Day: December 4, 2000

Is Democracy An Impediment to Economic Growth?

In a recent column (The solution to Africa’s problems is not socialism but freedom) on Africa’s perennial economic problems, Walter Williams made an argument that rears its ugly head all to off ten in free market conservative thought — namely the claim that democracy isn’t necessarily a good thing. If Williams were advocating on behalf of philosophical anarchism that might be understandable, but instead he is defending what might be called mildly authoritarianism.

Williams’ impetus for making this claim is a state by Cote d’Ivoire minister of planning and economic development Tijdjame Thiame that, “Africa has paid too little attention to political modernization. Too many African governments pay only lip service to democracy, which is often limited to simply holding regular elections.”

Williams has a simple retort to that — democracy isn’t necessarily desirable for economic growth.

“Whatever are the benefits of American-style democracy,” Williams writes, “democracy is not a necessary condition of economic growth and, in fact, democracy might impede economic growth.” Williams goes on to cite some non-democratic countries that have experienced impressive economic growth — Chile, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Meanwhile, as Williams points out, India has experienced much economic chaos even though it is a democracy.

Reading his article, I kept waiting for Williams to qualify this argument, but alas he leaves it at that — democracy can interfere with economic growth. To be blunt, this is nonsense.

First, Thiame isn’t too far off the mark in his analysis of African democracy. Frequently in Africa there are countries which hold elections which are essentially meaningless. Zimbabwe is a good example of just such a country. While it is nominally a democracy and holds regular elections, the bottom line is that the country is run by a single party and uses all the accoutrements of dictatorships, including ignoring the supposedly independent judiciary when it tries to reign in excesses. Many African democracies are democratic in the same way that Mexico claimed to be a democracy even though a single political party effectively pulled all the strings.

Second, Williams’ analysis is too short term. His claims are reminiscent of Leftists who proclaimed Communism a success because the Soviet Union and other Communist nations achieved growth rates higher than in Western nations for brief periods of time in the 1940s. Unfortunately the problem is that the longer authoritarian policies remain in effect the more likely it will be that such powers will end up screwing things up. It is true that in India voters can go to the polls in favor of socialist policies, but it is conversely true that should Chile have decided to put in place socialist policies, its citizens would have had no recourse. Faith in authoritarianism is the faith that whoever has his finger on the trigger of political power at the moment will be a free trader.

Besides, there are things more important than economic growth. What good was economic success of Chile to those who were kidnapped and disappeared in the days and months after Pinochet’s coup d’etat? How were the pro-democracy protesters in South Korea to spend their money after being shot dead in the streets by the military government?

Fundamentally, Williams’ argument raises similar questions as those raised by the anti-immigrant views that frequently appear at a site such as LewRockwell.Com. Immigration is bad on this view because a) immigrants will consume welfare services, b) they will tend to vote disproportionately for Democratic candidates, and c) they will support the expansion of the welfare state. But is free market liberalism really such a weak, anemic idea that it has to be imposed by dictators or preserved by keeping out immigrants who might be hostile to it (and I don’t agree that is the case, but refuting it is beyond the scope of this essay)?

If so, Williams and others might want to re-evaluate if it’s really an idea worth defending at all.

Source:

The solution to Africa’s problems is not socialism but freedom. Walter Williams, Capitalism Magazine, November 30, 2000.

Trevor Marshall on DVD Audio

Byte.Com’s Trevor Marshall has written the first part of a two-part piece on DVD audio. Basically the format allows up to six channels of audio, with 24 bits of accuracy sampled at rates as high as 192 KHZ. And, of course completely incompatible with existing CD players.

I’m pretty skeptical that he advantages of DVD audio will be enough to outweigh the incompatibility to drive adoption of the standard. Marshall seems to agree with my skepticism, writing that,

DVD disks offer more than six times as much data storage as audio CDs. In my humble opinion, the industry has been trying to figure out how to gobble up that extra data bandwidth before somebody realizes that his whole collection of audio CDs could be converted to MP3 format and stored on a single DVD-Recordable disk! What the industry has come up with is a marketing-driven push toward a DVD-audio standard that will obsolete all our audio CD players, and most of our DVD players and DVD-ROM drives.

Marshall notes that some audiophiles are still critical of the “inferior” sound of the compact disc. The problem with such arguments is that music fidelity always involves tradeoffs. I have known several people, for example, who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars and stereo equipment trying to improve the sound. For those people, DVD audio will probably be a boon.

Most people, however, seem to have something more like my stereo setup — my speaker location is completely contrary to proper acoustics and I still haven’t figured out how to get my TV/VCR’s audio out routed through my receiver.

