Joseph Stiglitz is working himself up from simply winning a Nobel prize to being one of the leading critical commentators on all things economic and many things political. He doesn’t seem exactly shy, he writes well, he’s prepared to stir things up, and his credentials give him a platform that few others have. My prediction – watch him become more prominent and more controversial in the months to come. Go Joe!

Here are two examples.

Via slashdot, an editorial in the British Medical Journal about intellectual property rights, which is an issue that will only get bigger in the next few year. He not only lambasts the existing system, but actually has an alternative to propose (a medical prize to fund innovations). Here are some extracts:

… In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed. For example, a year’s treatment with a generic cocktail of AIDS drugs might cost $130 (£65;  Continue reading

Environmental Economics points us to Boss Hog by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone. It is an article about Smithfield foods, the biggest pork processor in the world, and — well, let’s just say it makes me glad I’m a vegetarian. Here are the first few paragraphs, but really you should print off the whole article (8 pages). Just don’t read it close to dinner.

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most
profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last
year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is
fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of
processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to
butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San
Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San
Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth,
Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville,
Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and
Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than
transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest
cities … Continue reading

Did anyone think that meat from cloned animals would make you sick? I didn’t think so.

The headlines following from the US FDA announcement (FDA Issues Draft Documents on the Safety of Animal Clones) are misleading. The headlines are all of the form "Cloned animals deemed safe to eat" (Nature) or "US regulator declares food from cloned animals is safe to eat" (International Herald Tribune), but that’s not the story here.

For the record, here is the sentence from the report.

meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals.

But safety of the meat is not the issue. The real story is towards the end of the announcement:

In the draft guidance, FDA does not recommend any special measures relating
  to human food use of offspring of clones of any species.   

That is, cloned food needs no labels.

The issue is that cloned animals (like genetically-modified crops) introduce many potential changes to the agricultural industry – changes in the balance of power within the industry, the … Continue reading

Can you imagine reading "Apple Says Jobs Did It"? Me neither.

Steve Jobs, one of the tech world’s most iconic leaders, was cleared by Apple Computer Inc.’s board of directors of any wrongdoing in a stock options accounting scandal that has snared almost 200 North American companies and some of their top executives…

Link: Apple’s Jobs cleared in backdating probe.

Continue reading

I hand over a few dollars each month to Six Apart, who own Typepad, for this blog. There are free ones, of course (blogger for one) but when I started off I decided that Trackbacks were worth paying for. If you make a post about an entry on someone’s blog, then you can add a trackback, which is a link from their blog post to yours. It looked to me like a valuable part of the conversational aspect of blogs.

But it seems that trackbacks are doomed. I don’t think blogger ever supported them. And now many blogs have disabled them, because all you get is trackback spam which is a pain in the neck to deal with. I’ve noticed that they seem to be going the way of the dodo, and now I see that Trackbacks Are Dead. It’s a shame – one more victim of the plague of spam.

But this little corner of the web is quiet enough I still have trackbacks enabled.

Continue reading

Jeremy Rifkin is not a modest man. He entitles his books things like "Entropy: A New World View" and "Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century". I stopped reading his books after "The End of Work", which was very sloppy and so obviously wrong.

But here he is again, in today’s Toronto Star, arguing that the global movement into cities is responsible for the population boom.

The first sentence is typical Rifkin. Then he gets worse. Rifkin is completely, 180 degrees, wrong.

Link: TheStar.com – opinion – The risks of too much city in a crowded world.

The coming year marks a great milestone in the human saga, a development similar in magnitude to the agricultural era and the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, a majority of human beings will be living in vast urban areas, many in megacities and suburban extensions with populations of 10 million or more, according to the United Nations.

We have become "Homo Urbanus." …

It’s no accident that as we celebrate the urbanization of the world, we are quickly approaching another … Continue reading

You may have noticed that my normally far-from-hectic posting rate has gone from snail-like to glacial over the last few weeks. Well, be assured that it’s going to stay that way for the remainder of 2006. I intend to have even less to say than usual.

Whether we like it or not, this is a season of consumption and so, for no good reason, here is a list of some of the best things I consumed in 2006.

Best fiction I read. Three Junes by Julia Glass. Not my kind of book at all, which makes it all the more remarkable that I found it unputdownable.

Best non-fiction I read. Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, who is my new intellectual hero. It was published back in 1991, but my interest in this kind of stuff is relatively recent. I was put onto it via Susan Blackmore’s excellent Consciousness, A Very Short Introduction. A book I’ll be reading again in the next couple of weeks, and one that changed how I look at life & death.

Best movie I watched. Hidden (Cache), directed by Michael Haneke. Watching movies or TV is usually thought to be a … Continue reading