The marketplace for (politically acceptable) ideas

This is either about free speech, free markets or the joy of being one’s own editor. Not sure, exactly. The weird thing is, I have no problem with nanny-state laws like fines for buying your drunk friends more booze (a New South Welsh law).

To the point. From the Guardian:

… in the eyes of Denmark’s ministry of justice, Mikkelson, the 56-year-old grandfather cheerfully grilling half a dozen different kinds of sausages by the roadside earlier this week is at the very least a terrorist sympathiser. And if the Danish justice minister, Lene Espersen, has her way, soon his only contact with the culinary world will be prison rations.

Alongside Schultz and five other Danes, Mikkelson could be in jail by Christmas for his part in one of Europe’s most curious court cases: the so-called T-shirt terror trial. His crime was sticking a poster up in his van for a brand of T-shirts bearing the logos of two groups classed by the EU as terrorist organisations: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

…

All are members of a Danish activist group called Fighters+Lovers and are charged with “sponsoring terrorism”, a crime under post-9/11 Danish anti-terror laws that carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.

Is this story’s setting – Denmark – being the same one as for those cartoons about Muhammed a coincidence? Who knows. Can’t they just spy on their citizens illegally, then send people off illegally to be tortured illegally (or legally, provided one is rendered extraordinarily to the appropriate country)? Honestly. Europeans. Such dramatics.

F + L seem harmless enough:

Fighters+Lovers is the brand that takes music and fashion beyond new horizons. We have a passion for change. In a world obsessed with envy and hate, Fighters+Lovers dares to speak up for brotherhood and the right to fight for what is right.

T-shirts don’t change the world. Neither does music. The world is already spinning and we simply make the tools and street gear for the creative people who make it happen. People with an attitude.

Kind of.

Fighters+Lovers is a private enterprise dedicated to the cause of freedom and hard-rocking street gear. Communication is key to any change. Fighters+Lovers aim to provide support for new equipment for radio stations and graphics workshops run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). This is our tribute to these freedom fighters.

Graphics workshops? Back at the Guardian.

They believe the EU “terror list” to be undemocratic because it is drawn up behind closed doors according to unknown criteria, and say that both PFLP and Farc are not terrorists but legitimate resistance movements comparable with Denmark’s own Nazi resistance during the second world war. They say that neither group is classed as a terrorist organisation by the UK, which does not defer to the EU on such matters.

What’s more, they say, they weren’t financing any sort of violence, as the £3.50 from each T-shirt sale that would have gone to the two organisations was earmarked for “humanitarian projects” such as equipment for radio stations.

I’m okay with most of that (I’ve posted previously about Palestine). I don’t – honestly – like their shirts that much. I downloaded their music, but I wouldn’t call it “Jungle”. I respect their beliefs and their commitment to them, but they are probably pushing provocative farther than I’d go (and I’m listed on ratemyprofessor.com as hating America!).

Ultimately, though, I’m still mostly an economist. By their own admission, their line of clothing appears not to be getting into hands that are likely to be throwing all that many bombs:

“… as the person who put together the hundreds of T-shirt orders we received from around the world before we got arrested, I can tell you that the majority of our customers were fat, old men,” she said. She knows the buyers were not hip young things because almost everyone asked for XXL size, and they had “old-fashioned names”.

I believe in the marketplace for ideas. If “the government” believes so strongly that this is somehow wrong, let them try to convince us. They’re welcome to abuse their own position as the government to criticise F + L like the mature adults we expect them to be and, having balanced the information in the marketplace, it will be up to us as consumers to make the judgment. Does such overt criticism spawn provocation and rebelliousness? Yes, of course. They may well make F + L most profitably notorious – that’s the way it goes.