Personally I think more people will be interested in being able to carry around hundreds of albums in a very compact form rather than having six channel audio (that is, until somebody figures out how to “rip” the DVD audio tracks into a six channel MP3-like format. Then all bets are off).

Get it Fast Rather than Right

USA Today reported that the Supreme Court unanimously agreed to vacate the Florida Supreme Court decision and ask it to clarify its reasoning. Not true. The ruling was issued per curiam (in the name of the court), and does not break out how individual justices voted.

As for the ruling itself, this was a pretty clever way to deal with the situation — essentially a warning shot to the Florida Supreme Court to stop creating law rather than interpreting it, but at the same time trying to sidestep the issue of whether the Supreme Court should substitute it’s own judgment for that of a state court.

Student Radio Station Shut Down at Rice University

The Houston Chronicle has coverage of Rice University’s recent seizure of the student funded radio station, KTRU-FM. What sort of bizarre, uncivilized actions did KTRU-FM take to get shut down?

Incredibly, the students who run the station wanted to broadcast two athletic events each week, while the athletic departmented wanted them to broadcast up to six athletic events each week. As a protest, some student DJs at the station played music over a broadcast of a women’s basketball game, and the university seized the station and changed the locks (and although the student’s pay for the station, the university smartly owns the license).

Typically failing to show proper subservience to the athletic department at a major university can result in tarring and feathering or worse, so these students got off pretty lightly. Seriously, I don’t understand how any rational adult would conclude that this was an acceptable way to resolve the conflict between the student radio station and the athletic department. The DJs’ protests may have been immature, and some disciplinary action by the student staff at KTRU in order, but the administration’s decision to seize the radio station was way over the line.

What’s next? Do they seized the student newspaper if it decides to cut back on its sports coverage?

Dumb.

A Better Tuberculosis Vaccine?

The World Health Organization recently released a report on the daunting numbers of tuberculosis infections. It wasn’t too long ago that scientists thought that tuberculosis was on the verge of being wiped out, but complacence about the disease as well the HIV/AIDS epidemic led to a resurgence of the disease. According to WHO regional director in Southeast Asia, Uton Muchtar Rafei, “an estimated 40 percent of the population is infected with TB in our region and more than 1.5 million people died of TB last year.”

Worldwide, tuberculosis is the second leading cause of death from a single infectious agent.

When TB was last a major epidemic, at the turn of the century, a tuberculosis vaccine was created and refined from 1906-1919. The only problem was that it was only about 50 percent effective. Now researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles believe they may have created a much more effective vaccine.

Dr. Marcus Horwitz at UCLA led a study of the new vaccine that involved taking samples of the old vaccine and genetically modifying it to add a protein that is secreted from the organism that causes tuberculosis. “Most proteins of a bacteria are inside,” Horwitz told Reuters, “but there are some proteins which are actually excreted.”

Researchers then infected guinea pigs with tuberculosis, injecting half of them with the new vaccine and leaving the others unvaccinated as a control group. “The difference between the unvaccinated guinea pigs and those that were vaccinated is just day and night,” Horwitz said. “The unvaccinated animals, their lungs just became completely covered with tubercules and destroyed and the animals with the vaccine have one or two lesions which are contained.”

Testing should begin within a year to see if the vaccine is effective in human beings. If so, Horwitz said it should be able to be produced for just pennies a dose. The only drawback is that the vaccine won’t help people with AIDS since the vaccine could potentially disease itself in people with compromised immune systems.

Sources:

WHO finds TB, malaria return in killer diseases. Reuters, November 27, 2000.

Vaccine may work against tuberculosis. Reuters, November 30, 2000.

Genetically Engineered Chickens Lay Protein-filled Eggs

One of the long standing goals of genetic engineering was to modify animals to express designer proteins in milk or eggs. Producing proteins in the laboratory is extremely expensive, and modifying animals to produce the proteins could dramatically speed up medical research.

Over the weekend, the team that cloned Dolly the sheep announced they had achieved this milestone. Several news agencies reported that the Roslin Institute, which became famous for its sheep cloning success, has successfully created a genetically modified chicken that lays eggs containing relatively large amounts of proteins that will greatly aid the drug discovery process.

Each chicken will lay about 250 eggs each year, and each egg will contain about 100 mg of the protein for which the chicken is coded. The protein produced is controlled by genetic material inserted into the single cell nucleus that is used to create the chicken, so the protein expressed in the egg can be changed to whatever researchers want to study.

Nicknamed “pharming” by some, ten years ago this sort of technique was purely the stuff of science fiction. Today, thanks to medical researchers, it is a science fact that could revolutionize medical research and treatments for human diseases.

Source:

Dolly scientists create cancer-fighting chicken eggs. Line One News, December 3, 2000.

Dolly team creates designer chicks. The BBC, December 3, 2000.