Today’s links to interesting news and analysis, collected from around the Internet. If you find this useful, pass it to a friend or colleague.
- About Iraq: “No promised land at the end of all this“, The Economist, 4 March 2010 — “Iraq, having beaten most of its insurgents, holds an election on March 7th. But its institutions may be too weak, and its politicians too greedy, to save democracy.”
- About changes in the Dutch political balance: “Down the Polder Drains“, blog of the London Review of Books, 5 March 2010 — About the rise of the Freedom Party (PVV), led by the Geert Wilders.
- “Adam Smith was not a Laissez-Faire Ideologue“, Mark Thoma (U of Oregon), Economists’ View, 7 March 2010
- Can natural gas provide an energy bridge to carry us though peak oil? “Europe the new frontier in shale gas rush“, Financial Times, 7 March 2010
- But it’s not free; US natural gas prices are crazy low: “The heat continues to rise on the cost of producing shale gas“, Financial Times, 6 March 2010
- “The endgame for Europe: wage cutting and the battle for exports“, News and Economics, 7 March 2010
- “Beyond torture: the future of interrogation“, New Scientist, 8 March 2010 — “Coercive techniques like waterboarding can inflict as much psychological harm as crude physical torture. But do they work?”
Today’s special recommendations
We can better understand the financial crisis by looking at the global picture (not just the US) and comparing this downturn to the previous big one.
(a) “An Irish Mirror“, Paul Krugman, op-ed in the New York Times, 7 March 2010
(b) “What do the new data tell us?“, Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Vox (research by economists), 8 March 2010 — A tale of two depressions, updated. “{W}hile there is cause for optimism, there is no room for complacency.”