This is the same all over (speaking geographically and with respect to “the issues”). I believe in gay marriage and I believe in the right to choose. These are fundamental to my notions of habeas corpus: I take it a mite further than merely having the right to have one’s body. I reserve the right to have my own mind; I reserve the right to decide for myself that which is good and bad, and I go along with the invention of Government for the specific purpose of doing the things that I and society have agreed Government should do, and for the purpose of keeping me properly informed, so that the decisions that I make are rational ones.

Other people won’t make rational choices, and that’s fine: that’s the way it goes. People will object to people buying these tee-shirts; people will object to people sending money to the Israeli Defence Force. People will object to their taxes being used to pay for the UN; others will object to their taxes being used to provide billions in aid for Israeli materiel. People object to abortion; I object to a a wombless room of men so old and corrupt they should not even be offered another term deciding what women get to do with their bodies. Do women ban men from starting wars?

So it goes. There’s a marketplace for ideas, and it should be allowed to thrive. Can a tee-shirt be doing the damage, instead of the guns, the income inequality, the land-and-water-grabs, the UN, the IMF? Spare me. NBC played the tape of crazy Virigina shooting guy – are they in gaol? F + L are in gaol, but are the companies that manufacture the weapons that do the damage in any danger of the same treatment? Do we impose sanctions on China or Russia when their guns wind up in the hands of the wrong people, while our guns are going into the hands of the right people? We do none of these things. Who are we to judge? Like any intervention by Government, this should be recognised – and evaluted – as such. This one is not warranted; it was not requested; it does not benefit us (or, rather, the Danes).

Does this all mean Threadless.com gets shut down for this tee-shirt?

Does it mean I go to gaol for wearing my copy of it?

And at the end of the day, if one cannot wear their politics on a tee-shirt, what is the point of having politics at all?

“Investors are kind of ignoring the economic news …”

Speaking of truer words never having been spoken..

For investors, the possibility for lower rates seemed more compelling than persistent concerns about a slowdown economic growth. The Fed has already reduced rates at its last two meetings, and continues to inject billions of dollars into the financial system through repurchase agreements to help calm the shaky markets. The central bank will hold its final rate-setting meeting of the year on Dec. 11.

“Everything we’re seeing in the market is revolving about credit and encouragement that the Fed is going to bail us out again,” said Alexander Paris, economist and market analyst for Chicago-based Barrington Research. “Investors are kind of ignoring the economic news like housing and durable orders that were all weaker than expected.”

… signs that the Fed will reduce rates to keep cash flowing freely helped overshadow reports showing that in October, sales of existing homes fell for the eighth consecutive month and orders for big-ticket manufactured goods fell for the third straight month.

Plunging oil and gold prices also lifted investors’ hopes for a rate cut _ if inflation is in control, policy makers have less reason to keep rates high.

That last bit doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense (at least to me). Oil really hasn’t fallen nearly enough for inflationary pressure to have diminished – and with the US still running well below 5-year averages for refined oil (i.e. the gasoline that – so far – we’ve kept from appreciating by burning through reserves), coupled with the depreciating US dollar – depreciation that one ought to expect to continue, following a third rate cut – I wouldn’t expect the US economy to benefit much, at all, from any easing. Besides, oil is oil – does it matter if prices “ease” for a few days or weeks?

Gold – I guess. I have always been given to believe that silver would be more relevant to watch for the purposes of inflation. Gold is like T-bills: we watch them to see the extent to which people blow for quality reserves for holding their wealth.

This repeated behaviour, though, of ecstasy over mere things like rate cuts, opening up, evermore, the windows used by assholes to spin bad paper away from them (or through them, long enough to make some money) is just idiotic. People won’t keep spending (hell, they haven’t been since August). I’ve seen more rationality in heroin addicts.

In the famous words of Mos Def, “I heard ‘em say it was all about the Benjamins: I don’t believe it now; didn’t believe it then.” One wonders just how far the pool of ‘core’ investors will shrink.

Does Sarkozy have an answer for Chinese pollution?

Possibly. For a right-wing tit with a hole in his head, he just might think pretty good, sometimes.

