are specified for some 13 worked out probability problems. One of these problems (a revision of Boole's problem 10) is then made the foundation for Part III of the TP. Part III is then made the logical foundation for Part V. Carabelli's and O'Donnell's "reading" of Keynes's TP is very poor, at best. Skidelsky's conclusions, based on their very poor reading, are very poor. Skidelsky also appears to have been misled by Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson into believing that Keynes was a strictly literary economist, who was a poor mathematician by 1927. Supposedly, Keynes had never taken the twenty minutes that was necessary to understand the theory of value (microeconomics). Based on these bizarre beliefs, Skidelsky comes to the queer conclusion that Keynes deliberately refused to present any formal mathematical model of his general theory in the General Theory (1936; GT). Any mathematically trained reader can find Keynes's completely worked out model, with the results presented in the form of elasticities so that a reader of the GT can compare Keynes's results with those of A C Pigou, in chapters 19, 20, and 21 of the GT. Keynes then compares and contrasts his model with Pigou's model, who had also presented his results in the form of elasticities, in the appendix to chapter 19 of the GT. A technically trained economist should purchase a copy of the GT instead of this book.

Anyone who has taken a course in macroeconomics knows who Keynes is. Economics is full of camps, conflicting doctrines, feuds, rivalries, etc. Keynes was unique in that, unlike other economists who are indoctrinated or are in love with a theory, he was never scared of giving up an idea that did not work. If one was to read his "Tract on Monetary Reform" one might be fooled into thinking that it was Milton Friedman that was writing and not the J. M Keynes who revolutionized economic thought with his General Theory. This pragmatism is what sets Keynes apart from every other economist. But why Keynes was so different from others is something students never learn.
This biography does an admirable job of tracing Keynes' upbringing, his education, career, and contributions in the light of circumstances that Keynes lived through and shaped his ideas. It is also full of nuggets about Keynes' idiosyncracies which humanizes the biography and shows the real person behind the aura. The book is long, but 63 years of action-packed life requires such detail. The Chinese say, May we live in interesting times. Keynes certainly lived in interesting times with the result that this book is just as interesting.