Category: Uncategorized
-
Nein Uber in Berlin
Arriving in Berlin from Africa via Frankfurt proved to be a nightmare this time around. While the flight and connections were almost perfect, the same cannot be said about my luggage. I checked in one bag at the point of origin and asked the airline agent to confirm my bag will indeed show up in…
-
The Pervasiveness of Efficiency
Were 19th-century slaves working in the US Southern plantations more efficient than the free farmers of the Northern states? This was one of the critical questions two economists, one being a pioneer of cliometrics, studied in a book published in 1974. Based on extensive empirical research and data available at the time, their conclusion was…
-
From MDGs to SDGs
An unexpected abundance of acronyms seems to be one of the traits of the UN. Having worked at the organization for (too) many years helped corroborate this fact. Yes, the UN is not the only entity with such a trait, not by a long shot. However, the UN has formal global scope and thus acronyms…
-
Evolution of Global Internet Access – 1990 – 2015
No doubt Internet access has come a long way in the last 25 years. The latest estimates for 2016 show that 3.45 billion people have access to the Internet. That is 47% of the world’s population. The flip side of this number is perhaps more revealing: more than half of the world is not connected to the…
-
Wealth and Income Inequality Data
A new version of the World Wealth and Income Inequality database has been available online since last January. The new website has a new slick look. It also offers an interactive tool to view and visualize data on a global scale or by country. For those who love to poke around, looking at the raw…
-
Human Rights and Utopia
The use of the words “human rights” in the English language only started in the 1940s. It was just until the late 1970s that the concept as we know it today emerged in full force. Nevertheless, historians of human rights have been able to trace the idea back to the Greek Stoics and study its…
-
Basic Economics for All
In an attempt to critique mainstream economics, Adler’s short book focuses on two key pillars of today’s dominant economic theory: 1. Pareto’s efficiency theorem; and 2. The theory of wages. The central question to bear in mind is the implicit assumption that what is good for the rich is also good for the rest of…
-
Comments on FOSS and Public Administration in Costa Rica Report
As part of the FOSS and SMMEs project we have funded in Costa Rica, we commissioned a report on the above subject which was implemented by the local counterpart, the National University of Costa Rica. The latest version of the report is here (in Spanish of course!): CR-FOSS- PA-report-2012-09-06 . Here are my comments (in…