First, the problem (by way of an update on the problem): economic mechanisms for the control of pollution. Cap-and-trade is an excellent notion, Coasean solutions are excellent ideals. And they work pretty well, within an economy. The Clean Air Act in the US did a very nice job at bringing down emissions. Pigovian taxes (essentially allowing the government to function as our agent in a Coasean solution) also work quite well.

However. What happens when the ecology affected by pollution has no control over the economy causing it? Case in point: China.

Studies have found that the worst effects of acid rain and other pollution occur within several hundred miles of a power plant, where the extra acidity of rainfall can poison crops, trees and lakes alike.

But China is generating such enormous quantities of pollution that the effects are felt farther downwind than usual. Sulfur and ash that make breathing a hazard are being carried by the wind to South Korea, Japan and beyond.

Not enough of the Chinese emissions reach the United States to have an appreciable effect on acid rain yet. But, they are already having an effect in the mountains in West Coast states. These particles are dense enough that, at maximum levels during the spring, they account at higher altitudes for a fifth or more of the maximum levels of particles allowed by the latest federal air quality standards. Over the course of a year, Chinese pollution averages 10 to 15 percent of allowable levels of particles. The amounts are smaller for lower-lying cities, like Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

China is also the world’s largest emitter of mercury, which has been linked to fetal and child development problems, said Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington.

Unless Chinese regulators become much more aggressive over the next few years, considerably more emissions could reach the United States. Chinese pollution is already starting to make it harder and more expensive for West Coast cities to meet stringent air quality standards, said Professor Cliff of the University of California, slowing four decades of progress toward cleaner air.

The US government cannot tax Chinese firms, and the US government cannot mandate emissions reductions by, or regulate the trade of emissions permits amongst, Chinese firms. Or can they? Enter Sarkozy:

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, on Tuesday warned China that the European Union could penalise cheap imports from high carbon-emitting countries in order to defend EU companies obliged to meet strict environmental standards.

…

Mr Sarkozy, alluding to the EU’s informal goal of halving its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, said such targets were essential in order to avert a planetary catastrophe.

“We cannot have one response from Europe and one from Asia, one from the north and one from the south,” he said. “China can and must play its full part.”

But he said the EU, which regards itself as the world’s pace-setter in fighting climate change, would not indefinitely let its companies bear the brunt of this campaign if countries that mass-produced cheaper goods delayed adopting similar standards.

“I will defend the principle of a carbon compensation mechanism at the EU’s borders with regard to countries that don’t put in place rules for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Mr Sarkozy said.

His idea already has supporters in the European Commission, particularly among officials charged with defending the interests of industry.

So far it doesn’t look as though he has a majority of Europe on-board; amongst other things, there is always the danger of retaliation by the Chinese government.

Speaking more generally, one ought also be wary of such a policy: we’ve seen, more than well-enough over-used, domestic economic policies dressed up as foreign aid – why not as foreign environmental policy? If China won’t adjust its exchange rate, jack up the “green” tariff on Chinese imports. The EU is the home of the CAP, for Cliff’s sake: it wouldn’t suprised me (nor, for that matter, would it with respect to Japan, the US, Australia… it’d be a long and protectionist list).

Give him credit, though – he’s fairly clearly shit at being a domestic leader, but Sarkozy is putting out ideas on the international stage. At the very least, we need to think of something:

In its latest report, the International Energy Agency, the west’s watchdog, said China was likely to overtake the US as the world’s largest energy consumer soon after 2010. Chinese primary energy demand is forecast to more than double from 1,742m tonnes of oil equivalent to 3,819m tonnes by 2030.

[Image from the New York Times:]

Iraqi returnees, statistics and those damn lies again

An update on returning Iraqi refugees, by way (for a rare change) of the New York Times.

Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq and Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.

On Nov. 7, Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the American-Iraqi effort to pacify Baghdad, said that 46,030 people returned to Iraq from abroad in October because of the “improving security situation.”

