Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Good Stuff in The Economist
Lots of it this week:
A good article on welfare reform, ten years after (sub req'd). Of course, there's a lot of the gloating about how wonderful the free market is that's typical of the Economist, and it's hard for me to believe that putting posters up in welfare offices has had a big role in encouraging people to work (this is seriously something they mention). But they do a good job of reviewing what's worked about welfare reform, and have some interesting things to say about what still needs to be done.
A review of the Suez Crisis, on its fifty-year anniversary. In case you don't remember (I didn't), the basic story of the Suez crisis is that two major military powers (the UK and France) launched an ill-advised invasion of an Arab state (Egypt) because they didn't really understand some major new realities of the post-colonial world (you could say that they had a pre-WWII mentality). The plan backfired disastrously, and allowed a genuinely dangerous global enemy (the USSR) to gain a foothold in a part of the world where it hadn't had much influence.
Parallels to the present much?
The one big difference, of course, is the role played by the U.S. Eisenhower realized from the beginning that the Anglo-French invasion was crazy, and tried to stop it; when England and France invaded anyway, he quickly stopped them by threatening to withhold loans from England. Would that we had that kind of leadership today.
A good article on welfare reform, ten years after (sub req'd). Of course, there's a lot of the gloating about how wonderful the free market is that's typical of the Economist, and it's hard for me to believe that putting posters up in welfare offices has had a big role in encouraging people to work (this is seriously something they mention). But they do a good job of reviewing what's worked about welfare reform, and have some interesting things to say about what still needs to be done.
A review of the Suez Crisis, on its fifty-year anniversary. In case you don't remember (I didn't), the basic story of the Suez crisis is that two major military powers (the UK and France) launched an ill-advised invasion of an Arab state (Egypt) because they didn't really understand some major new realities of the post-colonial world (you could say that they had a pre-WWII mentality). The plan backfired disastrously, and allowed a genuinely dangerous global enemy (the USSR) to gain a foothold in a part of the world where it hadn't had much influence.
Parallels to the present much?
The one big difference, of course, is the role played by the U.S. Eisenhower realized from the beginning that the Anglo-French invasion was crazy, and tried to stop it; when England and France invaded anyway, he quickly stopped them by threatening to withhold loans from England. Would that we had that kind of leadership today.
