Brad DeLong provides a valuable history lesson:
“Now it appears that Lt. Gen. Sanchez, commander of Coalition Joint Task Force 7, has less control over his own logistics train than did John Churchill: Churchill’s supply depots and the wagon trains were commanded by officers and manned by soldiers. And Sanchez certainly has less control over the how many — 20,000? — armed contractors in Iraq than John Churchill under Anne or even Robert Dudley under Elizabeth had over any part of the British forces in the NetherlandsÂ… Things that were known in the reign of Anne the Protestant should not be forgotten in the reign of George the Feckless.”
Felix Salmon takes me to task for approving of Martin Wolf’s ten commandments.
I read Wolf’s points very differently to Felix. For example, to my mind when Wolf calls for trade negotiations to be confined to the major trading nations in some instances, it isn’t to stitch up a deal to impose on smaller or weaker nations. It is to agree standards that might be appropriate for Europe and the US, but are irrelevant and potentially harmful for sub-Saharan Africa.
Wolf precisely wants to avoid “the sort of thing which gave globalisation such a bad name to begin with”. I have to wait until the book comes out, but having discussed some of these issues with Martin I’m reasonably confident of my interpretation.