Last week, Iraq’s minister of displacement and migration, Abdul-Samad Rahman Sultan, announced that 1,600 Iraqis were returning every day, which works out to a similar, or perhaps slightly larger, monthly total.

But in interviews, officials from the ministry acknowledged that the count covered all Iraqis crossing the border, not just returnees. “We didn’t ask them if they were displaced and neither did the Interior Ministry,” said Sattar Nowruz, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

As a result, the tally included Iraqi employees of The New York Times who had visited relatives in Syria but were not among the roughly two million Iraqis who have fled the country.

The figures apparently also included three people suspected of being insurgents arrested Saturday near Baquba in Diyala Province. The police described them as local residents who had fled temporarily to Syria, then returned.

Some Iraqi lawmakers said that overly broad figures were being used intentionally.

…

A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.

The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.

Underscoring a widely held sense of hesitation, many of those who come back to Iraq do not return to their homes. Clambering off the bus on Sunday, a woman who gave her name as Um Dima, mother of Dima, said that friends were still warning her not to go back to her house in Dora, a violent neighborhood in south Baghdad. So for now, she said, she will move in with her parents in southern Iraq.

Just like the Herd said: never trust a cop, a politician or a tv set.

The Gap wants me to be admi(red).

Exams having been been written. I was in a/the Gap store, yesterday. Upon the purchase of two shirts (thermal something or other – although I doubt they’re actually thermal), total price USD32, the teller hands me (or, perhaps, my wife and I) two of these:

Pins, related to their Gap (red) campaign.

Now: these pins are nominally on sale: USD1 each, money going to charity. Why did the teller give me two, for free? My assumption is that they would like me to wear them (no chance. I buy everything from ANZAC day pins to red noses to poppies, but I generally refuse to wear them) to push, virally, interest in (a) the Gap(red) campaign, and/or (b) the Gap, itself (since, if I’m wearing this pin on top of some other fashionable clothes, I may well give the impression that said clothes, or my entire ‘outfit’, are from the Gap. Also not likely to be the case).

I don’t flatter myself that I appeared, somehow, to be above the average in trendiness: I am a child of nineties and, most, days, you’d just point to me in the street and say, “I’ll bet he’s listening to Pearl Jam right now” (and you could well be right). No, I’m assuming this store – possibly every store – has been doing this as a practice.

My internal question, then, is this: is the Gap paying in that $1 to the charity? If they’re not, are they, instead, investing in me generating more than that $1, by getting more people interested in the pin, and prompting more people to buy it? What if I just prompt people to go to the Gap, where they buy a shirt and also get a pin for free?

I don’t know how much money this campaign is making. I see a fair few shirts, properly and cleverly logo-d, but I don’t recall seeing the jumpers, sneakers, etc. on anyone I’ve seen in the street.

My moral dilemma is slightly different. I was, at the point of purchase, mostly just interested in getting the hell out of the store. I didn’t stop to work all of this out with the poor bastard working for his hourly wage on a Saturday morning. I’m never going to wear these pins, so perhaps I should return them? Go to a random store and just give them 2 dollars for their campaign? Give 2 dollars to a random homeless person (something I do often enough, anyway)? By now I believe they’re gone, anyway - in fact I think they went out in the same bag with the old pieces from the filter on the turtle tank.

If I had more time and energy, I’d figure out whom to attempt to contact, to get my first question answered. I’m curious as to whether this is a part of some marketing campaign, or whether this store – and/or others – just wanted to get rid of a jar of pins that aren’t selling.

I’ve been pondering since this morning, what’s up with this heat?

Near-gratuitous One Piece reference (watch every episode here!). One Piece is awesome. Make a note. Awesome.

So. Today’s weather:

Walking around with the missus (we went to Grant’s tomb – boring, but, in their defence, closed for the holiday. Still), she commented on the heat, its unseasonality, how freezing cold it had been in her youth, etc. Honestly, she should have known better – a statistician and a contrarian for a husband? Crazy idea.

