Poland: the world’s fourth ranking blog country? 
In the midst of an interesting post on simplistic economic arguments, Edward Hugh on A Fistful of Euros drops the factoid that new EU member Poland may well have 100,000 weblogs. He points to OnetBlog and Blog.pl. I’m not sure how he reckons that makes Poland the fourth ranking blog country, but I appreciated his analysis: “This may not be entirely devoid of significance when thinking about PolandÂ’s future.”
Maybe Dave should spend his summer in Poland?
Josh Ramo, the former foreign editor of Time, has an original piece in today’s Financial Times (subscribers only).
His thesis is that the Washington Consensus — free capital flows, transparency, privatisation, liberalisation — is being replaced with the Beijing Consensus — “a development approach driven not by a desire to make bankers happy, but by the more fundamental urge for equitable, high-quality growth — because no other formula can keep China from exploding”.
Ramo sees countries like India, Brazil and Vietnam now studying the lessons of China’s rise.
I’m slightly more sceptical of his idea that part of the development of the Beijing Consensus is extended to what prime minister Wen Jiabao calls “coordinated development”, in Ramo’s terms “growth that is both environmentally friendly and corruption-free”.
Ramo now spends most his time in China so I defer to his expertise. But from a distance I don’t see a lot of evidence that there are true moves towards green growth, and I’m dubious how far rooting out corruption will go in the near term.
Ramo’s thesis is being published soon by the Foreign Policy Centre, who generally have a good policy about making material available on the Web.
Kevin Drum has been widely cited for his comparison of president Bush to those CEOs “who have goals they would dearly love to attain but who lack either the skill or the fortitude to make them happen”.
Mark Schmitt takes the comparison and runs with it to brilliant effect in A Bad CEO.
“If you think of Bush as the Bad CEO, you don’t hesitate to call it what it is: a failure of leadership. Leaders persuade others, and leaders also absorb information and other points of view. They change direction in order to find the smoothest path to their goals. They react quickly to changes, to get ahead of them.”