A US Democrat views the British election 

New Donkey:

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Election 05 

I’ll be out of London for at least half of the campaign and for election day itself.

Fortunately, this year there will be plenty of resources to keep track of the UK general election. Both the BBC and The Guardian have started election weblogs, and both offer RSS feeds — although it takes a couple of clicks to get to the BBC’s feed, a design choice which I don’t understand. The Guardian’s weblog features a folksonomic graphic, which is clever but not particularly useful.

Unsurprisingly, both blogs pick up the story of the Alastair Campbell weblog. The Guardian reckons it must be a hoax; the BBC feels it’s probably a hoax, but isn’t sure. I have to say that if it is a hoax — and the odds are that it is — whoever is writing it has effected a complete mind merge with Campbell himself. The tone is right, the details are uncanny and it’s both funny and absorbing.

No fooling 

To celebrate its first birthday, Google’s Gmail service just gave users an extra gigabyte of storage. And their plan is to keep scaling up the amount of storage as capacity allows.

What am I going to do with that exabyte in two years and the yottabyte in five?

Bad news for The Guardian 

The news that Simon Jenkins is joining The Guardian is tied to even worse news: he is replacing David Aaronovitch who is filling Jenkins’s slot at The Times. I don’t always agree with Aaronovitch, but I always find him worth reading and thought provoking. A huge step down for The Guardian.

No young readers 

The Carnegie Corporation’s report, Abandoning the News, is an eye-opener on how young people in the US have deserted conventional news media (hat tip to Dan Gillmor). Newspapers fare particularly badly.

“From 1972 to 1998, the percentage of people age 30-to-39 who read a paper every day dropped from 73 to 30 percent. And in just the years between 1997 and 2000, the percentage of 18-to-24-year-olds who say they read yesterday’s newspaper dropped by 14 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America.”

I suspect the wholesale neglect of newspapers by the young isn’t as severe in the UK, but the trend is the same. The entire Carnegie report is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the developing media ecology.

Explaining Kyrgyzstan 

Elinor Burkett explains what’s happening in Bishkek: “This is not democracy. This is just a crowd.”

I know where Kyrgyzstan is, and I know how to spell it. I’ve even met now-former president Askar Akayev a number of times. But I didn’t understand the news from Bishkek before Burkett’s piece.

FT: no comment 

There were two must-reads in yesterday’s Financial Times and one curious piece about weblogs.

The must-reads were an analysis of the US property bubble and Wolfgang Munchau’s lament about Europe’s growth strategy (or lack of it). Both, needless to say, are subscribers only.

The key passage on US property:

And Munchau on Europe:

And the curious piece on weblogs (not behind the subscription firewall)? It’s about how advertisers are discovering the power of blogs. It was played prominently, on the back page of the first section next to the Lex column — which must be one of the most-read things in the newspaper. It was reasonably sensible. But not a single weblogger was quoted. That’s way below the standards I expect of the FT.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow 

It’s been so long since I’ve been truly snowed under with work that it’s a novel feeling to be swamped. But it’s a very good feeling.

Sadly, something has to suffer in the circumstances, and it has been Davos Newbies. I need to find a way to keep my hand in here, but for the moment the demands of starting a new company are taking absolute precedence.

Aux armes citoyens 

It looks like the French riposte to Google Print may be gaining momentum.

Setser on Wolfowitz 

Brad Setser has a typically thoughtful post on the Wolfowitz appointment. It’s too thorough and good to summarise, so just go over there and read it.

Efficient? 

Barry Ritholtz on the, ahem, efficient market.

Whither goes the renminbi… 

Brad Setser on the possible devaluation of the renminbi. I still marvel that I can get thorough analysis like this straight from real experts rather than mediated by the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal.

Could Arnold be up in the High Court?  

Maybe I missed something, but I find it odd that I’m in California but I only read about a Schwarzenegger libel case on the BBC.

It could go to trial in London this autumn, apparently. My advice to the governor: you don’t want to face a libel action in English courts. Libel law is a mess in England, with a presumption on behalf of the plaintiff and few of the protections US libel law offers to public figures.

Libel is such a soft touch for plaintiffs in England (I say England rather than Britain because Scotland has its own court system) that plenty of people “jurisdiction shop” to lodge an action there. There have been far more tenuous connections to England than in this case.

The one consolation for Schwarzenegger is that damages, should he lose, will be assessed not on the global damage to Anna Richardson’s reputation but only on the extent to which she suffered loss in the UK. Since the alleged libel was published by the Los Angeles Times, which is available in the UK through its website, I can’t imagine the damages locally were that great.

What if the no vote wins in France? 

I realise there’s a long way to go until May 29, but I’m surprised that French polls already seem to suggest that the “no” camp will win the referendum on the constitution. Only a few weeks ago, the “yes” campaign was well ahead; now it’s fighting to come through with occasionally ridiculous rhetoric.

Can interior minister Dominique de Villepin really have meant it when he said a no vote would produce “the big market that the Anglo-Saxons dream about, a Europe under US influence, a Europe under Chinese influence”?

What can that possibly mean?

As happens so often in European referenda, the vote will only nominally be about the constitution. Instead, it’s a chance for people to register how much they hate the present govenment. The problem the “yes” camp faces is that if they actually turn to the constitution, even putative supporters will be so bored that they won’t turn up to vote. So only the rabid no voters will bother.