My counter-arguments: (1) that the temperature on the day of Thanksgiving is a variable, like any other. The week of Thanksgiving, maybe. But the day? Temperature and time both are continuous variables. A single day is just way too precise to pin something like that on; (2) my wife was probably remembering particularly cold days from her youth, which was affecting her memory of the true average temperatures for this period.

So, being the manner of econometrician that I am. After dinner, I jumped on the web and started looking. I found my way to Almanac.com, and started pulling out the temperature for all of the November 22nds since the birth of my wife (1981; a fine year for pretty girls).

I had to jump from Central Park to JFK in 1994 (no Central Park data past then, but I checked a handful of the dates since, and there’s no apparent measurement problem). Descriptive statistics:

So, what do I do? I start looking for 60 degrees (today’s) in the 95% Confidence Interval for the mean temperature on Thanksgiving Day.

$ latex begin{eqnarray*}
95\%CI_{\mu } &=&\overline{x}\pm t_{.025,26}\times \sigma _{\overline{x}} \\
&=&\overline{x}\pm t_{.025,26}\times \frac{\sigma }{\sqrt{n}} \\
&=&45.4\pm 2.056\times 1.76 \\
&=&41.78\text{ to }49
\end{eqnarray*} $

WordPress’ latex plug-in is ass. It was supposed to look like this:

So today’s 60 degrees just (just) misses out. Like fun it does.

The conclusion: Confidence Interval conclusions can vary, but we can say that, for example, 95% of Thanksgivings will not have a mean temperature of 60 degrees (97.5% of them will be less than 60 degrees – by a long way). We are 95% certain that the population mean (the true mean for Thanksgiving Day) is not 60 degrees.

Is today’s temperature therefore extreme? We can visit the 99% confidence interval:

$ latex begin{eqnarray*}
99\%CI_{\mu } &=&\overline{x}\pm t_{.005,26}\times \sigma _{\overline{x}} \\
&=&\overline{x}\pm t_{.005,26}\times \frac{\sigma }{\sqrt{n}} \\
&=&45.4\pm 2.779\times 1.76 \\
&=&40.51\text{ to }50.29
\end{eqnarray*} $

Or, again,

Again, um, just? Barely. There is less than a 1% chance that, on any given Thanksgiving Day, the mean temperature will be this far from the average (and less than half of one percent that it will be this high). Statistically, it was an extreme event.

There is far less than a 1% chance: the p-value for an average temperature of 60 degrees is, in fact, basically 0 (the t-statistic being 8.3)

I managed a partial victory. The two lowest days – and the only two below 30 degrees – occurred in my wife’s youth, and the lowest occurred the year she was freezing cold out in the parade itself. So I scored a minor point.

A caveat is the mean. I used the entire series. This is to say, a caveat to the numbers – that result isn’t going anywhere.

Suppose I used only the Thanksgivings up until this one? Today’s was the maximum for the series: the next highest was 59 degrees. Cutting out today’s 60 degrees lowers the average to 44.8, and the standard deviation to 8.84. It also lowers the sample size, increasing the “critical value” t-statistic slightly (due to the lower degrees of freedom) as well as the standard error. The new 99% Confidence interval narrows, slightly, but also shifts downwards: 40 degrees to 49.6. Either way, 60 degrees (new t-statistic 8.77) is still nowhere near likely to be another average temperature in a hurry.

“The subprime crisis is the baby of Alan Greenspan: excess global liquidity,”

That’s not the story (I brought you here under false pretenses). What a great quote, though.

A huge spike in global inflation generated by China and India could lead to 1970s-style hyper-inflation in Australia, one of Australia’s largest asset managers, Queensland Investment Corporation, has warned.

The analysis of QIC’s chief executive, Doug McTaggart, charts a path to spiralling inflation, huge economic consequences and plummeting stockmarkets – with precious little central banks will be able to do about it.

