Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Today's theme: Corruption.

Police in D.C. lie to convict a man of selling heroin. This probably happens every day in every city.

Closer to home, a local politician gets kickbacks from red light cameras:

Redflex Traffic Systems of Phoenix, Ariz., planned to direct 3.2 percent of the fines it collects to Bryan Wagner, a former New Orleans City Council member and lobbyist who helped Redflex get the contract in Jefferson Parish.

Maybe I should pay my next camera fine with a zero dollar bill. It's working in India:

A corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Good news:

Although world population has increased by about 80% over this time (World Bank 2009), the number of people below the $1 a day poverty line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006. In the past 36 years, there has never been a moment with more than 1 billion people in poverty, and barring a catastrophe, there will never be such a moment in the future history of the world.
The two charts of world income distribution are dramatic.

Friday, January 22, 2010

More corruption in Louisiana. Yawn:

Among the charges is the allegation that Porteous took cash, gifts and other services from lawyers and a bail bondsman with business before his court.
I searched for this article in the Advocate, but didn't find it. Not newsworthy, I guess.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Tyler Cowen has been blogging about the country of my birth a lot. There's this:

It is striking how much cooperation and heroism we've seen in Haiti. It's evidence that the Haitian social fabric is a lot stronger than many people thought. It also suggests that economic growth models with a one-dimensional "trust" variable are not furthering our understanding very much. I do expect the violence to get worse, as hunger and thirst continue, but so far the Haitian people have a lot to be proud of.
And some ideas of how to help:

6. Invite Haitians to occupy the empty homes in the run-down parts of New Orleans.
And Obama's challenge in Haiti:

Just as it's not easy to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan, it won't be easy to pull out of Haiti.

Maybe you thought health care was a hard problem. Maybe you thought that cap and trade would make health care look easy. This may be the hardest problem yet and it wasn't on anybody's planning ledger. Obama won't have many allies in this fight either. A lot of Democratic interest groups might, silently, wish he would forget about the whole thing.
There's lots more, so follow my first link and just keep scrolling.

Thursday, January 7, 2010