Archive for the ‘World current affairs’ Category
“The Spirit Level” (1)
June 5th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I’ve started to read a fascinating book called “The Spirit Level” by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett. This video promotes the main message:
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Introducing the Youth Parliament of Pakistan
June 4th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Thanks to my web site, I receive e-mails from all around the world and I derive great pleasure from knowing that material on the site is of interest and assistance to people of many different nationalities and cultures. I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world and there is something on […]
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When will Israel ever learn?
June 2nd, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Friends of Israel (and I am one of them) must despair that the country will ever learn that disproportionate and counter-productive security operations, like the invasion of the Gaza strip and now the attack on the aid convoy, do not just cause appalling loss of life but alienate the nation from the international community and […]
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Does India have a middle class?
May 19th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
According to the thinking outlined in this article, it seems that India has no middle class. The central point is that there are essentially two ways to measure inequality, one is in absolute terms and the other is in relative terms. The problem with the definition of middle class used in the article is that […]
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How corrupt is your country?
April 21st, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I’ve been asked to give a lecture on anti-corruption policies to a group of Chinese Government officials. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll do it. But, as I thought about the subject, I checked out one measure of the level of corruption in different countries of the world. Since 1995, Transparency International has published an […]
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“When China Rules The World”
March 22nd, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I’m just about to start a trip to China and, in preparation, I’ve read a really excellent work: “When China Rules The World” written by Martin Jacques. You can read his summary of the main arguments here. You can read my review of the book here.
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The Gini coefficient
March 21st, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Arguably nothing is more important in politics that inequalities in power and wealth. Power is hard to measure and wealth is often used as a kind of proxy measure. Now inequalities in wealth can be measured in many ways but a well-accepted instrument is the Gini coefficient . This is a measure of statistical dispersion […]
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Happy Iranian New Year
March 20th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
It’s the Iranian New Year and we celebrated it with Iranian friends here in London. The New Year celebrations go by many names, typically Nowruz meaning ‘new day’. The event is unrelated to Islam and indeed precedes it. We marked the occasion at the London flat of Iranian brother and sister Mehrdad and Manoosh, whom […]
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A case of affluenza
March 14th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
“Complex economic formulas developed by two professors of economics, Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran, and published in the current edition of the Economic Journal, suggest that greater affluence can seriously damage a nation’s health. Based on their mathematical modelling, the economists advance the theory that once a country reaches a reasonable standard of living there […]
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The tragedy of gendercide – and the wonder of friendship
March 13th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
“In China and northern India more than 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys’ greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.” This is a quote from a feature in “The Economist” which suggests that worldwide at least […]
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