…

Mr McTaggart’s argument is built on growing evidence that China and India are at the point of skills shortages that are driving up wage costs, with potentially dire consequences for inflation.

Deutsche Bank South Asia regional economist Sanjeev Sanyal, in Singapore, says: “It’s already the case that both these countries are seeing huge increases in salaries.

“The question is: can they they get productivity gains large enough in other areas to offset these increases?”

In a private briefing to heads of global fund manager associations in Sydney this month, Mr McTaggart outlined his bleak view that as a result of the skills shortages China and India are poised to become exporters of inflation.

“[Then] we get inflation in Australia and the US, and probably at quite high levels, and it is outside the control of the central banks,” Mr McTaggart says.

“They will be forced to raise interest rates savagely to extract the liquidity from the market in order to try to bring it under control, and I think they will fail.

“You can imagine the 1970s’ double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment and recessionary circumstances for a long period.”

The quote came from the key to this conclusion: that central banks don’t much control the money supply any longer – hardly unexpected, given the transition to debt-backed money supplies in so many of our economies.

In Mr McTaggart’s analysis, central banks have lost the ability to respond to the consequences of hyper-inflation because their control over the money supply has been decoupled.

He said the US Federal Reserve, in particular, had responded to crises by pumping up global liquidity.

But excess liquidity had found expression in asset bubbles including the 2000 dotcom boom and the most recent subprime problems in the US.

I’ve thought, for a long time, that the US, certainly, faced this threat – not the global economy, though.

Writing exams

I’ve managed to pull questions from NBA/WNBA data and this paper on hedge funds. I’m making an effort, this time. I’m quite pleased with the exam so far (this is Stats: Economics is still to be written).

For now, then, Penny Arcade:

Also, this counts as a post about Hannah Montana. That’s 4, now. One more and I shall buy her CD just to freak out my wife. Ooh! Or my students. Yeah…

Violence in Iraq

The Financial Times (and just about everybody but the Huffington Post) is carrying the story of declining violence in Iraq:

Violence in Iraq has fallen at a rate that has surprised military commanders and even one of the architects of the “surge” that boosted US troop numbers in the country this year, according to figures gathered by the US.

The figures show the numbers of suicide attacks, roadside bombings, mortar and other attacks on US forces and on the Iraqi population have more than halved since 30,000 extra troops in June.

…

The US military says the number of civilian deaths has also fallen 60 per cent since the surge took effect, with a drop of 75 per cent in Baghdad. According to icasualties.org, the average monthly US death toll dropped from 96 for the first half of 2007 to 66 in the past four months. The average monthly death toll for Iraqi civilians and security forces has dropped from 2,157 to 1,223 in the same period.

One must be hesitant to take such statistics at face value, of course. Besides the incredible violence of the period with which this is being compared (although, “improvement” is fine, so long as nobody starts talking about “success”, as US deaths march on towards 4,000).

This is still, loosely, the same crowd that was happy to define murder as sectarian if the bullet went in the back of the head, but plain old murder otherwise. There are lies, damn lies, statistics, and then there is a military industrial complex trying to sell you a broken war and keep making money while we run out of heating oil and poor kids still can’t read.

Some such scepticism (thank you again, Inel) is noted by the FT:

… some experts are less convinced. Anthony Cordesman, a defence expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the statistics did not capture the true picture of violence in Iraq.

“The [numbers] that the coalition counts tend to omit most of the violence in the south, which is Shiite-on-Shiite, and lower-level tensions between Arabs and Kurds. It also doesn’t seem to count Sunni-on-Sunni unless it is al-Qaeda versus anti-al-Qaeda.”

One wonders if such people also serve in police forces where black-on-black gang violence (or gang-on-gang gang violence, to keep with the times) isn’t considered a policing problem.

