Wednesday, June 16, 2010 :::
“In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century,” Romer observes drily.
Update: Particularly near the end, it seems to annoyingly (and confusingly) conflate "freedom" with "democracy". Or, in any case, that's the only sense I can make out of some of the late paragraphs. (The whole point here is to export the credible defense of freedom and related rights protections against the local government, including against the masses, who thereby commit themselves to a regime that will benefit them, but which would otherwise be threatened by the temptation of short-term gains from theft. Macroeconomists call it "time-consistency"; game theorists call it "subgame-perfection"; political theorists, at least the ones I've read, mostly just use the term "credibility". This is what poor countries lack, and would be importing.)
::: posted by dWj at 2:57 PM
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