I don’t have that much of a problem with what the constitution says. Major institutional reform is needed to have an effective Europe of 25 countries; even with 15 countries before last year’s expansion, the mechanisms were fairly creaky. What’s wrong with the constitution — drafted by a conference led by former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing — is that it is such a dreary, technocratic document.

The motivation to have a constitution was correct. But the lack of leadership, the inevitable compromises, the failure of imagination produced a treaty, not a constitution.

Of course if the no vote wins, Tony Blair — who will win his third election on 5 May, three weeks before the French vote — will be off a very big hook. It will render moot his promise to have a UK referendum on the constitution next year.

When I mentioned this to a Berkeley political scientist today, he said, “So Blair must be funding the no campaign in France.” Not such a bad idea, come to think of it.

Finding the women 

Katha Pollitt‘s accurate, well-taken questions about why there aren’t more women columnists in prominent positions has been linked to just about everywhere.

By coincidence, Lucy Kellaway writes about the same thing in today’s Financial Times (subscribers only):

As Kellaway points out, the situation is very different in Britain. She names Polly Toynbee, Melanie Phillips, Julie Burchill, Ann Leslie, Deborah orr and Jackie Ashley. It’s odd that the UK, which is behind the US in many ways in terms of diversity, has advanced women into lots of prominent roles in the media.

What pressure? 

Maybe I shouldn’t put such faith in The Guardian’s political coverage (see below), when they get a business story as wrong as this:

Where to start? “Step towards web domination”? “Raise concerns for Google”? Tell me why Google — or Yahoo or Microsoft — will give a moment’s thought to a company that has 3% and dropping of the search market, and which has never produced decent search results.

I thought The New York Times’s purchase of About.com was the height of folly, but this is worse.

The unsurprising election 

I don’t want to be accused of complacency, but here’s an unremarkable headline: Tory revival runs into the sand.

More on Wolfowitz 

Felix Salmon has an excellent piece on the Wolfowitz nomination, deconstructing The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed piece.

Is anyone listening? 

Iain Duncan Smith, the ludicrous former Tory leader, has a weighty op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. It’s an odd sensation to see a politician who no one would give the time of day to in Britain given important editorial space in the US.

That said, his point about the dangers of elective dictatorship (as can happen when one party has a large majority in the UK parliament) is perfectly valid. I did think, however, that it was dissembling for him to make no reference whatsoever to his own party’s consistent abuse of its majority during its ascendency in the Thatcher years.

27 years of change, part I 

I’ve alluded to my new venture before on Davos Newbies. All will be revealed in due course, but the equally big news for me personally is that after 27 years in Europe, I’ll be moving to the United States this summer.

Lots of people I know say to me, “What’s it like to be going back?” The odd thing is that after all this time, I don’t really think of it as going back. It’s moving, certainly. But there’s no “back” about it.

Many of the same people also offer an exclamation of one kind or another about my moving to Bush’s America. I have several responses to this. First, we all live in Bush’s world, so separating yourself from the US geographically doesn’t make much difference. Second, I’m moving to Berkeley, which is about as far as you can get from a Bush worldview and remain on the planet.

We have a beautiful house organised (when we make the move, I’ll spell that organized) in the Elmwood neighbourhood (neighborhood) of Berkeley. We’ve found a great school for the boys. And of course I have an exciting new business to create.

Reading The New York Review of Books on the plane the other day, I thought of a series that I’m going to initiate here on Davos Newbies: 27 years (or thereabouts) of change. Paul Krugman in the March 10 issue of NYRB has a revealing statistic:

There are more dramatic shifts over 27 years, but since that was the statistic that set me thinking about changes in my native country over the years, it’s an appropriate place to start.

A different take on Wolfowitz 

Adam Posen from the Institute for International Economics has an optimistic view on Wolfowitz at the World Bank (subscribers only in the Financial Times). I don’t think his tongue was in his cheek:

Wolfowitz without the ideology 

So the rumours about Paul Wolfowitz getting president Bush’s nomination for the World Bank presidency proved correct.

There will be a great hue and cry, thanks to Wolfowitz’s prominence among the neo-cons. But Bush was always going to nominate an ideological soulmate. What about the other qualifications?

To my mind, the ideal World Bank president would have excellent development knowledge, experience in the developing world and have proven skill at running a large organisation. Overriding these traits, she or he would have a deep concern for helping the world’s poor people.

Wolfowitz is no fool, so I suspect his years in academia and the State Department make him a bit familiar with development issues. Not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, and probably not up to my standard of excellent knowledge.

On the developing world, he did live in Indonesia during his ambassadorship. That’s not a lot, and I suspect he spent more time in comfortable surroundings than out among the poor. But he did live in a developing economy.

He can’t, however, claim any background in running a large organisation. He’s an academic, a policy wonk, an ideologue. Not a manager by any description.

As to where his heart lies, I keep an open mind. In his favour, a European economist friend of mine, who came to know Wolfowitz when he was in Indonesia, reckons he’s not as mad, bad or dangerous as many people think.

I should also note that it’s hard to think of any World Bank president who would have done well on my criteria. Wolfensohn has certainly had his heart in the right place. But he came to the job knowing very little about development, with hardly any experience in the world’s poor countries and with a background running a boutique investment bank. His immediate predecessors came from commercial banking on Wall Street. I suppose Robert McNamara is the closest analogue to Wolfowitz in background, but he had been president of Ford when Kennedy brought him to the Pentagon.

The lesson is that heads of international organisations get chosen for reasons having very little to do with their qualifications. Let’s hope that Wolfowitz rises to the task, however, because the world certainly needs an effective World Bank.