We cannot say “violence is down”, when we are measuring only violence from certain people towards certain other people, or in certain other areas. We also aren’t measuring all of the things towards which people are violent, to wit: infrastructure. Around this time, last year, the BBC ran a similar discussion, wherein they mentioned two other signals: insurgent attacks against infrastructure:

which, when added, showing “violence” still on the up, and displacement of Iraqis fleeing said violence. Now, post-surge, if you will, kind-of-better-but-still-typically-mixed news:

Iraqis return home ‘in thousands’

An estimated 1,000 people a day are returning across Iraq’s borders having previously moving abroad to escape the violence, Iraqi authorities say.

Most of the returnees are coming from Syria – and very few from Jordan, where better-off refugees tended to go.

Why mixed? Well, that social gradients to returnees is going to be a factor:

One factor in their return is likely to be a sharp and sustained drop in all kinds of violence, particularly in parts of the capital Baghdad, following a US-Iraqi military “surge”. But the stream of returnees from Syria is not being matched by return traffic from Jordan, where there may be as many as a million Iraqi refugees.

That is probably because those in Syria are poorer, so their savings have run out more quickly, says the BBC’s Jim Muir in Baghdad. Syrian authorities, who have seen the country’s population swollen by up to 10% by the flood of Iraqi refugees, have begun imposing visa requirements.

Iraqi authorities, for their part, have been providing incentives for refugees to return, such as free bus rides from Syria. They have also tried to encourage those Iraqis displaced inside the country – who constitute about half the total – to return to their homes by offering families grants of $800 to do so.

So far 4,700 families have taken up the offer with another 8,500 registered for them. But not all the returnees are confident the security improvement is permanent.

A separate piece by the BBC a couple of weeks ago is more positive. They are also realistic, though, which is something the engineers of the occupation may not be. Not to mention a civilian government more prone to asinine displays of childish triumphalism than to government (one wonders what they think, now, of parading around with their purple fingers). I’d like to see some figures on the infrastructure either still being destroyed, or destroyed over the last year, particularly right after the escalation in violence during the late summer.

My interest is in terms of economic development. The more Iraqi infrastructure is destroyed, the more reconstruction will cost, certainly, but the longer it will take to rebuild human and social capital, and to return to any sort of path of economic development – and I just don’t trust the government that sent Paul Bremer there to rip that rug out from under Iraqis once before to do all that much to help. Meanwhile the US State Department can’t get people to go to Iraq at all, let alone the best and brightest needed to put Iraq on the best footing for future economic recovery and growth.

Finally, while we look at rogue pictures of be-flagged coffins and ask ourselves if it was worth it. We went there, uninvited. Frankly, we get (collectively) what we deserve, even though most people are getting, disproportionately, what a relative few people deserve. Still, we’re not the ones doing close to the suffering:

While those numbers are also way down (finally), civilian fatalities since January 2005 are still 38,712; Iraqi police fatalities are 6,358 – and those people aren’t coming back. Quite an enterprise.

Inflation, comma, food.

From the Bureau of Labour Statistic’s October numbers:

Energy of course the big performer, but not for this post. We are interested in agflation, that lovely term of art coined by The Big Picture. To wit (from the Associated Press, via Yahoo Finance):

Wheat, Soybean Prices Finish Sharply Higher on Chicago Board of Trade; Livestock Closes Higher

Agricultural futures climbed sharply Tuesday on the Chicago Board of Trade, with a big jump in wheat and soybean prices.

Wheat for December delivery rose 17.25 cents to $7.735 a bushel; December corn rose 3.75 cents to $3.8125 a bushel; December oats gained 1.5 cents to $2.77 a bushel; January soybeans jumped 16.5 cents to $10.87 a bushel.

Beef and pork futures advanced on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

December live cattle rose 1 penny to 96.17 cents a pound; January feeder cattle rose 0.75 cent to $1.0957 a pound; December lean hogs gained 2.82 cents to 54.82 cents a pound; February pork bellies rose 3 cents to 92.4 cents a pound.

Um, good thing I’m vegan?