RIM strikes... and misses

Engadget's Joshua Topolsky offers the best quip on Blackberry's less-than-stellar attempt at a touchscreen:

"For casual users, the learning curve and complexity of this phone will feel like an instant turn off, and for power users, the lack of a decent typing option and considerable lagginess in software will give them pause. RIM tried to strike some middle ground between form and function, and unfortunately came up short on both.... Going into this review, we really wanted to love this phone."

• PC World's Yardena Arar hates the Storm: "awkward and disappointing". 
• Mossberg likes it: "another good option for anyone who is looking to buy one of the new, more powerful, pocket computers". 
• Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan isn't a big fan: "falls short of what they were aiming for". 
• And, the Christian Science Monitor does a nice roundup of the reviews.
  

Better luck in v.2!

Good news

Boy, the world needs a lot of good news just about now.

But, first the bad news

We're facing a medium-term recession, whether or not a "surge" of borrowed taxpayer dollars will help ease the pain of Wall Street, General Motors, or foreclosing "home-borrowers" in the short-term. The reason? We have lived well by depleting our assets for years, Henry Bloget points out in a great chart on Clusterstock:



Alas, a cynic could say, the strength of U.S. consumer spending--the genius of American economy over the past decade--was simply a charade of "fudge"-priced assets, similar to those backing Enron's investments in the early 2000s or fueling MMM's meteoric rise in Russia in the early 1990s.

We are now taking on a new charade: propping up today's economy by using a mythically unlimited capacity of U.S. government to--someday--pay back debt.  Demand for treasury bonds is creating unprecedentedly low interest rates, despite the total surpassing $11 trillion.

(Data: Federal Reserve)

It's as though the U.S. government is a Latin American country in the 1980s. Or, a condo "fix and flipper" couple in 2004. Or, a Carlyle-Blackstone-KKR-Bain Capital in 2006.  It's ready to borrow, plop down money on "underpriced assets", turn them around, and flip them for a profit a few years later. Foreign investors, once again, are happy to try their luck.

Let's be very careful with this trust. I hope Bush, Obama, and Congress are both prudent and bold in their stimulus and crisis response.

So, what's the good news?

Thanks to American institutions, we have the most competitive, and the eighth freest economy in the world.

And, American democracy is literally on the march, with Tom Palmer's publication of DeTocqueville's "Democracy in America" in Russian.

If little else, do keep these two in mind.

GOP's New Slogan

"Sarah Palin--well, that was awesome for about two weeks!"

Zakaria and Powell break with McCain and the GOP

Bad news for Republicans in California, Florida, New York, and (embarrassing posturing) in Virginia.

This is in addition to recent scandals in Idaho, Alaska, Florida, and nationally. Another day, another chip in the Republican armor.

Fareed Zakaria and Colin Powell make powerful arguments for Barak Obama for President.

Review: Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work

Overall, Making Globalization Work seems shockingly light: akin to Stiglitz lending his Nobel Economic credentials to the agenda of the World Social Forum. Instead of an independent viewpoint, Stiglitz seems to fully endorse the “anti-globalization” thesis defined activists like Vandana Shiva and Naomi Klein.

However, for me, there were a few interesting takeaways:

1. In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs writes of natural resources as the key differentiator between countries that did and did not make it out of the "poverty trap"—UK and Bolivia, for example.

Stiglitz, on the other hand, points to the "resource curse": "It's no accident that so many resource-rich countries are far from democratic. The riches breed bad governance." He cites Nigeria, Congo, Iraq, Middle East, and Russia.

It seems you’re thus “damned if you have” and “damned if you don’t.” Perhaps another explanation of the underlying phenomenon is required.

2. Throughout the book Stiglitz condemns colonialism, IMF, and "shock therapy", similarly to (right-leaning) William Easterly in The White Man's Burden.

This is a stunning policy agreement, as it is rooted in completely different ideologies. While Easterly links all three policies to Western governmental meddling in “exotic lands,” Stiglitz considers the first two as examples of (mercantilist/pro-corporate-interest) "globalization" and the last as "market fundamentalism"—exactly the reverse of Easterly.

3. Finally, Stiglitz recognizes—as does Sachs—"free markets" as the foundation of a happy, abundant society and condemns socialist excesses. However, almost in the same breath, he proposes heavy Keynesian, if not essentially socialist, reforms to help "improve” these markets.

This rhetorical give-and-take is an important economic reform consideration. It seems that given such liberal concerns of the slippery slope towards unfettered markets and their opposite—conservative apprehension of the slide towards socialism—any sound, bipartisan economic reform proposal will have to appeal to the language and thinking of both to gain broad support.

This is particularly true of current economic institution reforms in the U.S. and internationally. If past is any example, these are likely to turn out as the battle of two lobbies—pro-aid and pro-corporate interest—neither one of which is necessarily pro-freedom or pro-prosperity.